Overview
Innovate UK is investing up to £2 million into helping UK SMEs remove barriers to commercialisation and scale, specifically within advanced manufacturing supply chains, where improvements in resource efficiency or resilience can be demonstrated.
Scope
The aim of this competition is to enable micro, small or medium sized enterprises (SMEs) to unlock barriers to commercialisation and scaling in the UK.
Proposals must focus on delivering an improvement in the resource efficiency or resilience of the Advanced Manufacturing Sector Plan frontier industries supply chains.
Projects should deliver cross-cutting technologies that can be applied across the six frontier industries defined in the Advanced Manufacturing Sector Plan.
Applicants must have developed a basic version of the product or service, such as a prototype or Minimum Viable Product (MVP), at TRL6 or higher. The prototype or MVP must focus on improving the resource efficiency or resilience of the supply chain.
This should be demonstrated through the potential of the product or service to:
- increase the output quantity or quality of the supply chain per unit of primary resource input; or
- maintain or increase the output quantity or quality of the supply chain per unit, while reducing reliance on resource inputs from outside the UK
While an applicant may currently operate within a single frontier industry, the product or service must be capable of scaling into adjacent advanced manufacturing frontier industries.
To support SME progression towards commercialisation and increase the number of investable, scalable innovations, up to 50% of the grant can be used to access support in one or more of the following areas:
- commercialisation plan development and implementation, for example licensing and manufacturing readiness
- financing strategy development and implementation, aligned with the commercialisation plan
- revenue model analysis and development
- sales strategy development
- marketing plan development
- carbon plan development
- environmental, social and governance (ESG) strategy development
- impact strategy development, including environmental impact
- impact management
- validated market research
- customer validation and testing
- assessing and achieving minimum required volumes for offtake
- risk analysis and forecasting
- risk management controls, including sensors and data for real-time risk monitoring
- insurance investigation
- intellectual property development and protection
- data considerations, including best practice principles and requirements for energy performance certificate (EPC) assessment to determine scaling risk
- standards compliance and validation, including, for example, the Standard Assessment Procedure (SAP) and Publicly Available Specification (PAS) 2035/30 accreditation
- regulatory support and insights
- operational costs of a commercial pilot
Key themes and topics
Projects must focus on one or more of the supply chains in the Advanced Manufacturing Sector Plan frontier industries, as follows.:
- automotive
- aerospace
- advanced materials
- batteries
- agri-tech
- space
Project duration
Projects must:
- last between three months and nine months
- start by 1 August 2026
- end by 30 April 2027
Award value
Projects must have a grant funding request of between £50,000 and £100,000
Funding rates
For industrial research projects, purposeful research that builds new knowledge and skills to improve or develop products, processes, or services—often through prototypes or system components that validate ideas in realistic settings, you can get funding for your eligible project costs of:
- up to 70% if you are a micro or small organisation
- up to 60% if you are a medium sized organisation
Eligibility criteria
- Subcontractors must be preferably UK-based with fully justified and appropriate costs
- All funded project work must be carried out within the UK
- intend to exploit the results from or in the UK
- Subsidy control and state aid rules apply
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