Lead organisation

To lead a collaborative project or to work alone, your organisation must be a UK registered business of any size.

More information on the different types of organisation can be found in our Funding rules.

Academic institutions cannot lead or work alone.

Project team

To collaborate with the lead, your organisation must be one of the following UK registered:

• business of any size
• academic institution
• charity
• not for profit
• public sector organisation
• research and technology organisation (RTO)

Each partner organisation must be invited into the Innovation Funding Service (IFS) by the lead to collaborate on a project. Once partners have accepted the invitation, they will be asked to login or to create an account in the IFS. They are responsible for entering their own project costs and completing their Project Impact questions in the application.

To be an eligible collaboration, the lead and at least one other organisation must:

• apply for funding when entering their costs into the application
• include rationale for the collaboration and describe the structure in your application
• ensure any no single organisation can claim more than 70% of the total project costs

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).

Your project must:

• have a grant funding request of between £350,000 and £700,000
• last between 3 and 9 months
• start by 1 January 2027
• end by 30 September 2027

Any organisation receiving funding must carry out its project work in the UK, intend to exploit the results in the UK, and spend most of the funding within the UK.

Projects must always start on the first of the month, even if this is a non-working day. You must not start your project until your Grant Offer Letter has been approved by Innovate UK. Any delays within Project Setup may mean we need to delay your project start date.

You must only include eligible project costs in your application. See our overview of eligible project costs.

If your project’s grant funding request or duration falls outside of our eligibility criteria, you must provide justification by email to support@iuk.ukri.org at least 10 working days before the competition closes. We will then decide whether to approve your request.

If your project does not meet our criteria and you have not requested justification approval, your application will be made ineligible, and it will not be sent for assessment.

An online briefing event will be held on 7 August 2026 at 11:00 and a surgery on 27 August at 13:30.

Register for these sessions.

7 August 2026: Online briefing event and surgery – register to attend

Briefing slides will be available to download from Supporting Information after the event

2 November 2026: Applicants notified

1 January 2027: Project start by