Innovate UK, part of UK Research and Innovation, is working with the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) to invest up to £1.5million across 3 years in grant funding for innovation projects that can improve the observation capabilities of the UK’s waters, towards improved assessment and evaluation of the status and risks to natural capital assets. These can include the data acquisition, communication, storage, analysis and modelling systems.
This will be a two stage competition.
This first stage competition is for the development of key technologies and capabilities, that can be used for more effective and efficient observation of biodiversity in natural capital assets.
The later stage 2 competition will be for the development of complete end-to-end marine monitoring systems and their verification and validation. These must include on-site testing in an operational environment, or data curation, validation, analysis or visualisation.
Eligibility
Your project must:
You must only include eligible project costs in your application.
Under current restrictions, this competition will not fund any procurement, commercial, business development or supply chain activity with any Russian and Belarusian entity as lead, partner or subcontractor. This includes any goods or services originating from a Russian and Belarusian source.
To lead a project or work alone your organisation must:
If the lead organisation is an RTO it must collaborate with 2 businesses (one SME and one business of any size).
Academic institutions cannot lead or work alone.
To collaborate with the lead, your organisation must be one of the following UK registered:
Each partner organisation must be invited into the Innovation Funding Service by the lead to collaborate on a project. Once accepted, partners will be asked to login or to create an account and enter their own project costs into the Innovation Funding Service.
If collaborating, the lead and at least one other organisation must claim funding by entering their costs during the application
Your project can include partners that do not receive any of this competition’s funding, for example non-UK businesses. Their costs will count towards the total project costs.
Subcontractors are allowed in this competition.
The aim of this competition is to develop key technologies and capabilities or proof of concept systems that can be used for more effective and efficient observation of biodiversity in natural capital assets.
We are looking for technologies and systems that can operate in depths up to 100m and significantly improve the current ocean monitoring data acquisition and analysis methods and systems. Improvements can be in areas such as, but not limited to:
Your proposal must clearly:
We want to fund a variety of projects across different technologies, marine monitoring systems, technological maturities and specific themes. We call this a portfolio approach.
Specific themes
Your project must focus on one or more of the following:
Your project can include other themes relevant to the scope of this competition but must include at least one from the list of specific themes.
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