This competition offers loans to help businesses overcome barriers to their innovations becoming a successful, commercial reality. The aim is to make a considerable economic impact which results in significant, sustainable business growth.

Innovate UK is looking for businesses who can demonstrate that their projects have the best potential for the future.

Your idea must lead to innovative products, processes or services that are significantly ahead of others currently available. It can also involve a new or innovative business model.

Your proposal must demonstrate:

• a clearly expressed and compelling innovative idea
• a robust and deliverable business plan that addresses and evidences market potential and needs
• a team with the necessary skills and experience to run and complete the project successfully and on time, and take the outputs forward
• awareness of all the main risks the project and business will face, with realistic plans to manage, mitigate and minimise the impact of each of these
• sound, practical financial plans and timelines that represent good value for money and ability to repay the loan
• why you are unable to fund the project from your own resources or other forms of public or private-sector funding
• a clear, evidence based plan to deliver significant economic impact, return on investment (ROI) and growth through commercialisation, as soon as possible after project completion

Your project can include:

• prototyping
• demonstrating
• piloting
• testing
• validation

These can be in environments that represent real life operating conditions.

Your application will be evaluated on our:

• assessment of the quality of your project proposal
• judgement on the suitability of your business to take on a loan

We will decline loans for businesses which:

• we consider unable to afford the interest and repayments on the loan
• have not demonstrated that they are unable to obtain finance from other sources on suitable terms

We are looking to fund a portfolio of projects and businesses, across a variety of technologies and markets, with a particular focus on future economy areas set out in the Innovate UK plan for action.

Specific themes

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

Net Zero

• energy
• impact of industrial processes and use of materials
• agriculture and food and other sources of emissions
• capital intensity

Health and Wellbeing

• tackling ill health
• enhancing Wellbeing
• diet and food

Next generation digital technologies

Technology families

• advanced materials and manufacturing
• artificial intelligence
• digital and advanced computing
• bioinformatics and genomics
• engineering biology
• electronics, photonics and quantum technologies
• energy and environment technologies
• robotics and smart machines

We are also particularly interested in receiving applications from diverse businesses; those involving communities that are typically under-represented, including from regions outside the “Golden Triangle” (London, Oxford and Cambridge) or with, for example, female, ethnic minority and diverse-ability founders.