The aim of this competition is to help businesses use people-centred and planet-centred design methods to lay the foundations for innovative ideas with the potential to deliver significant benefits. These can be ideas for new or significantly improved products, services, places or business models.

To be within scope for the net zero round of this competition, your proposal must fall within one or more of the following 3 categories:

1. Defining innovation opportunities: You will use people-centred and planet-centred design methods to identify, understand and prioritise needs and innovation opportunities that are relevant and valuable to your business. You will plan innovation activity to respond to them, including by generating, testing and improving new ideas as described above.
2. Generating new ideas: You recognise a specific need or opportunity to innovate and will use people-centred and planet-centred design methods to verify and respond to it by generating new or improved ideas.
3. Testing and improving ideas: You have an innovative idea and will use people-centred and planet-centred design methods to simulate, test and improve the quality of the experience and benefits that it offers at every stage of its lifecycle.

To be within scope for this competition, your proposal must also meet the following criterion:

1. Net Zero Living: You must use people-centred and planet-centred design methods to identify, understand and prioritise needs and innovation opportunities which have the potential to transform where we live and work into net zero places.

Your project must explore opportunities and ideas from the perspective of the people and socio-technical systems who will be involved with, or affected by them, in the context of the transition to a net zero economy. Their experiences, motivations and behaviour must be allowed to shape the challenge and ideas. This is to make sure that:

• the most important, urgent and valuable problems and opportunities are being addressed
• proposed solutions are more desirable, equitable, beneficial and supportive of net zero living
• new ideas are more likely to be adopted and promote positive changes in behaviour

You must include activities to identify and involve relevant stakeholders sufficiently early and at appropriate points throughout the project. Your project team should reflect the characteristics, culture and lived experiences of the people they are designing for, or take steps to bring those perspectives into the project in a meaningful and relevant way.

Projects that use planet-centred or system-aware approaches to consider nature as a stakeholder, and to design beneficial solutions within the limits of planetary resources and ecosystems are particularly encouraged. These projects must also take account of people’s motivations and behaviour, so that ideas have the best chance of being adopted and realising their potential.

Any 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 which support the net zero agenda
• be as quick and low-cost as possible, and aim for the lowest level of fidelity or 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 prohibitively expensive or time consuming to do so

Once the project has started successful applicants are encouraged to respond to findings emerging from the project and new discoveries made during the research and design process. This might include abandoning or rethinking your original ideas and changing the focus of planned R&D activity. Innovate UK will consider well-justified project change requests submitted via a project’s allocated monitoring service provider.

Applications are encouraged from organisations that have not previously used people-centred and planet-centred design processes or expertise. We encourage applicants to work with design experts as partners or subcontractors to get the best results and to develop their own understanding and design capabilities.

Portfolio approach

We want to fund a variety of projects that:

• represent a range of strands, themes, research categories and markets which are relevant to the net zero agenda
• are located throughout the UK
• represent a range of company sizes

We call this a portfolio approach.

Specific themes

Your project must focus on net zero living, but may also cut across one or more of the following:

• health and wellbeing
• food and agriculture, except in primary production
• application of advanced digital and other technologies

This list is not exhaustive

Projects we will not fund

We are not funding projects that:

• are the design of experiments, policies or research methodologies,
• don’t follow best practice people-centred and planet-centred design methods as described in the competition scope
• focus on the final finish or specification of an idea where fundamental design decisions have already been made, for example where new customer feedback or discoveries will have little influence on the design outcome
• seek only to validate technical feasibility or progress the technology readiness level of an idea, rather than improving the quality of the experience or its benefits for people or the planet
• are likely to be harmful to people or the planet

We are not funding projects that are proposals to create prototypes or demonstrators in cases where the prototype:

• requires a majority of the project cost or time to build
• are to be made fully functional at considerable effort or cost when partial or simulated functionality would suffice
• are intended primarily to test technical feasibility or performance rather than the customer experience and benefits
• will only be shared with stakeholders late to the project for example with no time allowed to make changes in response to feedback

We cannot fund projects that:

• involve primary production in fishery and aquaculture
• involve primary production in agriculture
• have activities relating to the purchase of road freight transport
• are not allowed under De minimis regulation restrictions
• are not eligible to receive Minimal Financial Assistance
• are dependent on export performance, for example giving an award to a baker on the condition that they export a certain quantity of bread to another country
• are dependent on domestic inputs usage, for example if we give an award to a baker on the condition that they use 50% UK flour in their product

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