What are grants and innovation loans?
Grants are non-repayable funds provided by a Government body or institution to support a specific purpose or product.
These can include grants for relocating and investing in geographical locations and regions through to supporting innovation through the development of new products, services, or processes. Often the goal of these grants is to reduce the financial risk of innovation and help businesses bring ideas to market.
How do I apply for a grant?
Applying for grants requires detailed evidence of why your project meets and aligns with the goals of the funding body. The provision of non-repayable funds is highly attractive, yet writing the technical grant application and managing the wider grant process can be extremely time consuming.
A client-led approach, providing project management, technical specialists and grant-writing expertise comes together in combination with a deep understanding of your business to provide you peace of mind and full support in your grant applications.
The Process
1. Kick-Off
From the very start, you’ll be supported by a dedicated client manager who will guide you through the grant funding process. We take time to understand how your business operates and how you like to work, ensuring our support feels seamless and fully aligned with your processes.
2. Review suitable grant opportunities
Developing a long term sustainable grant strategy is highly valuable for you to ensure that you aren’t missing out on funding opportunities. Whether we are identifying the grant opportunities for you, or you have come to us for a specific grant application, we will work with you to further develop a grant identification strategy.
3. Develop the proposal together
In order to give you peace of mind and maximise your chances of success, we provide professionally written applications that align with your work and ambitions. We help navigate the submission process, deadlines and requirements to make sure that the application is submitted in timely manner.
4. Ongoing support and post-submission follow-up
In order to keep you informed and reduce the often significant workload of managing the grant process, we stay with you after the application process to keep you informed and updated, to make the post-submission phase as simple as possible. Tracking outcomes, feedback, proactively supporting revisions if required, we will keep you aware and on top of the process.
Want to discuss your options?
- How can I find the right grant for me?
- Instead of taking the volume approach of applying for ten relevant grants with a view to winning one, we take the approach of identifying grants that reduce the competition levels via utilising aspects of your business, product or network that are less common in your sector. For example, identifying you have a German company in your network you can partner with to access a UK/Germany bi-lateral grant.
- How much of my time will it take?
- Again each case is unique, however our process is designed to ensure that we minimise your time where possible. In most cases we can look to limit your and your team’s time commitment to a handful of hours.
- How do you structure your fees?
- Grant funding projects are usually priced with a mix of success-based fees and, in some cases, a small upfront element. We’ll always agree the approach together and keep things clear and straightforward. No surprises, just fair pricing you can trust.
- What are my chances of success?
- Grants for innovation projects can be extremely competitive. For some Innovate UK grants, your chances of success can sometimes be as low as 4%. However, recipients have found that a proper grant verification approach to ensure your project meets the criteria and working with a grants expert significantly improves your chances.