To lead a project, you can:

• be an organisation of any size, including those based in the EU, EEA or internationally
• work alone or with the subcontracted skills and expertise of others from business, research organisations, research and technology organisations, or the third sector (charities, social enterprises and voluntary groups)

Contracts will be awarded to a single legal entity only. The majority of the project work and key deliverables must be completed by the applicant and be carried out in the UK. Subcontractors can be used, but only for specialist skills.

Projects must:

• start on 1 January 2026
• end by 31 March 2026
• have total costs of between £10,000 and £40,000, inclusive of VAT

Your application must have at least 50% of the contract value attributed directly and exclusively to R&D services, including solution exploration and design. R&D can also include prototyping and field-testing the product or service. This lets you incorporate the results of your exploration and design and demonstrate that you can produce in quantity to acceptable quality standards.

R&D does not include:

• commercial development activities such as quantity production
• supply to establish commercial viability or to recover R&D costs
• integration, customisation or incremental adaptations and improvements to existing products or processes

The aim of this competition is to improve the transport sector by accelerating the development of innovative quantum sensing technologies to solve transport challenges, increasing the efficiency and resilience of transport critical national infrastructure and transport platforms.

Projects will benefit the UK transport sector by developing use cases and business cases for quantum sensing technologies to improve the efficiency and resilience of transport critical national infrastructure and transport platforms. Projects need to cover one or more of the challenge areas:

1. Infrastructure, asset testing or fault prediction, monitoring, inspection, for example, quantum sensors for Non-Destructive Testing, or other approaches.
2. Preparing for transport construction, earthworks, monitoring existing structures, for example, quantum sensors for mapping below ground attributes.
3. Improved transport platform health and maintenance using quantum technologies, for example, Non-Destructive Testing of transport platforms, sensing, imaging, or other approaches, transport platforms include maritime vessels, aircraft, road vehicles and trains.

Projects must deliver both of the following:

1. A use case based on one or more of the above challenge areas.
   The use case could consider, for example only, technical requirements, user requirements, operational guidelines, system architecture, security considerations and standards. The main outcome is to strengthen understanding of the practical applications of quantum sensing technologies in the challenge areas to provide a foundation for further development.
2. An outline business case based on the chosen use case.
   The business case could include, for example only, the business need, market analysis, commercialisation strategy, stakeholder mapping or engagement, supply chain mapping, strategic alignment, economic viability, commercial barriers to adoption. The main outcome is to improve the understanding of the commercial viability for the use case.

Successful projects will be expected to attend a programme event to engage with the community and provide progress updates.

Your project must focus on a second generation quantum technology, defined as involving the generation and coherent control of quantum states, resulting in phenomena such as superposition or entanglement. Single photon generation and detection technologies are in scope.

Contracts will be given to successful applicants.

You must define your goals in your application and outline your plan for phase 2.

You must demonstrate a credible and practical route to market, so your application must include a plan to commercialise your results.

At this stage contracts will only be given for phase 1.

Subject to funding, in phase 2 we will ask successful applicants from phase 1 to further develop the work, based on the outputs of phase 1.

An online briefing was held on Tuesday 16 September: a recording and briefing slides will be available soon.

If you would like help to determine eligibility or find a subcontractor, contact Innovate UK Business Connect’s quantum or transport teams.