Smart Grants from Innovate UK, the new wine industry reforms, funding for immersive digital mental health therapeutic solutions plus the new UK supply chain directory
For today’s blog post, we’re discussing Smart Grants from Innovate UK, the new wine industry reforms, funding for immersive digital mental health therapeutic solutions plus the new UK supply chain directory
Welcome to our round up of the latest business news for our clients. Please contact us if you want to talk about how these updates affect your business.
Innovate UK Smart Grants: September 2023
Innovate UK, part of UK Research and Innovation, is investing up to £25 million in the best game-changing and world-leading ideas.
Ideas need to be designed for swift, successful commercialisation and be genuinely new and novel, not just disruptive within their sector.
All proposals must be business-focused, with deliverable, realistic, adequately resourced plans to achieve return on investment, growth and market share following project completion.
Applications can come from any area of technology and be applied to any part of the economy, such as, but not exclusively:
• net-zero,
• the arts, and
• design and media.
To be in scope, your proposal must demonstrate (among other things):
• a game-changing, innovative, and disruptive idea that will lead to new products, processes or services;
• an idea that is significantly ahead of others in the field, set for rapid commercialisation; and
• clear potential to positively impact the UK’s position, productivity and competitiveness within the global economy.
Innovate UK will fund feasibility projects, industrial research projects and experimental development projects, as defined in the guidance on categories of research.
Your application must include at least one micro, small or medium-sized enterprise (SME) as the lead or a collaborative grant claiming partner.
Read the full eligibility criteria and scope for Innovate UK Smart Grants.
The competition closes at 11am on Wednesday 17 January 2024.
New wine industry reforms
Following a public consultation, Wine: reforms to retained EU law, the UK government has set out reforms for the wine sector which will begin in 2024.
Feedback from the wine industry has shown that certain regulations within the current 400-page rulebook have been stifling innovation and preventing the introduction of more efficient and sustainable practices.
Changes will include removing some packaging requirements – such as ending the mandatory requirement that certain sparkling wines must have foil caps and mushroom-shaped stoppers. This will reduce unnecessary waste and packaging costs for businesses. Outdated rules around bottle shapes will also be scrapped, freeing up producers to use different types.
The government will also remove the requirement for imported wines to have an importer address on the label – the Food Business Operator (FBO) responsible for ensuring all legal requirements are met will still need to be identified on the label, as is the standard requirement for food products. This will create more frictionless trade and reduce administrative burdens.
Further reforms will also give producers more freedom to use hybrid varieties of grapes. This will enable growers to choose the variety that works best for them and reduce vine loss due to disease or climate change, while also providing greater choice to consumers.
See: New wine reforms to boost investment and ease burdens on industry – GOV.UK (www.gov.uk)
Mindset: Extended reality for digital mental health
Funding is available for immersive digital mental health therapeutic solutions.
Innovate UK, part of UK Research and Innovation, will invest up to £4.5 million in innovation projects across the two strands of the Mindset XR competition.
The aim of this competition is to develop digital therapeutic extended reality (XR) solutions to provide improved delivery of mental health and wellbeing services.
This competition is split into two strands:
• strand 1 – for feasibility studies
• strand 2 – for industrial research
Your project must undertake feasibility studies or industrial research in the application of XR to provide mental health care solutions. Your proposal must specifically explore how digital therapeutic content can provide positive mental health applications and outcomes for young adults (aged 13 and above) or older adults. Your project must also demonstrate that the solution could be applied, trialled and ultimately adopted at scale, to provide a broad benefit to the UK mental health sector.
The deadline for applications to both strands of this competition is 11am on Wednesday 6 December 2023. To find out more about the competition, potential applicants are invited to register for an online briefing and applicant workshop, taking place on Thursday 12 October 2023.
The new UK supply chain directory
The High Value Manufacturing (HVM) Catapult could make it easier for domestic manufacturers to connect with a new, free to use, UK Supply Chain Directory.
The platform harnesses the power of machine learning to provide up-to-date information on UK manufacturers. It combines publicly accessible data with web scraping to create the single most data-rich source of UK’s manufacturers and suppliers. It also allows companies to put up their company profile to update and enrich their content.
HVM keep Companies House as a reference and it joins information coming from companies’ websites, CreditSafe, and Dealroom.
This new tool is bringing together hundreds of thousands of businesses across UK industry in one online resource.
The tool is free to sign up for and access, and businesses can use it to:
• find new suppliers and customers; and
• map the UK’s capability in their sector or area.
Users can search the directory according to company size, location, and specialist areas, with a wide range of other filters. Using data-driven classification, users can also find suppliers or supply chains based on manufacturing capability.