Funding Competition: Net Zero Living Digital Accelerator Programme (Round 1)

Deadline: 07-Jun-2023

UK registered businesses can apply for a share of up to £1.5 million to develop digital applications to solve challenges in delivering net zero for places.

Innovate UK, part of UK Research and Innovation, will invest up to £1.5 million in innovation projects. This funding is part of the Net Zero Living programme.

The aim of this competition is to support ambitious, early stage digital focussed businesses in developing and delivering net zero in relation to challenges based on place. This must be done through data driven digital applications and by collaborating with potential customers and product users.

By accelerating their journey, they hope to create high growth businesses that will drive forwards digitalisation across the UK and globally in Net Zero sectors, creating jobs, growing a customer base and delivering customer value.

Scope

• Your proposal must focus on two or more net zero challenges across:
  • power
  • heat
  • mobility
  • product manufacture and usage
• Your digital product must be for domestic, commercial, industrial or public authority users. Links to other sectors are also welcome where relevant to the delivery of net zero.
• Your project must be a software or data lead solution.
• It must make use of a number of open and shared data sets across a range of place relevant topics, including, but not limited to:
  • energy vectors and assets
  • citizens and communities
  • buildings
  • geography
  • transport
  • carbon emissions
  • industry
  • economy
• Your digital products or services must help places to accelerate their journey to net zero, and be replicable and scalable. You can focus on decision making tools, cost evaluation, reporting tools, prioritisation, or citizen engagement.
• Your businesses is likely to be at least 2 years old. You may have a product being developed or available and have some customer engagement. You could be self funded or have early investors and you may have accessed some public funding in your growth journey to date.

Funding Information

• Your project’s total grant funding request must be between £150,000 and £300,000.
• start by 01 November 2023
• end by 31 October 2024
• last between 9 and 12 months

Projects they will not fund

• They are not funding projects that are:
  • focusing on large scale national infrastructure solutions alone, for example, not tackling placed based challenges to net zero
  • focusing on only one sector
  • lead by a long established business with modest growth record and ambitions
  • not utilising a number of shared and open data sets relevant to place
• They 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

Eligibility Criteria

• Your project must:
  • carry out all of its project work in the UK
  • intend to exploit the results from or in the UK
• Under current restrictions, this competition will not fund any procurement, commercial, business development or supply chain activity with any Russian and Belarusian entity as lead, partner or subcontractor. This includes any goods or services originating from a Russian and Belarusian source.
• Lead organisation
  • To lead a project your organisation must:
    • be a UK registered micro or small business
    • collaborate with at least one UK registered business, organisation or public authority of any size
    • collaborate with at least one potential customer or product user as part of the project.
• 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.
  • To be an eligible collaboration, the lead and at least one other organisation must apply for funding when entering their costs into the application.
• Non-funded partners
  • 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. They 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
  • An organisation can only lead on one application.
  • If an organisation is not leading an application, it can collaborate in any number of applications.

For more information, visit Innovate UK.