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 UK registered organisations must enter their own project costs into the Innovation Funding Service.

To be an eligible collaboration, at least one eligible business from the UK must apply for funding when entering their costs into the application and partner with at least one eligible Canadian SME.

In the collaboration, no single partner or country can represent more than 70% of total grant.

Applicants from UK academic institutions or RTOs cannot claim more than 50% of the UK’s total grant requested.

Your project can include partners that do not receive any of this competition’s funding. Their costs must be included in the total project costs.

Canadian project participants who are not eligible for funding (including researchers from the National Research Council of Canada) are welcome to collaborate as additional participants on a self‑funded basis or as subcontractors.

Subcontractors are allowed in this competition.

For UK organisations, the cost of subcontractors is limited to no more than 20% of your organisation’s total eligible costs.

All subcontractors must be selected through your usual procurement process.

You can use subcontractors from UK, Canada and other countries but must make the case in your application as to why you could not use suppliers from the countries providing grant funding for the project.

You must provide a detailed rationale and evidence of the potential UK or Canadian contractors you approached, with the reasons why they were unable to work with you. We will not accept a cheaper cost as a sufficient reason to use a subcontractor from a third country.

All subcontractor costs must be justified and appropriate for the project.

You cannot use a previously submitted application to apply for this competition.

Exclusions

Innovate UK are not funding projects that are:

• not covered by any of the four specific themes
• market research, road-mapping or landscape studies

Innovate UK cannot fund projects that 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
• 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 £3 million from Innovate UK and up to CA$ 4.5 million from the National Research Council of Canada Industrial Research Assistance Program (NRC IRAP), an equivalent of £6 million, has been allocated to fund innovation projects in this competition. Funding will be in the form of a grant.

Selected CR&D projects will be eligible to receive funding from their respective national funding body.

UK Organisations

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 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

The research organisations undertaking non-economic activity as part of the project can share up to 50% of the total grant request. If your consortium contains more than one research organisation undertaking non-economic activity, this maximum is shared between them. Of that 50% you could get funding for your eligible project costs of up to:

• 80% of full economic costs (FEC) if you are a UK Je-S registered institution such as an academic
• 100% of your project costs if you are a UK registered RTO

NRC IRAP will provide a maximum contribution of up to CA$500,000 to each eligible Canadian SME participating in the project. Canadian SMEs may receive up to 50% funding of eligible project costs.

Canadian SME applicants must be registered as NRC IRAP clients to be considered for funding through this competition. Please see the NRC IRAP competition page for more information in English and French when the EoI competition opens on 21 November 2022.