Innovate UK has added an Expression of Interest (EOI) stage to the Innovation Loan application process, a major development for this popular and lucrative scheme.
The EOI will make it easier for Innovate UK’s assessors to identify and reject ineligible applications, which have increased dramatically in recent years.
While it requires much less information than the full application, businesses must take the EOI seriously.
It is a valuable opportunity to shape Innovate UK’s understanding of your project, and presents a possible pitfall for businesses that are time-strapped or unfamiliar with Innovate UK’s application process
Here are the key things you need to know about the EOI stage for Innovation Loans.
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What are Innovation Loans?
First, a quick recap on what Innovation Loans are.
The Innovation Loans Future Economy is an Innovate UK scheme offering £100,000 to £5 million in debt financing to UK micro, small and medium-sized companies (SMEs) developing highly innovative, late-stage R&D projects.
Key Features and Benefits
- Loans cover up to 100% of project costs, including capex costs
- Below-market interest rate of 7.4%, half of which is deferred while you complete your project
- Loan terms of up to 7 years
- Funding can be used for pre-commercialisation work
Innovation Loans are available to projects in six sectors:
- Advanced Manufacturing
- Clean Energy
- Creative Industries
- Defence
- Digital and Technologies
- Life Sciences
What's Changed?
The Expression of Interest (EOI) is a new stage in the application process for Innovation Loans.
Your EOI must be approved before you can submit a full application for an Innovation Loan.
EOIs are used in a number of grant competitions to help Innovate UK filter out ineligible applications and identify the strongest candidates.
There is no deadline for the EOI stage, so no pressure to meet a hard deadline.
Innovate UK also announced that Innovation Loans can now cover pre-commercialisation work like market testing and production scaleup.
Why Has Innovate UK Done This?
As we understand it, the Innovation Loan scheme was getting inundated with ineligible applications.
This is partly because LLMs now allow businesses to build applications in a fraction of the time, even if they do not meet the scheme’s stringent eligibility criteria.
Sifting through this deluge of applications took considerable resources, bogging down Innovate UK’s assessors and making the scheme extremely expensive to run.
The introduction of the EOI looks to solve this by allowing assessors to identify and reject ineligible applications much more quickly.
This protects the viability of the Innovation Loans scheme and frees assessors to focus on what they do best: deciding which qualifying projects most deserve government funding.
What Information Will I Need to Submit?
The EOI application is much shorter than a standard Innovate UK grant application.
There are just two sections (as opposed to the usual four). They are:
- Project details
- Application questions
Project Details
Project details consist of:
Project summary – max 1,000 words
This is where you describe your project and explain why it’s innovative.
It should cover your vision for your project, your objectives, the team delivering it, and why you were unable to fund it from other sources of funding.
This section isn’t scored but gives Innovate UK’s assessors useful context when judging the rest of our application.
Industrial strategy alignment
Where you select which of the six sectors your project mostly closely aligns with.
Application Questions
There are 11 questions in total. They break down like this:
- 8 questions are tick boxes, where you’ll answer simple questions like your broad funding strategy and how large a loan you are looking to secure
- 3 questions are not scored. They relate to your company’s commercial maturity, cash position and whether you’ve received previous Innovate UK funding.
- 2 questions have written components, but ask for relatively straightforward information regarding your plans for fundraising and the names of any professional investors that have stakes in your business
- 1 question asks you to upload a pitch deck, management accounts, and an overview of your team structure
You can find out more on the Expression of Interest page.
How Can GrantTree Help?
Our grant writing experts can maximise your chances of securing an Innovation Loan in a range of ways:
Eligibility and Competitiveness Assessment
A free service that tells you whether your company and project are eligible for an Innovation Loan.
Our pre-qualification service includes assessing whether you can provide sufficient evidence that you’ll be able to repay the loan and, crucially, whether your project is at the right stage of development to qualify for a loan.
You can book your free Eligibility and Competitiveness Assessment here.
EOI Submission
We are highly experienced with Innovate UK Expression of Interest applications, helping you prove your suitability for the Innovation Loan.
Application Support
Once you’re through to the full application, we offer a variety of services to help you put forward the strongest possible submission.
Our service suite includes:
- Full Service Write – End-to-end support where our writers and technical experts assemble your application from scratch, drawing on decades of success winning funding from Innovate UK
- Grant Reviews – Receive one or more rounds of comprehensive, easy-to-implement guidance on how to improve your application from an active Innovate UK assessor
- Elevate– Working with you, we integrate our writing and review offerings with one-to-one coaching to create a custom support package catering to your individual needs, goals, and budget.
How Can GrantTree Help?
To find out if you qualify for an Innovation Loan, explore your eligibility for grants generally, or learn more about how we can maximise your chances of funding, just get in touch.
My colleagues and I would be happy to help!
