Innovate UK, part of UK Research and Innovation, will invest up to £4 million in innovation projects in the creative technologies sector. This is across two strands of the competition.

The aim of this competition is to develop digital therapeutic Extended Reality (XR) solutions to provide mental health care services. These solutions may be applied and trialled following a two year R&D cycle. They must have the potential to be adopted at scale to form part of the UK’s formal mental healthcare ecosystem.

Your proposal must include the design and features of your solution and how it will be applied.

Projects will undertake research and development in the application of extended reality (XR) to provide mental health care services.

XR refers to Extended Reality and covers Augmented Reality (AR), Mixed Reality (MR) and Virtual Reality (VR), haptics, interfaces, platforms and software. These are often referred to as immersive technologies.

In applying to this competition, you are entering into a competitive process. This competition closes at 11am UK time on the deadline stated.

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Eligibility

Your project

Your project must:

• have total project costs between £100,000 and £250,000
• start by 01 April 2023
• end by 31 March 2025
• last between 6 months and 24 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.

If your total project’s 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. We 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.

Lead organisation

To lead a project or work alone your organisation

• must be a UK registered business of any size.
• can collaborate with other UK registered organisations

Academic institutions and RTOs cannot lead or work alone.

Project team

To collaborate with the lead, your organisation must be one of the following UK registered:

• business of any size, including social ventures
• academic institution
• charity
• not for profit
• public sector organisation
• research and technology organisation (RTO)

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.

If collaborative, the lead and at least one other organisation must claim funding by 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

Subcontractors are allowed in this competition.

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

You can use subcontractors from overseas but must make the case in your application as to why you could not use suppliers from the UK.

You must provide a detailed rationale, evidence of the potential UK contractors you approached and the reasons why they were unable to work with you. We will not accept a cheaper cost as a sufficient reason to use an overseas subcontractor.

All subcontractor costs must be justified and appropriate to the total project costs.

Number of applications

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

If a business is not leading on an application, it can collaborate in up to three applications in this strand.

An academic institution, charity, not for profit, public sector organisation or research and technology organisation (RTO) can collaborate in any number of applications.