Summary
This Innovate UK Phase 3 Contracts for Innovation competition funds extended field trials for pre-commercial clean air technologies focused on monitoring, mitigating, or removing air pollution to protect human health.
The funding supports demonstration, testing, and validation of existing innovations to prepare them for market—not early-stage ideas. Adoption of solutions may require future procurement processes. Funding is competitive and limited, so not all high-scoring proposals may receive support.
Scope
In this Phase 3 competition you must further develop your existing innovation, deploying, testing and iterating in a real world or representative environment.
You must work directly with potential future customers and users. This will lead to insight and feedback to allow you to make final adjustments to the product or service, that will lead to successful commercialisation.
Your potential users and customers can claim funding support to facilitate their involvement in the project. Applications will be evaluated on the level of commitment to the project and the solution demonstrated by the potential future customers and users.
The strongest applications would likely be able to highlight the potential future customer’s intention to procure the solution if it can be shown to be effective.
You must demonstrate a credible and practical route to market, so your application must include a plan to commercialise your results.
Contracts will be given to successful applicants.
Specific themes
Your project must focus on one or more of the following:
- monitoring air pollutants or using data to create actionable insights to safeguard health
- extracting harmful pollution from the atmosphere
- mitigating harmful emissions at their source
Research categories
Phase 3: real world implementation and testing
The primary objective is to make further technical improvements on products, processes or services that are not substantially set.
This can include further prototyping, demonstrating, testing and validation of existing pre-commercial products, processes or services in environments representative of real-life operating conditions.
Project duration
Up to 12 months
Must start by September 2025
End by 30th June 2026
Award value
Projects must have total costs between £75,000 and £100,000 inclusive of VAT.
Eligibility criteria
- Projects must be led by an organisation of any size
- Contracts will be awarded to a single entity only
- Subcontractors can be used for specialist skills and can be businesses, research organisations, research and technology organisations or the third sector(charities, social enterprises and voluntary groups)
- You must select whether you are VAT registered before entering your eligible project costs
- If you are VAT registered, you must enter your eligible project costs exclusive of VAT and your total eligible project costs inclusive of VAT must not exceed £100,000
- If you are not VAT registered, you must enter your eligible project costs exclusive of VAT and your total project costs must not exceed £100,000
Your application must have at least 50% of the contract value attributed directly and exclusively to R&D services, including solution exploration and design. R&D can also include prototyping and field-testing the product or service.
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