To work alone your organisation must be a UK registered micro, small or medium sized enterprise (SME).

Subcontractors are allowed in this competition, but they are limited to no more than 50% of the total grant claimed. All subcontractor costs must be justified and appropriate to the total eligible project costs.

An SME can only lead on one application.

Your project must:

• have a grant funding request of between £50,000 and £100,000
• last between three months and nine months
• start by 1 August 2026
• end by 30 April 2027

Any funded organisation needs to carry out their project work in the UK and must intend to exploit the project results from or in the UK.

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.

Your proposal must focus on delivering an improvement in the resource efficiency or resilience of the Advanced Manufacturing Sector plan frontier industries supply chains.

We want to fund projects that deliver cross-cutting technologies that can be applied across the six frontier industries defined in the Advanced Manufacturing Sector Plan.

You must have built a basic version of the product or service, for example, a prototype or Minimum Viable Product (MVP) at TRL6 or higher. Your prototype or MVP must focus on delivering an improvement in the resource efficiency or resilience of the supply chain. This should be expressed in terms of the potential for your 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, whilst decreasing the resource input from outside the UK

While you may currently operate within a single frontier industry, your product or service must be capable of scaling into adjacent advanced manufacturing frontier industries.

To support SMEs progress towards commercialisation and increasing the number of investable, scalable innovations, up to 50% of your grant can be used to access support in one or more of the following areas:

• commercialisation plan development and implementation, for example, licencing, manufacturing readiness
• financing strategy development and implementation, in line with your 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
• investigate insurance
• intellectual property development and protection
• data, 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 commercial pilot

Your project 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

Innovate UK will hold a webinar briefing at 10am on Monday 23 March: click here to register for a place. A recording and slides will be available afterwards.

If you would like help to find a subcontractor or have other queries, contact Innovate UK Business Connect’s Manufacturing team.