Drivers such as climate change, supply chain resilience and the cost of energy mean that there is a growing need to invest in manufacturing efficiency, particularly across the Power Electronics Machines and Drives (PEMD) value chain.

Innovate UK’s Driving the Electric Revolution, part of UK Research and Innovation, will invest up to £5 million in projects that enable the scale-up of PEMD manufacturing to develop a resilient, cross-sectoral, UK supply chain for these enabling technologies critical for net zero.

This competition is split into two strands:

Strand 1 (this strand): Adopting manufacturing best practice, which aims to fund feasibility studies that facilitate the transfer of knowledge, solutions, technologies and best practice from other manufacturing sectors and demonstrate the impact of these innovations on the PEMD supply chain.

Strand 2: Manufacturing process development

It is your responsibility to ensure you submit your application to the correct strand for your project. You will not be able to transfer your application and it will not be sent for assessment if it is out of scope.

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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Your project

Your project must:

• have a grant funding request between £50,000 and £400,000
• start by 1 May 2023
• last between 6 and 12 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 grant funding request 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 your organisation must:

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

‍Academic institutions and research technology organisations RTOs cannot lead.

Project team

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

• business of any size
• 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.

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, but are limited to no more than 20% of your organisation’s total eligible costs.

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 be involved in up to three applications across both strands of the competition. They can lead on a maximum of one application in each strand.

An academic institution, research and technology organisation (RTO), charity, not for profit or public sector organisation cannot lead on any applications but can collaborate on any number of applications across the two strands.

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