Millions of pounds for innovative businesses: new opportunities

23 Jan 2018 03:26 PM

An overview of Innovate UK's upcoming funding competitions for organisations to collaborate with partners to develop new products, processes or services.

Innovate UK has millions of pounds to invest in innovative UK businesses up to April 2018.

The funding will be awarded through competitions in a range of areas, which will open for applications in the coming months.

Businesses can also apply into an open funding competition with ideas for any game-changing or disruptive innovations.

Opportunities for funding

Emerging and enabling technologies and health and life sciences

Up to £19 million will be invested to support productivity and cutting-edge innovation across these 2 industry sectors.

In the area of health and life sciences, we will seek projects that show significant innovation in one of the following:

• increasing agricultural productivity
• improving food quality and sustainability
• advanced therapies, such as cell and gene therapies
• precision medicine
• medicines discovery
• advanced biosciences

For emerging and enabling technologies, projects should focus on an Innovate UK priority area:

• emerging technologies
• digital
• enabling capabilities
• space applications

Open programme

A share of up to £19 million will be available for game-changing or disruptive innovations that have the potential to impact the UK economy.

Projects may come from an Innovate UK industry sector - emerging and enabling technologies, health and life sciences, infrastructure systems and manufacturing and materials - or be outside of them.

Biomedical catalyst

This is the first biomedical catalyst competition of 2018, which will offer up to £12 million to SMEs working on projects that solve healthcare challenges. These could include:

• disease prevention and proactive management of health and chronic conditions
• earlier and better detection and diagnosis of disease, leading to better patient outcomes
• tailored treatments that either change the underlying disease or offer potential cures

Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund: Faraday Battery Challenge

The Faraday Battery Challenge supports the design, development and manufacture of batteries for the electrification of vehicles as part of the Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund.

In this second round of innovation funding up to £25 million will be invested in projects that stimulate new automotive battery technologies and build the supply chain in the UK.

Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund: digital health technology catalyst

Up to £10 million will be available under the digital health technology catalyst, which is part of the Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund.

We will seek projects that support the development of digital health products or digitally-enabled medical technologies, which:

• improve patient outcomes
• transform healthcare delivery
• enable more efficient delivery of healthcare

Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund: robotics

Up to £20 million will be available in this competition. It is being funded as part of the Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund for robotics and artificial intelligence in extreme environments.

This challenge aims to take people out of extreme work environments such as deep mining, nuclear, space and offshore energy.

Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund: medicines manufacturing

Innovate UK is investing up to £10 million in innovation projects in medicines manufacturing through the Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund.

We will be seeking collaborative research and development projects that focus on the technical or commercial challenges of manufacturing new medicines.

Find funding opportunities