Contracts for Innovation: Clean Air, Phase 3
Organisations can apply for a share of £800k to further develop clean air pre-commercial innovations in extended field trials.
Opportunity Details
When
Registration Opens
19/05/2025
Registration Closes
25/06/2025
Award
Your Phase 3 projects can range in size from £75,000 to £100,000 total cost, inclusive of VAT. Contracts for Innovation competitions involve procurement of R&D services at a fair market value and are not subject to subsidy control criteria that typically apply to grant funding.
Organisation
Innovate UK
This is a Contracts for Innovation competition funded by Innovate UK.
The aim of the competition is to conduct extended field trials to evaluate and enhance any emerging technological solution in the clean air domain. The technology may be focused on monitoring, mitigating or extracting air pollution to safeguard human health.
This phase 3 Contracts for Innovation competition is a standalone competition open to any eligible applicants with existing pre-commercial innovations which might contribute to cleaner air.
There have been no previous phases run in this competition. The reference to Phase 3 indicates that this competition will fund demonstration, testing and validation of existing technologies to support them to commercialisation. It will not provide funding for initial exploration of ideas or low technology readiness prototypes.
Any adoption and implementation of a solution from this competition would be subject to a separate, possibly competitive, procurement exercise. This competition does not cover the purchase of any solution.
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To lead a project, you can:
- be an organisation of any size
- 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)
Your technology must relate to:
- monitoring
- mitigating
- extracting harmful air pollution
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.
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Projects must:
- start on 1 September 2025
- end by 30 June 2026
- last up to 10 months
- have total costs of between £75,000 and £100,000, 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.
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In this Phase 3 competition you must further develop your existing innovation, deploying, testing and iterating in a real world or representative environment.
You must work directly with potential future customers and users. This will lead to insight and feedback to allow you to make final adjustments to the product or service, that will lead to successful commercialisation.
Your potential users and customers can claim funding support to facilitate their involvement in the project. Applications will be evaluated on the level of commitment to the project and the solution demonstrated by the potential future customers and users.
The strongest applications would likely be able to highlight the potential future customer’s intention to procure the solution if it can be shown to be effective.
You must demonstrate a credible and practical route to market, so your application must include a plan to commercialise your results.
Contracts will be given to successful applicants.
Your project must focus on one or more of the following:
- monitoring air pollutants or using data to create actionable insights to safeguard health
- extracting harmful pollution from the atmosphere
- mitigating harmful emissions at their source