Audience of The Future: Design Foundations

This is part of the Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund’s Audience of the Future programme. Successful applicants will have an opportunity to apply for later stage R&D funding from this programme in 2019.

Innovate UK, as part of UK Research and Innovation, will invest up to £1 million to fund early-stage, human-centred design projects through the Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund (ISCF). These will seek to understand customer needs and create new or better ideas for:

• immersive audience experiences across the creative industries
• tools, products or services necessary to create and deliver immersive content

Your project must include activities or work packages that:

• discover audience perceptions, motivations and behaviour
• define the problem statement and pinpoint the characteristics necessary to make any solution desirable and fit for purpose
• develop a broad range of ideas for new products, services or experiences using immersive technologies, or that support the creation and delivery of immersive content
• deliver clearly communicated ideas that have been validated through fast, low-cost prototyping and user-testing and are ready for further technical research and development (R&D)

The 9 sectors in the UK creative industries are:

1. advertising and marketing
2. architecture
3. crafts
4. design: product, graphic and fashion
5. film, TV, video, radio and photography
6. computer games and services
7. publishing
8. museums, galleries and libraries
9. music, performing and visual arts

To be eligible to lead a project you must:

• be a UK-registered business
• carry out your project work in the UK
• intend to exploit the results in or from the UK

You can work alone or in collaboration with others (businesses, research base or third sector). Only SMEs can work alone on projects.

Collaborative project partners can include:

• businesses
• universities
• non-profit research and technology organisations (RTOs) including catapults
• independent research organisations (IROs)
• cultural institutions

Your project’s total costs should be between £20,000 and £60,000. Projects must end by 31 January 2019 and last between 2 and 6 months.

Early-stage design projects are classed as feasibility studies, for which you could be funded:

• up to 70% of your total project costs if you are a small or micro business
• up to 60% if you are a medium-sized business
• up to 50% if you are a large business

If your project’s total costs or duration fall outside of our eligibility criteria, contact Innovate UK at least 10 days before the competition closes.