Innovate UK has opened a £12 million competition for UK businesses working on advanced materials, with grants of £500,000 to £1 million per project.
The National Materials Innovation Programme funds collaborative industrial research that moves a materials innovation out of the lab and towards a real product. That can mean improving a material you already make, developing a new one, or using an existing material somewhere nobody has tried it before. What it will not fund is research with no home to go to, so every project needs a named end user waiting at the other end.
Below, I have explained the key things you need to know about this competition before you apply: who is eligible, how much funding is on the table, and what the application process looks like.
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Who is Eligible?
Your Organisation
To lead a project, you must be a UK-registered business of any size. This one cannot be done alone. At least two organisations have to claim grant funding, and one of the funded partners must be a UK-registered micro, small or medium-sized enterprise.
You can work with the following as collaborators:
- Academic institutions
- Businesses of any size registered in the UK
- Charities
- Not-for-profits
- Public sector organisations
- Research and technology organisations (RTOs)
You can also bring in partners who take no grant money, and those partners can sit outside the UK.
You can lead one application and collaborate on up to two others. Academic and research organisations can collaborate on as many as they like.
Your Project
Your project must:
- Have a total grant request of between £500,000 and £1 million
- Last between 18 and 30 months
- Start by 1 February 2027 and end by 31 July 2029
All funded work must be carried out in the UK, and you must intend to exploit the project results from or within the UK.
Your project must also:
- Address one of the four competition themes and at least one of its sub-themes
- Involve at least two organisations claiming grant funding, one of them a UK SME
- Keep any single organisation's share of the total project costs at 70% or below
- Keep subcontracting to 30% or less of total eligible project costs
- Name an end user working in one of the eight industrial strategy sectors, and give them a real role in the project like a seat on the advisory board
- Show a clear and realistic route to adoption in that sector
A letter of support will not do as evidence of end user involvement, and neither will an email or a purchase order. Innovate UK wants to see the end user actually in the project. RTOs, academics, consultants and regulators do not count as end users.
Your project has to sit in one of four themes:
- Future healthcare solutions, covering biocompatible and regenerative materials, and bioelectronic materials
- Metamaterials and metasurfaces
- Power electronics and connectivity, covering wide and ultra wide bandgap materials, and advanced connectivity materials
- Structural materials innovation, covering sustainability and circularity, surface engineering, design and deployment, and extreme environments
The structural materials theme is tighter than it looks. It only covers a fixed list of material classes, including speciality steels, advanced non-ferrous metals and alloys, fibre reinforced composites, technical ceramics, advanced glasses and glass ceramics, advanced concretes and geopolymers, and high performance structural polymers. If your material is not on that list, that theme is closed to you.
Innovate UK won't fund projects that:
- Are focused on chemical or raw materials synthesis rather than getting a material into an end application
- Are focused on digital tools like AI or machine learning to support materials innovation
- Are focused solely on defence, although dual use is fine where the primary focus is civil
- Sit in enabling areas like regulation, educational resources, behavioural science, policy or skills
How Much Funding Can I Apply For?
The amount you can claim depends on your organisation's type and size and the sort of research your project involves.
Individual grants range from £500,000 to £1 million.
Applying as a Company
| Project Type | Micro and Small | Medium | Large |
|---|---|---|---|
| Percentage of Costs Covered* | 70% | 60% | 50% |
*Industrial research refers to planned research aimed at acquiring new knowledge for developing new products, processes, or services.
One more limit worth knowing. No single enterprise can take more than £3 million in grant across this competition.
Funding Example
Say your project has £1.4 million of eligible costs and you are a small company. You can claim 70%, which is a grant of £980,000. You will need to fund the remaining £420,000 from other sources, like R&D Tax Relief, investment or loans.
Applying as a Non-Commercial Organisation
Non-economic organisations can share up to 30% of the total eligible project costs between them, and are funded at higher rates:
- Up to 100% of eligible costs if you are a charity, not-for-profit, public sector organisation, research organisation, or RTO
- Up to 80% of full economic costs (FEC) if you're a Je-S-registered institution, like a university
How Do I Apply?
The deadline for applications is 28 October 2026.
Applications are submitted via Innovate UK's Innovation Funding Service (IFS) portal.
The application is split into four sections:
Project Details
This section is background rather than scored. It covers:
- Application details, including your title, start date and duration
- Application team
- Public description
- Project summary
- Research category
- Scope
Most answers in this section are limited to 400 words.
Application Questions
There are 18 questions in total:
- Eight unscored administrative questions covering topics like animal testing, export licences, trusted research, your chosen theme and end user involvement
- Ten scored questions covering your need or challenge, approach and innovation, team and resources, market awareness, outcomes and route to market, wider impacts, project management, risks, added value, and costs and value for money
You can include appendices (PDFs of up to two A4 pages) for the approach, team, project management, and risk questions.
Finances
Every organisation claiming grant funding enters its own project costs here, and academic institutions cost their work using the TRAC method.
Project Impact
Every partner completes this section and it is not scored.
Your application will be reviewed by three independent assessors. Their individual scores will be combined to determine your final result.
If you're successful, you'll be notified by 2 December 2026.
Like with most competitions, Innovate UK takes a 'portfolio approach' by funding projects across different technologies, markets and technological maturities. This means that a strong score won't necessarily guarantee that your application will be successful.
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