Eslabón Program — High-Tech Supplier Development (Desarrollo de Proveedores de Alta Tecnología)

Eslabón Supplier Linkage Program (Programa Eslabón)

Funds three-party consortia in Argentina where anchor firms coordinate, Sadosky guides, and partners co-create high tech solutions.

⚠ This may reflect a past cycle — verify the current call on the funder's site.

Programa Eslabón is Fundacion Sadosky's supplier-development instrument for the Argentine information and communications technology sector. Rather than disbursing public grant funds directly, Sadosky acts as a broker and organizer: it structures a three-party consortium comprising an anchor enterprise (empresa líder) in a strategic sector — typically agriculture, health, food, or mining — a small or medium-sized ICT firm (PyME or startup) that will build the high-technology solution, and an IT research group curated and channeled by Sadosky. The anchor enterprise provides the project budget; Sadosky's contribution is its selection and coordination of the research group, whose expertise strengthens the supplier's technical capability. The program is therefore a brokered linkage instrument rather than a conventional grant, with private funding flowing from the anchor enterprise rather than from public coffers.

Eligibility is limited to Argentine-registered companies. The ICT PyME on the supply side must be prepared to co-develop a technology product addressing a documented demand from the anchor enterprise. A three-party consortium must be assembled before approaching the program; Sadosky does not match applicants to anchor enterprises on demand. Applications and program management are handled through the dedicated corporate portal sadoskyempresas.ar, which is separate from Sadosky's public-science website. A confirmed competition cycle closed on October 15, 2024; no specific 2026 cycle dates had been publicly announced as of the research date, though the program has run annually in recent years.

Programa Eslabón is best suited to Argentine ICT firms that already have a substantive relationship with a large enterprise in one of the target sectors and wish to formalize that relationship into a funded research and development collaboration with academic support. The competitive differentiator is the practical contribution the research group makes to the supplier's capability, not the novelty of the underlying science. Award values are not fixed by Sadosky because the anchor enterprise, not the foundation, sets the project budget.