Contracts for Innovation: Scaling community initiatives in diet and exercise

Overview

This competition supports social enterprises with ready-to-scale innovations focused on delivering community-based diet and/or exercise initiatives. Funded by Innovate UK, it aims to help these organisations test, validate, and demonstrate their existing solutions to prepare them for market.

Key points:

• Open to eligible social enterprises with pre-commercial innovations
• Funding is for demonstration and validation, not early-stage ideas or low-TRL prototypes
• It’s a single-phase competition; "Phase 3" refers to the innovation stage, not a previous competition cycle
• Funding is competitive and limited—high scoring proposals are not guaranteed funding
• This grant does not fund solution procurement; adoption may require a future procurement process

Scope

The aim of the competition is to fund social enterprises with the ability to scale and deliver social impact. Your proposal must address the delivery of community based diet and (or) exercise initiatives and your existing innovation must require further testing and R&D.

In this phase 3 competition you must further develop your existing pre-commercial innovation, deploying, testing and iterating in a real world or representative environment. You must work closely with potential users and customers, conducting the R&D to progress your project toward commercialisation.

In this competition you must:

• address one of the three themes
• identify a clear route to market, scalability and sustainability for your product or service
• have a validated business plan to scale your product or service and plan to scale by at least 25% of current baseline
• spend 80% of your allocated funding by 31 March 2026
• provide evidence of an existing lead customer who is using your product or service and the plan to increase their uptake
• detail a minimum of one and up to four new customers and an implementation plan for each
• describe how scaling your innovation addresses critical social challenges
• demonstrate a causal link between your business activities and achievement of your declared social impact
• describe how all social impact will be measured, evidenced, and reported
• outline your commitment to specific social outcomes, clearly identifying beneficiaries related to your social mission
• explain how any profits after tax will be distributed so any surpluses are used to achieve positive future social impacts
• describe how ongoing collaborations between all members of the project team will develop
• have the required ethical approvals, data sharing agreements and contracts in place

This is a single phase competition.

Themes

Your project can focus on one of the following community based initiatives for:

• diet
• exercise
• combined diet and exercise

Research categories

Phase 3: Adoption and scaling

This means planned research or critical investigation to gain new knowledge and skills for scaling up existing products, processes or services. The primary objective is to make further technical improvements on products, processes or services that are not substantially set.

You must work closely with the stakeholders to deliver the adoption and scaling up of the products processes or services in environments representative of real life operating conditions.

Project duration

Up to 12 months

Must start by 1^st September 2025

End by 31^st August 2026

Award value

Projects must have:

• total costs between £200,000 and £250,000 inclusive of VAT
• spent 80% of awarded funding by 31st March 2026

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 £250,000
• If you are not VAT registered, you must enter your eligible project costs exclusive of VAT and your total project costs must not exceed £250,000

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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