Funding Competition: Resource-Efficient or Bio-based Materials and Manufacturing (FS 2) in the UK

Innovate UK, part of UK Research and Innovation, will work with the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC), to invest up to £1 million in innovative feasibility projects.

The UK has clear potential to become a world class destination of choice for advanced low carbon manufacturing.

The aim of this competition is to realise the three strategic imperatives for UK materials and manufacturing, which are:

• net zero and resource efficient
• resilient and responsive
• technologically advanced and digital

Themes

• Your project must relate to one or both of the following themes:
  • Theme 1: Resource efficient materials and manufacturing
    • You must aim for a significant improvement of resource efficiency in UK materials and manufacturing.
    • Your project must focus on two or more of these five areas:
      • Materials for the future economy: functional materials, material applications for cutting-edge products that reduce emissions, energy consumption and costs
      • Smart design: effective design methods, design for resource efficiency, and design for maximum through-life value
      • Resilient supply chains: complete supply chain visibility, sustainable feedstocks, and co-location of waste and emission streams
      • World class production: flexible production capacity, minimal material use, high quality products, high productivity, and full adaptivity
      • Longer in use and reuse: minimal material waste, practicing complete traceability, and new remanufacturing services
  • Theme 2: Sustainable bio-based materials and biomanufacturing
    • You must aim to improve the sustainability profile of bio-based materials and biomanufacturing. This can be achieved by increasing the use or re-use of bio-based feedstocks, chemical replacements, and circular products.
    • Your project must focus on one or more of these five areas:
      • Materials for the future economy: improving extraction of existing bio-based feedstocks using biological systems, or developing alternatives to traditional manufacturing processes, including bio-catalysis and microbiomes for sustainable biomanufacturing
      • Smart design: utilising biotechnology for the design and development of advanced bio-products, such as chemicals, materials, and engineered biofilms with improved properties
      • Resilient supply chains: discovering and optimizing enzymes and organisms for biomanufacturing or using biotechnology to secure value from waste streams
      • World class production: improving manufacturability and consistency at scale, or progressing the development and adoption of biotechnology across multiple manufacturing industries and sectors
      • Longer in use and reuse: enhancing the sustainability of products through the application of biotechnology

Funding Information

• Up to £1 million has been allocated to fund innovation projects in this competition. Funding will be in the form of a grant.
• Your project’s total costs must be between £50,000 and £100,000.

Eligibility Criteria

• Your project must:
  • have total costs of between £50,000 and £100,000
  • last between 3 and 6 months
  • carry out all of its project work in the UK
  • intend to exploit the results from or in the UK
  • start by 1 October 2024
  • end by 31 March 2025
• Projects must always start on the first of the month and this must be stated within your application. Your project start date will be reflected in your grant offer letter if you are successful.
• Lead organisation
  • To lead a project, your organisation must be one of the following UK registered:
    • business of any size
    • academic institution
    • research and technology organisation (RTO)
    • charity
    • not for profit
    • public sector organisation
  • The lead organisation must collaborate with other UK registered organisations and must be or involve at least one grant claiming micro, small or medium-sized enterprise (SME).
• Project team
  • To collaborate with the lead, your organisation must be one of the following UK registered:
    • business of any size
    • academic institution
    • research and technology organisation (RTO)
    • charity
    • not for profit
    • public sector organisation
  • Each partner organisation must be invited into the Innovation Funding Service by the lead to collaborate on a project. Once partners have accepted the invitation, they will be asked to login or to create an account in the Innovation Funding Service. They are responsible for entering their own project costs and completing their Project Impact questions in the application.
  • 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. Their costs will count towards the total project costs.
• Subcontractors
  • Subcontractors are allowed in this competition and are limited to no more than 20% of the project’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. 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 eligible organisation can lead on one application only but can be included as a collaborator in a further 2 applications.
  • If an organisation is not leading any application, it can collaborate in any number of applications.

Ineligible

• Theme 1: Resource-efficient materials and manufacturing
  • They will not fund projects that focus on:
    • enabling areas such as energy, regulations and policy, skills and relations
    • an incremental improvement in resource efficiency
    • circularity of rare earth elements
    • technologies to directly reduce industrial energy consumption
    • carbon capture and storage technology
• Theme 2: Sustainable bio-based materials and biomanufacturing
  • They will not fund projects that focus on:
    • enabling areas such as energy, regulations and policy, skills and relations
    • biopharmaceutical recombinant proteins for diagnosis or therapeutics, including protein, or nucleic acid-based vaccines or antimicrobials
    • microbiomes towards human health therapeutics
    • sustainable aviation fuel
    • alternate protein sources for example, food and beverage
    • bioplastics and packaging
    • carbon capture and storage technology
• For clarity, the use of captured carbon as a feedstock is in scope for both themes.
• 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.

For more information, visit Innovate UK.