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 new products, processes or services that are significantly ahead of others currently available or propose an innovative use of existing products, processes or services. 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 shows evidence of 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.

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.

Your application will be evaluated on:

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

We will decline applications for 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

Portfolio approach
We want to fund a variety of projects across different technologies and markets, with a particular focus on future economy areas set out in the Innovate UK plan for action. We call this a portfolio approach.

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

Research categories

We will only fund experimental development projects, as defined in the guidance on categories of research.

Projects we will not fund

In this competition we are not providing grant funding.

We will not provide funds to match the grant funding of any projects.

We will not fund commercial activities such as marketing and sales.

We 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