Resource efficiency for materials and manufacturing (REforMM)

Overview

Innovate UK, part of UK Research and Innovation, will invest up to £1 million in innovation projects.

Scope

The aim of this competition is to support UK materials and manufacturing organisations to become more resource efficient.

Simultaneous demonstrations of how UK materials and manufacturing will become more resilient or technologically advanced are encouraged.

Drivers such as climate change and supply chain resilience mean that there is a growing need to invest in manufacturing efficiency and material resource use or re-use across the supply value chain.

Your proposal must focus on two or more of these five core areas contributing to improvements in resource efficiency and be able to demonstrate carbon reduction:

materials for the future economy: new material applications for cutting-edge products that reduce emissions, energy consumption and costs
smart design: effective design methods, design for resource efficiency, and design for maximum through-life value
resilient supply chains: sustainable feedstocks, supply chain visibility, and co-location of waste and emission streams
world-class production: flexible production capacity, minimal material waste, high-quality products, high productivity, and full adaptivity
longer in use and reuse: minimising materials use and waste, practising complete traceability, and using new remanufacturing services

Enabling areas, such as clean energy, regulations and policy, skills, relations, and value models, must not be the main focus of your project.

Eligibility

Your project must:

have total project costs between £50,000 and £100,000
start by 1 June 2023
end by 30 November 2023
last between 3 and 6 months
carry out all of its project work in the UK
intend to exploit the results from or in the UK

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

To lead a project or work alone your organisation must be a UK registered business of any size.

Where applicable you can collaborate with other UK registered organisations

Academic institutions, research and technology organisations (RTO), charities, not for profit or public sector organisations cannot lead or work alone.

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 enter their own project costs into the Innovation Funding Service.

The lead must claim funding when entering their costs during the application. If part of a collaboration, the lead and at least one other organisation must claim funding when entering their costs during the application.

Your project can include partners that do not receive any of this competition’s funding, for example non-UK businesses. Their costs will count towards the total project costs.

Subcontractors are allowed in this competition and are limited to no more than 20% of the project’s total costs.

Subcontractors can be from anywhere in the UK and you must select them through your usual procurement process.

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

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

Exclusions

Innovate UK are not funding projects that are about:

bio-based materials or biomanufacturing
circularity of rare earth elements
carbon capture and storage (CCS), however the use of captured carbon as a feedstock is in scope
technologies to directly reduce industrial energy consumption, for example, energy storage, energy from waste, fuel-switching

Innovate UK cannot fund projects that are:

dependent on export performance, for example giving a subsidy to a manufacturer on the condition that it exports a certain quantity of product to another country
dependent on domestic inputs usage, for example giving a subsidy to a manufacturer on the condition that it uses 50% UK content in their product

Funding Costs

Up to £1 million has been allocated 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, 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 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

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