Croatia supports innovations and society based on knowledge. Concrete ways of supporting knowledge and innovations (of public policies to everyday applications) can be seen in the second project of technology development (STP2). This project is realized with the support of the World Bank, and grants and loans is managed by the Croatian Agency for small business, innovations and investments HAMAG BICRO that is also financed through the project STP2. The agency facilitates access to financial resources and provides support to entrepreneurs of research and product development through to commercialization. Some of the successful projects of HAMAG BICRO are concepts such as components for installation in electric cars, converting images into text characters or testing dried blood stains to assess biological age of people.
Microblink is the company for research and development whose task is to simplify the daily life of various mobile applications that eliminate the need for manual data entry. They are used by recognizing text in real time on the handheld devices for reading ID cards, payment slips, invoices, IBAN. Two years ago, they completed the project, that financed agency with 35,000 euros whereby they have developed a functional prototype optical character recognition system for mobile devices. Their technology is installed in the applications of all commercial banks in Croatia. This project shows that financing of crucial step in the development of the product prior to its introduction to the market affects on the creation of applicable technology in many sectors.
With this project is encouraged the demand for EU funds in the business and scientific circles, small and medium entrepreneurs and successful scientists.
