Contracts for Innovation: Clean Air, Phase 3

Overview

This is a Contracts for Innovation competition funded by Innovate UK.

The aim of the competition is to conduct extended field trials to evaluate and enhance any emerging technological solution in the clean air domain. The technology may be focused on monitoring, mitigating or extracting air pollution to safeguard human health.

Scope

In this Phase 3 competition you must further develop your existing innovation, deploying, testing and iterating in a real world or representative environment.

You must work directly with potential future customers and users. This will lead to insight and feedback to allow you to make final adjustments to the product or service, that will lead to successful commercialisation.

Your potential users and customers can claim funding support to facilitate their involvement in the project. Applications will be evaluated on the level of commitment to the project and the solution demonstrated by the potential future customers and users.

The strongest applications would likely be able to highlight the potential future customer’s intention to procure the solution if it can be shown to be effective.

You must demonstrate a credible and practical route to market, so your application must include a plan to commercialise your results.

Contracts will be given to successful applicants.

Specific Themes

Your project must focus on one or more of the following:

monitoring air pollutants or using data to create actionable insights to safeguard health
extracting harmful pollution from the atmosphere
mitigating harmful emissions at their source

Research Categories

Phase 3: real world implementation and testing

The primary objective is to make further technical improvements on products, processes or services that are not substantially set.

This can include further prototyping, demonstrating, testing and validation of existing pre-commercial products, processes or services in environments representative of real-life operating conditions.

Eligibility

Projects must:

start on 1 September 2025
end by 30 June 2026
last up to 10 months
have total costs of between £75,000 and £100,000, inclusive of VAT

Projects must always start on the first of the month, even if this is a non-working day. You must not start your project until your Contract has been approved by Innovate UK.

You must only include eligible project costs in your application. See our overview of eligible project costs. For specific guidance, see the eligibility section in this competition.

If your project’s total costs or duration falls outside of our eligibility criteria, you must provide justification by email to support@iuk.ukri.org at least 10 working days before the competition closes. Innovate UK will decide whether to approve your request.

If you have not requested approval or your application has not been approved by us, you will be made ineligible. Your application will then not be sent for assessment.

Applicant

To lead a project, you can:

be an organisation of any size
work alone or with the subcontracted skills and expertise of others from business, research organisations, research and technology organisations, or the third sector (charities, social enterprises and voluntary groups)

Your technology must relate to:

monitoring
mitigating
extracting harmful air pollution

Contracts will be awarded to a single legal entity only. The majority of the project work and key deliverables must be completed by the applicant and be carried out in the UK. Subcontractors can be used, but only for specialist skills.

Sanctions

This competition will not fund you, or provide any financial benefit to any individual or entities directly or indirectly involved with you, which would expose Innovate UK or any direct or indirect beneficiary of funding from Innovate UK to UK Sanctions. For example, through any procurement, commercial, business development or supply chain activity with any entity as lead, partner or subcontractor related to these countries, administrations and terrorist groups.

Use of animals in research and innovation

Innovate UK expects and supports the provision and safeguarding of welfare standards for animals used in research and innovation, according to best practice and up to date guidance.

Any projects selected for funding which involve animals will be asked to provide additional information on welfare and ethical considerations, as well as compliance with any relevant legislation as part of the project start-up process. This information will be reviewed before an award is made.

Exclusions

Innovate UK will not fund projects that:

are not original in scope and duplicates someone else’s work
do not have an existing Clean Air Tech innovation with a demonstrable need for real world research and testing ahead of commercialisation
focus on tackling pollutants which have no demonstrated health impact
generate more harmful pollutants than are removed
result in a significant negative overall environmental impact
duplicate other UK government or EU funded initiatives you have already been funded for
have existing commercial agreements to deliver the proposed solutions

Funding Costs

A total of up to £800,000, inclusive of VAT, is allocated to this phase 3 competition.

Innovate UK predict that this Phase 3 competition will award up to 8 contracts with between £75,000 to £100,000 inclusive of VAT allocated for each contract.

This is to undertake extensive field testing in a real or representative environment, with potential future customers and users, for up to 10 months.

The total funding available for the competition can change. The funders have the right to:

adjust the provisional funding allocations
apply a ‘portfolio’ approach

The contract is completed at the end of this Phase 3 competition, and the successful organisation is expected to pursue commercialisation of their solution.

Value Added Tax (VAT)

You must select whether you are VAT registered before entering your eligible project costs.

VAT is the responsibility of the invoicing business. We will not provide any further advice and suggest you seek independent advice from HMRC.

VAT registered

If you select you are VAT registered, you must enter your eligible project costs exclusive of VAT. As part of the application process VAT will be automatically calculated and added to your project cost total. Your total eligible project costs inclusive of VAT must not exceed £100,000.

Not VAT registered

If you select you are not VAT registered, you must enter your eligible project costs exclusive of VAT and no VAT will be added. You will not be able to increase total project costs to cover VAT later should you become VAT registered. Your total project costs must not exceed £100,000.

Research and development (R&D)

Your application must have at least 50% of the contract value attributed directly and exclusively to R&D services, including solution exploration and design. R&D can also include prototyping and field-testing the product or service. This lets you incorporate the results of your exploration and design and demonstrate that you can produce in quantity to acceptable quality standards.

R&D does not include:

commercial development activities such as quantity production
supply to establish commercial viability or to recover R&D costs
integration, customisation or incremental adaptations and improvements to existing products or processes

Innovate UK may revoke our decision to provide funding without notice if government commitment for this initiative is withdrawn.

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