Efficient, Structured and Controllable AI Systems

Key Features

UK registered SME businesses can apply for a share of up to £1.66 million to deliver experimental validation of prototype AI systems for novel reusable components of efficient, structured and controllable learning systems.

Programme:     Innovate UK

Award:     Share of up to £1.66 million

Opens: 12th Oct 2026

Closes: 18th Nov 2026

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Grant Funding

Innovate UK will invest up to £1.66 million on industrial research for novel reusable AI mechanisms.

Grant Scope

The aim of this competition is to advance the development of novel reusable artificial intelligence mechanisms that will form the foundation for the next generation of AI and ML systems of the future.

Proposals must fall within one of more of the following specific themes:

  • Theme 1. Resource and data adaptive learning
  • Theme 2. Causal and intervention grounded models
  • Theme 3. Learned modular computation and routing
  • Theme 4. Geometric, equivariant and physics structured learning

Eligibility Criteria

To be eligible for this competition projects must have total costs of between £50,000 and £150,000 and last between 1 and 3 months. Projects must start by 1st April 2027 and end by 30th June 2027.

Lead Organisations: If working alone, organisations must be a UK registered micro, small or medium sized enterprise.

Subcontractors: Subcontractors are not allowed in this competition.

Number of applications: Eligible organisations can only lead on one application. Further applications by the same organisation as a lead will be ineligible.

Previous applications: Previously submitted applications can not be used in this competition.

Grant Exclusions

Innovate UK will not fund the following projects:

  • Projects that do not sufficiently provide clear background IP ownership, rights or specific defensibility route.
  • Projects that do not align with the competition theme specified priority areas or address the scope of the competition.
  • Projects that do not sufficiently provide a named baseline with metrics and numeric targets for validation.
  • Projects that do not provide a falsifiable hypothesis driven experimentation plan.
  • Projects that are primarily literature review studies, requirement gathering, without substantive experimental research and development.
  • Projects whose proposed routine integration, deployment, orchestration or productisation of existing AI tools or third party models without novel AI or ML development.
  • Products not delivering measurable and specific objectives.
  • Projects that are not primarily routine integration or deployment of existing AI tools without substantive technical innovation.
  • Projects without a clear technical novelty and feasibility challenge
  • Projects that do not result in defensible foreground IP or focused primarily on non-AI or non-ML research and development.
  • Projects focussed on prompt engineering, generic agent orchestration, routine Graph Neural Network application, passive only agentic layers

Funding Costs

Innovate UK are offering up to £1.66 million to fund innovation projects in this competition. Funding will be in the form of a grant.

If your organisation’s work on the project is commercial or economic, your funding request must not exceed the limits below. These limits apply even if your organisation normally acts non-economically but for the purpose of this project will be undertaking commercial or economic activity.

For feasibility studies, industrial research, experimental development and innovation support you can get funding for your eligible project costs of:

Category 1: Feasibility studies

Funding available for your eligible project costs of:

  • up to 70% if you are a micro or small organisation
  • up to 60% if you are a medium sized organisation
  • up to 50% if you are a large organisation

Category 2: Industrial research projects

Funding available for your eligible project costs of:

  • up to 70% if you are a micro or small organisation
  • up to 60% if you are a medium sized organisation
  • up to 50% if you are a large organisation

 

For further information on this competition, please see full details.

Full competition details