IGP or EXIST? How to choose the right early-stage grant for your venture

EXIST and the Innovationsprogramm für Geschäftsmodelle und Pionierlösungen (IGP) are both federal early-stage innovation programmes from the BMWK, both aimed at getting novel ideas to market, both administered with a Projektträger in the loop. From a distance they look like two doors to the same room. They are not. EXIST funds individual people through a university to develop a science- or technology-based venture before it is even a company. IGP funds market-novel innovations that are explicitly not classic research-and-development - business model innovations, service innovations, design-led products - and it funds companies, not stipends.

Choosing wrong is expensive in a non-obvious way: you can write an excellent application and still be rejected purely because the venture does not fit the programme's mandate. A consumer-app business model innovation submitted to EXIST will struggle on Innovationshöhe in the technical sense reviewers mean; a deeptech spin-out submitted to IGP will be told its R&D character belongs in a different line. The skill is matching the venture to the programme before you write a word.

EXIST is the right programme when: you are pre-formation or very early, your innovation is genuinely technology- or science-based, you have a credible link to a university, and you need a living stipend to dedicate yourself full-time to building. It funds the founders' living costs plus Sachausgaben and Coaching over a defined period, and it is structurally a Hochschul-Antrag. If you came out of a research group, a thesis, or a lab, EXIST is usually your first stop.

IGP exists precisely for the innovations that fall outside the classic R&D-grant world. If your novelty is in the business model, the service design, the user experience, or a new combination of existing technologies rather than in a technical breakthrough, IGP is built for you - and you would struggle to fit that into the technical-Innovationshöhe frame EXIST reviewers use. IGP funds companies (typically young SMEs) rather than paying individuals a stipend, so it generally assumes you are already formed or about to be. It is one of the few federal programmes that explicitly welcomes non-technical innovation, which makes it the natural home for a lot of ventures that get awkwardly rejected from technology-first programmes.

Run your venture through these questions in order. The first clear answer usually settles it.