Innova Región / Innova Chile — CORFO's Size-Tiered Technology Co-Financing Programme

CORFO, Chile's state economic development agency, has run a technology and innovation co-financing line for enterprises since 1990 under the name FONTEC, rebranded Innova Chile in 2005 to emphasise product innovation and 'new technology dissemination' alongside process improvement. Its current incarnation, Innova Región, differentiates co-financing by firm size — up to 80% of project cost for micro and small enterprises, 60% for medium firms and 40% for large firms — with an additional bonus of up to 10 percentage points for women-led businesses, explicitly designed to lower the barrier to technology adoption for the smallest, most credit-constrained firms.
The programme operates at real scale: Chile's Ministry of Economy reported that CORFO's technological programmes and consortia supported more than 2,800 SMEs and 450 associated technology-development projects in 2023 alone, within a system that has run continuously, under one name or another, for more than three decades.
The strongest independent evidence available is a peer-reviewed ex-post evaluation by Cristian Mardones (Universidad de Concepción), published in Contaduría y Administración (UNAM, 2021), using three waves (2007, 2009, 2013) of Chile's Longitudinal Survey of Firms and a panel of 559 firms tracked across all three waves. Mardones found that Innova's positive, statistically significant association with firm-level product or service innovation (coefficient 1.076, p<0.05) became statistically insignificant (0.607) once firms' pre-existing R&D-department status was added as a control — evidence consistent with CORFO 'picking winners' that would likely have innovated anyway, rather than the subsidy causing new technology diffusion. Only 2.9% of the panel's firms had received any CORFO funding at all, underscoring how thin the programme's demonstrated reach is relative to Chile's broader SME population.

Read the full analysis: https://www.chileatiende.gob.cl/fichas/64693-innova-region