Funding Competition: SBRI – Plant Health Innovations for Biosecurity (UK)

This is a Small Business Research Initiative (SBRI) competition delivered by Innovate UK part of UKRI, supported by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) and the Biotechnology Biological Science Research Council (BBSRC).

This competition aims to accelerate the effective development of innovative solutions, technologies or practices that enhance plant health and biosecurity activities. With a focus on regulated pests, diseases and of future operational deployment.

Your project can deliver innovation focused research activities to progress solutions towards one or more of the challenges identified. This can include establishing the feasibility of an idea, to demonstrating principle or developing a prototype.

Your project must demonstrate:

• the development and operational feasibility of innovative technologies or practices
• how you have taken the needs of intended users into consideration in your product or service development
• a credible and practical route to use in an operational environment and commercialisation
• knowledge transfer and exchange between the solution providers and solution users

Challenge Areas

Your project must focus on one or more of the following challenges and be applicable to regulated plant pests and diseases:

• developing innovative technologies and practices to enhance border inspections of traded plants for planting and plant commodities, including wood and wood products, improving sampling accuracy, detection rates of regulated pests, time and resource efficiency of inspectors
• enhancing in-land inspections of plants in nurseries, recently planted sites or the wider environment, through the application of innovative technologies and practices to enable pest and pathogen detection in the field, reducing the risk of outbreaks
• utilising passive and scanning surveillance approaches to provide timely and cost-effective methods for detecting pests and diseases in different landscape settings
• managing the supply of potentially infected or infested plants and plant commodities pre and post border, presenting alternative treatments to destruction following detection of a quarantine organism, reducing financial losses whilst maintaining biosecurity

Project Size

• Your project’s total costs must be between £20,000 and £150,000, inclusive of VAT.

Projects they will not fund

They will not fund projects that:

• are not original or in scope
• do not demonstrate significant support and engagement from potential users, setting out a clear route use in an operational environment and commercialisation throughout the project
• duplicates previous or someone else’s work
• focus purely on training, minor training elements can be included
• do not address how any potentially negative outcomes (such as on the environment or society) would be managed
• do not evidence the potential for their proposed innovation to generate positive economic or societal impact
• are covered by existing commercial agreements to deliver the proposed solutions

Who can apply?

• Your project
  • Your project must:
    • start between 1 April 2024 and 1 October 2024
    • end by 31 March 2025
    • last between 3 and 12 months
    • intend to exploit results from and within the United Kingdom
• Lead organisation
  • To lead a project, you can be an organisation of any size including:
    • a registered business, charity, or Non-Governmental Organisation
    • a research organisation eligible for UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) funding
  • To lead a project, you can work alone or with subcontracted or non-funded organisations as collaborators, such as solution developers and real-world solution users.
  • Contracts will be awarded to a single legal entity only, with any required subcontracting or arrangements between non funded partners, the Lead organisation and collaborators are to be arranged independently. The project and delivery against the project milestones will remain the responsibility of the Lead organisation.
  • This competition will not fund any procurement, commercial, business development or supply chain activity with any Russian or Belarusian entity as lead or subcontractor. This includes any goods or services originating from a Russian or Belarusian source.

For more information, visit Innovate UK.