Design Foundations Round 6

To lead a project your organisation must:

• be a UK registered business of any size
• collaborate with at least one other grant claiming UK registered organisation

Lead organisations must agree to contribute a minimum of one day and up to two days, in support of Innovate UK activities. These activities are to promote the use of design in business innovation, or to help improve products and services.

To collaborate with the lead, your organisation must be a UK registered:

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

Your project team must include appropriate expertise in people centred and systemic design. Lead organisations without this capability are encouraged to work with designers as project partners or subcontractors.

A business of any size can only lead on one application but can be included as a collaborator in two further applications. An organisation that is not leading any application can collaborate on any number of applications.

Your project must:

• have a grant funding request of between £40,000 and £80,000
• have a grant funding request that matches your total project costs
• last between three and six months
• carry out its project work in the UK
• intend to exploit the results from or in the UK
• start by 1 June 2025
• end by 30 November 2025

Your total project costs will be 100% funded. Total grant funding request and total project costs, detailed within your application, must not exceed the maximum project size of £80,000. If your total project costs do exceed the maximum, then your application will be made ineligible.

You can make reference to any additional voluntary contribution in your application answers. It must not be detailed in the finance section.

The aim of this competition is to help businesses use people centred and systemic design methods. These will lay foundations for innovative ideas that can deliver significant benefits to people, the planet and society as a whole. The ideas can be for new or significantly improved products, services, places or business models.

To be within scope of this competition, your proposal must be one or more of the following three categories:

1. Defining innovation opportunities: You will use people centred and systemic design methods to identify, understand and prioritise needs and innovation opportunities that are relevant and valuable to your business. You will plan design led innovation activity to address these opportunities, including generating, testing and improving new ideas.
2. Generating new ideas: You have identified a specific need or opportunity and will use design methods to verify it, then generate and develop new or improved ideas in response.
3. Improving existing innovative ideas: You have an innovative idea and will use design methods to simulate, test, and validate it, enhancing its quality and the benefits it provides throughout its lifecycle.

Your project must explore opportunities and ideas from the perspective of key stakeholders involved with or affected by them: this may include people, organisations, communities, and the planet. You must consider their experiences, motivations and behaviours.

You must also consider the technical, social and environmental factors that influence or are influenced by your solution. These insights must guide your approach to challenges and idea development.

All projects must apply people-centred and systemic design methods within an early-stage business innovation context. Proposals lacking these methods will be considered out of scope.

All projects must apply design methods that support responsible innovation. This involves creating solutions that are ethically sound, sustainable and socially desirable, while anticipating unintended consequences.

Design approaches can be used to explore how innovation within your specific business context can be undertaken responsibly.

Your project team can reflect the characteristics, culture and lived experiences of the people they are designing for, or take steps to bring those perspectives permanently into the project.

All prototyping activity within your project must:

• focus primarily on making discoveries about the quality of experience, the likelihood of the idea being adopted or its potential to promote positive changes in behaviour
• be as quick and low cost as possible, and aim for the lowest level of fidelity and functionality necessary to get the required feedback
• be used to share ideas and make discoveries early in the design process, so they can be acted on before it becomes too expensive or time consuming to do so

During your project you will be encouraged to respond to feedback and new discoveries made during the research and design process. This may lead to changing, rethinking or adapting your original ideas, or shifting the focus of your planned R&D activities.

Innovate UK will consider justified project change requests where it does not change the original project scope.

Your project can focus on one or more of the following:

• net zero
• artificial intelligence and machine learning
• other emerging or advanced digital technologies
• health and wellbeing
• food and agriculture (except primary production)

This list is not exhaustive.

An online briefing event will be held at 11am on Tuesday 12 November: click here for the joining link.

If you would like to find a design expert to work with, or if you have any other queries about the competition, contact Innovate UK Business Connect’s Design team.