The innovation bureau provides a package of services to SMEs, aimed primarily at improving access to funding opportunities at national and Community level, with particular reference to the new Horizon 2020 framework programme. It does this using call scouting, local partnerships, business matching, and support for internationalisation.
It also matches member companies' demand for innovation to the supply of innovative services from a network of cooperative laboratories associated with the centre. This consists of CoRe Labs in particular, and also includes time-based access to high-performance software as a service, available on HPC cloud technology.
DLTM can also make staff available to help businesses prepare and submit project tenders at national and Community level, and to manage and report on approved projects in progress.
At the technical level, the centre offers a regulatory support service to enable businesses, especially SMEs, to access the complex corpus of naval and nautical legislation. This provides companies with initial support in researching and verifying the design rules applying to ship components and fittings. These are subject to stringent regulatory requirements that are often difficult to identify and interpret.