Innovate UK are to invest up to £15m in business led, innovative projects to help businesses broaden out innovation activities, to find new sources of revenue from new products, processes or services.

Projects will:

• harness E&E technologies across the economy
• develop and scale-up research and development to bring ideas, processes and products closer to availability at scale and commercial release
• use design processes to understand customer motivations and behavior and use that insight gained to create better products, services and processes

Innovate UK are looking to fund a portfolio of projects that include:

• technical feasibility
• industrial research
• experimental development

Projects must clearly show high-growth, potential innovations in one or more of the following areas:

• any emerging technology that can demonstrate a step change in performance and the potential to disrupt existing industrial approaches; we are particularly looking to fund projects in energy harvesting, imaging technologies, graphene or biofilms
• any enabling technology in: satellite applications, electronics, sensors, photonics, digital, Internet of Things (IoT), data, cybersecurity, virtual or augmented reality and distributed ledger technology.

More information: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/funding-competition-emerging-enabling-technologies

A series of events are being held by KTN to discuss the competition and to support networking:

• Innovate UK Briefing event, London, 30th September
• Innovate UK Briefing, Webcast, 30th September
• Regional Briefing Event, Manchester, 10th October
• Briefing Event, Belfast, 14th October
• Briefing Event, Cardiff, 20th October
• Briefing Event, Glasgow, 26th October
• Briefing Event, Bristol, 26th October