Eligibility

Your project must:

• have total costs between £100,000 and £150,000
• start no earlier than 1 May 2023
• end by 31 October 2024
• last between 12 and 18 months
• carry out all of its project work in the UK
• intend to exploit the results from or in the UK

Your application must include a letter of support from at least one of the UKRI Interdisciplinary Circular Economy Centres or the NICER CE-hub. The letter must demonstrate alignment of your proposed activities to one or more Centres’ aims and objectives. Collaboration directly with the centres or the hub as a project partner is encouraged but not essential.

To allow sufficient time for the centres to consider your proposal for support, you should contact them prior to 16th November 2022, or earlier if you are looking to involve them as project partners.

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 entity as lead, partner or subcontractor. This includes any goods or services originating from a Russian source.

To lead a project or work alone your organisation must be a UK registered micro, small or medium-sized enterprise (SME)

Academic institutions cannot lead or work alone.

Subcontractors are allowed in this competition.

A business can only lead on one application but can be included as a collaborator in a further 2 applications.

If an business is not leading any application, it can collaborate in up to 3 applications.

An academic institution, charity, not for profit, public sector organisation or RTO can collaborate on any number of applications.

You can use a previously submitted application to apply for this competition.

Exclusions

Innovate UK are not funding projects that:

• do not meet the competition eligibility or scope criteria
• are commercialisation activities such as marketing and sales
• are dependent on export performance, for example giving a subsidy to a baker on the condition that it exports a certain quantity of bread to another country
• are dependent on domestic inputs usage, for example giving a subsidy to a baker on the condition that it uses 50% UK flour in their product

Funding Costs

Up to £1.5 million has been allocated to fund innovation projects in this competition. Funding will be in the form of a grant.

If the majority of 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.

For feasibility studies and industrial research projects, you could get funding 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 experimental development projects which are nearer to market, you could get funding for your eligible project costs of:

• up to 45% if you are a micro or small organisation
• up to 35% if you are a medium sized organisation
• up to 25% if you are a large organisation

NICER Centre and Hub academic partners can apply for funding for activities or additional resources and materials that are essential to the project achieving its full potential.

These costs must be eligible project costs, which have not been supported by UKRI funds already awarded.

The research organisations undertaking non-economic activity as part of the project can share up to 30% of the total eligible project costs. If your consortium contains more than one research organisation undertaking non-economic activity, this maximum is shared between them.

Of that 30% you could get funding for your eligible project costs of up to:

• 80% of full economic costs (FEC) if you are a Je-S registered institution such as an academic
• 100% of your project costs if you are an RTO, charity, not for profit organisation, public sector organisation or research organisation