There is a call for proposals for R&D projects involving SMEs and RTDs (universities or other public research institutions) to deal with ‘technological’ problems (which has a very wide definition in Europe). This might be of interest to the clients/businesses you work with.

Part of the call covers not only individual SMEs with common problems but also associations of SMEs (e.g. digital, creative, biomedical etc) as below which might also be of interest:

Research for SME associations - targeting associations which act on behalf of their SME members to identify and address common technical problems and to promote the effective dissemination and take-up of results. Projects in this activity may address topics such as pre-normative research issues, technological problems related to the development and implementation of legislation, and technological problems of whole industrial sectors.

The CORDIS webiste is shown below. The deadline is December 8th 2010: http://cordis.europa.eu/fp7/capacities/research-sme_en.html