e50K is a social value and bid support business working across the UK defence sector. It advises prime contractors on social value strategy and delivery, and it delivers community, employment and environmental programmes on the defence estate as a subcontractor to prime contractors. Its delivery to date includes 22,446 Move You In Packs provided to armed forces families, an evidenced £24m social return on investment, a 16x multiplier from original investment, and 98.2% of its own supply chain spend placed with SMEs.
The status quo is that social value is committed at bid stage, delivered through supply chains running three or four tiers deep, and reported back in self declared formats that differ by prime contractor, by contract and by year. Evidence is assembled by hand, usually in spreadsheets, often months after the delivery happened. There is no common record, no independent verification of a claim, no way of seeing where the same delivery has been counted by more than one contractor against more than one contract, and no way to record value delivered outside the named scoring criteria.
The motivation is that defence is now committed to showing what its spending creates. The Defence Industrial Strategy 2025 sets out that people across the UK should feel the maximum benefit from increasing defence spending, and commits to a reformed approach to social value. It carries £28.8bn of MOD expenditure with UK industry in 2023/24, an increase in MOD spending with SMEs of £2.5bn by May 2028, £250m of Defence Growth Deals and £182m for skills. Each of those measures what was allocated. None measures what was created.
From 1 January 2027 the Social Value Model reduces to 6 criteria across 2 outcomes. Each criterion carries more weight, the evidential burden on each rises, and value delivered outside them is recorded nowhere. Industry will be scored more heavily on evidence it has no reliable way to produce, and defence will lose sight of a growing share of what its money does.
The Challenge
e50K is looking for a way to capture social value delivery once, at the point it happens, and make that record verifiable, deduplicated across supply chain tiers, and readable by every contract the delivery counts toward.
The difficulty is not data storage. It is:
- resolving identity across organisations that do not share systems, so the same delivery is not counted twice between tiers
- attaching provenance and external validation to a claim, so it is evidenced rather than asserted
- a data structure flexible enough to carry economic, community and environmental outcomes rather than only employment and skills
- consent and data protection at the level of the individual beneficiary
- capture in the field, by people who are not office based and will not use a portal
Solutions should be at TRL 6 or above, with a core capability that can be adapted rather than built from nothing. e50K expects a working pilot to be trialled on live delivery within the project period.
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Entrants to this competition must be:
- Established businesses, academic institutions, start-ups, SMEs, or individual entrepreneurs
- UK based or have the intention to set up a UK base
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The solution must / should:
- capture a delivery record in the field, on a mobile device, in under two minutes
- be usable by people with limited connectivity and limited digital confidence
- allow one delivery record to count toward more than one contract without being double counted in any total
- carry outcomes across employment, skills, community, environmental and economic categories, and allow new outcome types to be added without rebuilding the data structure
- produce a report for a prime contractor, an auditor and a public audience from the same underlying record
- scale from a single site to a multi tier supply chain of many organisations
- work without requiring every organisation in the chain to adopt the same internal system
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The solution must/should:
- resolve organisation and beneficiary identity across separate systems well enough to detect duplicate claims between tiers
- attach provenance to every record: who recorded it, when, where, and what supporting evidence exists
- support independent or third party validation of a claim
- exchange records through open, documented interfaces so they can move between existing contractor reporting systems
- map recorded outcomes to the Social Value Model criteria in force, and to the 6 criteria and 2 outcomes applying from 1 January 2027, without losing the underlying detail
- meet UK GDPR requirements, with consent recorded and withdrawable at individual level, and with aggregate reporting that does not expose personal data
- be auditable, so any reported figure can be traced back to its source records
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The solution must/should:
- work on the defence estate, including outdoor sites, sites with poor mobile coverage and sites with restricted access
- work offline, with later synchronisation
- be usable by volunteers and community participants, not only by professional users
- respect the security requirements that apply on the defence estate, including restrictions on photography and on recording location in some settings
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The solution must/should not:
- require a single central system that every contractor must buy or adopt
- rely on self declaration with no means of verification
- collect or expose personal data beyond what the recorded outcome needs
- add reporting burden to the people delivering on the ground
- be limited to employment and skills outcomes
- be a social value calculator or proxy value database.
Measurement methodology is not the problem here. The problem is verified capture and attribution of what actually happened.
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Grant funding of up to £60,000 is available to the selected solution provider for a project of up to 3 months. The figure reflects the scope of the challenge, which asks for identity resolution across organisations, provenance and validation, a flexible outcome schema, consent handling and field capture, all tested on live delivery. e50K does not receive any part of the grant.
e50K will contribute to the project in kind: the time of our own team across challenge definition, testing and evaluation, access to live delivery sites on the defence estate, participant access and preparation of delivery data for the trial. Beyond the funded project, a solution adopted at scale should be affordable to small organisations delivering at the lower tiers of the supply chain, since those are the organisations whose delivery is least visible today. Pricing that depends on a paid licence for every participant is unlikely to work.
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Successful applicants will be given an opportunity to pitch to the Challenge Holder. The winning applicant, as selected by the company, will then be eligible to apply for up to £60,000 Innovate UK grant funding to kickstart the development of the proposed solution through a 3 month project. Selected solutions will be trialled by the Challenge holder where apropriate, with potential for further adoption if trials are successful.
The benefits package for a successful applicant may also include:
- Support from Innovate UK Business Connect
- Support in the development of a prototype or pilot
- Technical support
- Invitation to attend or present at Innovate UK Business Connect events
- A potential business collaboration
- Investor introductions (if investment is required)
- Support if any Innovate UK or similar competitions are relevant
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- Challenge launch: 5 October 2026
- Deadline for applications: Friday 6 November 2026
- Review of applicants: Monday 9 – Friday 13 November 2026
- Selection and notification of finalists: Friday 13 – Tuesday 17 November 2026
- Pitch Day: Wednesday 25 November – Wednesday 3 December 2026
- Confirm selected solution provider: By Friday 4 December 2026
- Submission to Innovation Funding Service (IFS): December 2026
- Project length: 3 months (starting by 1 March 2027 and complete no later than 31 May 2027)