Design Foundations: Repairability (United Kingdom)

The aim of this competition is to help businesses adopt people-centric and systemic design principles to lay the foundations for innovative ideas with the potential to deliver significant benefits. These can be ideas for new or significantly improved products, services, places, or business models.

All proposed projects must look at the need or opportunity from the perspective of the people involved. This is to ensure that proposed solutions are more desirable, beneficial and more likely to be adopted or to result in desirable behaviour change.

Eligible organisations can apply for funding to use people centred and systemic design methods to:

• improve existing innovative ideas
• generate new ideas in response to a known need or opportunity
• identify new opportunities to innovate and plan how to respond to them

Specific Themes

• The theme is repairability and is open to be applied in any product, service, place and business model, across all sectors.
• Repairability is signifying an embedded and iterative optimisation looking toward change with long term benefits.

Funding Information

• Your project’s total costs must be between £40,000 and £80,000.
• Projects they will not fund
  • They are not funding projects that:
    • are a one time or occasional repair
    • are the design of experiments, policies or research methodologies
    • do not follow best practice, people and planet centred design methods and principles as described in the competition scope
    • focus on the final finish or specification of an idea where fundamental design decisions have already been made, for example, where new customer feedback or discoveries will have little influence on the design outcome
    • seek only to validate technical feasibility or progress the technology readiness level of an idea, rather than improving the quality of the experience or its benefits for people or the planet
    • are likely to be harmful to people or the planet
  • They will also not fund projects that are proposals to create prototypes or demonstrators, in cases where:
    • the prototype requires a majority of the project cost or time to build
    • they are to be made fully functional
    • they are at considerable effort or cost
    • partial or simulated functionality would suffice
    • they are intended primarily to test technical feasibility or performance rather than the customer experience and benefits
    • they will only be shared with stakeholders late in the project, for example, with no time allowed to make changes in response to feedback
  • They cannot fund projects that:
    • involve primary production in fishery and aquaculture
    • involve primary production in agriculture
    • have activities relating to the purchase of road freight transport
    • are not allowed under De minimis regulation restrictions
    • are not eligible to receive Minimal Financial Assistance
    • are dependent on export performance, for example giving an award to a baker on the condition that they export a certain quantity of bread to another country
    • are dependent on domestic inputs usage, for example if they give an award to a baker on the condition that they use 50% UK flour in their product

Proposal Categories

• The focus of this competition is repairability, or Design for Repair (DfR), which is a design philosophy that aims to make products and services more easily repairable.
• Your proposal must fall within one or more of the following categories:
  • Modularity and Accessibility: simplify the repair process and ensure that critical parts are not buried deep within the design
  • Standardisation and Compatibility: compatibility in all aspects including, industry standards and interoperability with other systems
  • Design for Durability: prioritise the use of high quality components and to ensure long-lasting value thorough testing
  • Extended Lifecycles and Lifecycle Assessment: consider adaptability to changing and emerging technologies, and support for legacy systems, evaluate environmental and societal impact for informed design decisions
  • Eco-Design and Circularity: promote sustainability, recyclability and reusability using design principles such as cradle-to-cradle (C2C) and biomimicry
  • Design for Resilience: increase resilience to external shocks and unexpected challenges, for example economic downturns and supply chain disruptions
• Any prototyping activity within your project must:
  • focus primarily on making discoveries about the quality of experience, the likelihood of the idea being adopted or its potential to promote positive changes in behaviour
  • be as quick and low cost as possible, and aim for the lowest level of fidelity or functionality necessary to get the required feedback
  • be used to share ideas and make discoveries early in the design process, so they can be acted on before it becomes prohibitively expensive or time consuming to do so

Eligibility Criteria

• Your project
  • Your project must:
    • have total costs of between £40,000 and £80,000
    • your grant request must match your total project costs
    • last between 3 months and 6 months
    • carry out its project work in the UK
    • intend to exploit the results from or in the UK
    • start on 1 June 2024
    • end by 30 November 2024
• Lead organisation
  • To lead a project your organisation must:
    • be a UK registered business of any size
    • be a charity, not for profit or public sector organisation
    • collaborate with other UK registered organisations
• Project team
  • To collaborate with the lead, your organisation must be a UK registered:
    • business of any size
    • academic institution
    • charity
    • not-for-profit
    • public sector organisation
    • research and technology organisation (RTO)
• Subcontractors
  • Subcontractors are allowed in this competition. The subcontractor’s costs must not exceed 75% of the total project cost.
  • Subcontractors can be from anywhere in the UK and you must select them through your usual procurement process.
  • They expect all subcontractor costs to be justified and appropriate to the total eligible project costs. They will not accept a cheaper cost as a sufficient reason to use an overseas subcontractor.
• Number of applications
  • A business of any size, charity, not-for-profit or public sector organisation can only lead on one application but can be included as a collaborator in two further applications.
  • Subcontractors can contribute to any number of applications. Lead organisations are advised to be mindful of their chosen subcontractors’ capacity to deliver should they be involved in more than one successful application.

For more information, visit Innovate UK.