Grants for Growth
CEOs Connect hosted a session on 2nd February on accessing grants as an alternative source of funding to scale your business.
Speakers at the event included Paul Malcolmson, Manager Northern Ireland, Innovate UK; Andrew Woods, CEO, Catagen and Adrian Johnston, Director of Strategic Business Development at Catalyst.
Kieran Dalton, Head of Scaling at Catalyst, opened the session with an overview of the funding landscape in NI concluding that there is significant opportunity for businesses to look at grant funding as a potential source.
Paul Malcolmson, Manager Northern Ireland, Innovate UK shared an overview of Innovate UK whose mission is to help UK businesses grow through the development and commercialisation of new products, processes, and services, supported by an outstanding innovation ecosystem that is agile, inclusive, and easy to navigate.
Innovate UK’s four criteria are
Large global market; accessible
Strong UK Capacity; relative
Timing; appropriate
Added-Value from our involvement
Addressing 5 strategic themes; Future Economy, Growth at Scale, Global Opportunities, Innovation ecosystem, and Global Levers moving from a sectoral approach to larger priority areas.
Innovate UK regional team’s aim is to
• Strengthen relationships with key stakeholders – innovation/business support
• Understand areas of strength and opportunities across academia and industry
• Ensure coherent innovation strategy and investment across the UK
• Working with stakeholders so that no grant applicant is disadvantaged because of their geography
NI Context
From 2014-2021 Northern Ireland received £160m of Innovate UK funding – 2.4% of all funding. Northern Ireland has the lowest amount of applications to Innovate UK – 1.4% of all applications yet the aggregate success rate of Northern Ireland applications was 24% (joint rank 1 with Wales).
Overall the number of applications and the size of applications is small highlighting the potential opportunities for NI companies.
Paul highlighted opportunities to stay current with opportunities
- Sign up to Newsletters
- New funding portal The Innovation Hub – Connecting businesses to funding and support (ukri.org) will act as a one stop shop
- Catapult networks
- Partnerships
The Application Process
Mainly through Innovation Funding Service.
Not ‘one size fits all’ – each competition will explain selection criteria.
Some common elements –
Competition budget
Independent Assessors
Minimum Quality Threshold (usually around 70% to be “fundable”)
Fixed Dates
Note if oversubscribed, the budget is allocated in rank order (passing the threshold is not a guarantee of funding)
A copy of Paul’s slides is available here.
Catagen’s Grant funding Success Story
Andrew Woods, CEO, Catagen, shared Catagen’s vision to Clean and Decarbonise the air and how Catagen aligned their strategy development to priority areas of government in 2018 following attendance at EDP at MIT. Catagen identified the limitations to scale within the core business and began to identify their core capability as emissions simulations and began horizon scanning.
From this, Catagen identified a new scaling horizon and 5 new business areas, opening their 2nd facility – the Net Zero Technology Centre with world-leading capability in 2022. Catagen has funded this wave by successfully securing grants from a variety of bodies including Innovate UK and BEIS with a 68% success rate on applications.
Andrew shared some tips and insights from this process
- Be persistent
- Blue Zone funding- sometimes an application can meet the threshold but no funding is left, often these applications can be funded through another funder without going through the process again
- Build a dedicated team to work on identifying opportunities and submitting applications, coordinating wider team input (Catagen currently have 8 FTE working on this)
- Catagen has strong governance and due diligence processes in place to manage these grants
- “Innovate UK money is too difficult to get” is a misguided mindset
Open Innovation at Catalyst
Adrian Johnston, Director of Strategic Business Development at Catalyst, shared information on the role of the new Open Innovation team at Catalyst.
The aim of the OI team is to share resources, knowledge, and expertise to de-risk innovation. Adrian will engage with existing and new Catalyst partners to help drive cluster-focused innovation.
Northern Ireland currently has the lowest level of private sector R&D expenditure of all UK regions and Adrian believes more needs to be done to help local companies access UK government and public sector funding to accelerate innovation activity and growth.
The team will also provide services, for example, help with bid writing, early-stage programme management, and help with governance and monitoring. OI can also help with matchmaking and identifying where NI companies, such as Catalyst tenant companies and programme alumni (like CEOs Connect), can slot into consortia.
The example of Catagen’s success highlights the breadth of the opportunity and that we could be submitting more applications.
Contact details for further information:
Paul Malcolmson: paul.malcomson@iuk.ukri.org