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Want to spruce up the en suites in your bed and breakfast business?

Want a Bangladeshi-style micro-loan to set up a micro-enterprise?

Or have you got a top idea for a new gizmo, but need some cash to start along the road to market?

If so, things may be just about to get a little brighter.

There's a £150m pot from the European Investment Fund looking likely for Scotland, which will back up the private sector in taking equity stakes in small companies or in making loans.

This has been a long time coming. The money has been available to the Scottish Government, but Treasury rules meant that if it were accessed, that same amount would be clawed back from the block grant.

That's just changed, with the Chancellor, Alistair Darling, altering his department's accounting rules.

So Scottish Enterprise is now, cautiously, on the trail of the money, stressing that there remain other obstacles that need to be cleared before the money is in place.

It could well take its place in an, as yet, very vaguely outlined plan for a Scottish Investment Bank, which is intended to draw together some of the operations already funded publicly.

The £150 million would come from the European Investment Fund, mostly owned by the European Investment Bank, which is distributed through banks and other intermediaries across the Union and a bit beyond, to plug financing gaps faced by small and medium-sized enterprises.

Scottish Enterprise appears to be the intermediary that can hold the fund for others to access, adding to the investment funds it already has funded from its mainstream block grant and trading activities.

Senior figures in the bank are suggesting that others could bid into the fund, and use a share of it to set up and administer a range of subsidiary funds.

These could include a micro-finance facility, as suggested for Scotland's poorer communities by the Nobel Prize-winning founder of Bangladesh's Grameen Bank, Professor Muhammad Yunus, pioneer of the use of tiny loans without collateral for women setting up their own businesses.

It could also provide for the idea of a tourism development bank, which has been kicked around for a while, filling a hole in hospitality financing where the banks have recently scaled down or withdrawn their activities.

It's in start-up funds for technology companies that there are also significant gaps.

Those in life sciences face big risks and long lead-times before they can hope to start earning revenue.

The best developed venture capital markets, such as you find in parts of the US, are experienced at handling that kind of loan.

There's a lack of that scale of activity in Scotland, but no lack of good ideas in science and technology.

Before the recession, venture capital was mainly run by angel investors, and Scotland's most prominent angel investors have been badly stung by the property slump and by the retreat of Bank of Scotland Corporate division.

So there's some repair to be done in that part of the finance market. And this European fund might be quite helpful in that repair job.