UK registered organisations can apply for a share of up to £15 million for game changing and commercially viable R&D innovations that can significantly impact the UK economy. This funding is from Innovate UK, part of UK Research and Innovation.
- Competition opens: Thursday 14 November 2024
- Competition closes: Wednesday 22 January 2025 11:00am
Innovate UK’s Smart grants programme is intrinsically positioned, by design, as a focused and uniquely differentiated product to support and propel the government’s five key missions:
- driving economic growth
- advancing clean energy
- enhancing public safety
- expanding opportunities
- strengthening healthcare
Smart grants enable UK businesses to lead the way in solving the most pressing challenges and ensuring a prosperous future for the UK. By fostering cutting edge projects showing the highest potential return based on evidence, Smart grants also play an important part in helping to create substantial economic impact and drives productivity improvements across the UK, ensuring that growth benefits all regions.
This competition has a focused scope and eligibility criteria to support micro, small or medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and their partners in developing genuinely new innovations with significant potential for rapid economic return to the UK. The application process reflects the importance of obtaining economic benefits from public funding, and the potential for successful commercialisation, growth, and exports.
Proposals must be business focused and show deliverable, realistic, adequately resourced plans to achieve return on investment, growth and market share, following project completion.
Applications can come from any area of technology and be applied to any part of the economy.
In applying to this competition, you are entering into a competitive process.
This competition has a funding limit, so we may not be able to fund all the proposed projects. It may be the case that your project scores highly but we are still unable to fund it.
The total budget will be divided between the two competition streams, see ‘project size’ for more details.
This competition closes at 11am UK time on the deadline stated in this Innovate UK competition brief. We cannot guarantee other government or third party sites will always show the correct competition information.
Funding type
Grant
Project size
Projects of 6 to 18 months must have total eligible project costs between £100,000 and £500,000 and can be single or collaborative. Projects of 19 to 24 months must have total eligible project costs between £100,000 and £1 million and be collaborative.
Accessibility and Inclusion
We welcome and encourage applications from people of all backgrounds and are committed to making our application process accessible to everyone. This includes making reasonable adjustments, for people who have a disability or a long-term condition and face barriers applying to us.
You can contact us at any time to ask for guidance.
We recommend you contact us at least 15 working days before this competition’s closing date to allow us to put the most suitable support in place. The support we can provide may be limited if you contact us close to the competition deadline.
You can contact Innovate UK by email or call 0300 321 4357. Our phone lines are open from 9am to 12pm and 2pm to 5pm UK time, Monday to Friday (excluding bank holidays).
