The Technology Strategy Board is all about driving innovation.

Their role is to stimulate technology-enabled innovation in the areas which offer the greatest scope for boosting UK growth and productivity. They promote, support and invest in technology research, development and commercialisation, spreading knowledge, bringing people together to solve problems or make new advances.

As well as advising the Government on how to remove barriers to innovation and accelerate the exploitation of new technologies, thety also work in areas where there is a clear potential business benefit, helping today’s emerging technologies become the growth sectors of tomorrow.

The competition:

The Technology Strategy Board is to invest an indicative £5m in a programme to help digital content creators and rights holders realise and maximise the commercial return potential from their intellectual property (IP).

The creative industry contributes a Gross Value Added (GVA) of 7.3% to the UK economy, with the content industries – computer games, TV and video, film, music, publishing, advertising and new media (all sectors in which the UK performs strongly on a world stage) – accounting for three quarters of the value. This investment by the Technology Strategy Board will support growth within the UK content industries and help develop the market pull to promote exploitation of the underlying digital technologies.

This competition is looking for proposals to develop applications that can be deployed across the digital content sector to extend market opportunities and promote the commercial exploitation of IP

for content creators and rights holders. These could include innovative projects addressing all or any of the following for professionally produced or usergenerated content and mash up services:

  • Development of new business models, business processes, consumer experiences and approaches to deriving commercial benefit from IP.
  • Applications that make it easier for rights holders to efficiently and effectively collect revenue from their content/services.
  • Solutions to broaden the market access of digital content services; this could include the development of new platforms designed to deliver scale to small businesses, or solutions to support multiplatform distribution of content based services.
  • Applications to help provide intelligent access to context relevant content, e.g. driven by individual consumer behaviours, habits, preferences or device selection.
  • Development of intuitive tools and applications to increase participation and extend democratisation of the Web for generating and interacting with content and networks.
  • Applications or tools to support the emergence of new value chains.

Proposals that seek to apply well established solutions from other industries to the digital content sector will be considered alongside the truly novel.

The Technology Strategy Board is concerned with innovative solutions to develop underlying capability that can be exploited widely within the UK digital content sector, i.e. applications or tools that have the potential to be applied across many businesses. This competition is likely to

be particularly relevant to businesses and practitioners in the following sectors:

Advertising, Computer games, Content creators, Digital content distribution, Digital/new media, Film and video, ICT and comms technology suppliers, Music, Rights holders, Publishing, TV and radio.

There will be two levels of application:

1. Projects greater than £100k in total project value – that typically take between 12 and 36 months to complete, with the outcome entering the supply chain within two to five years of completion.

2. Fast Track project below £100k in total project value – these must be led by a creative industry SME or micro company and are expected to take a year to complete.

Applicants need to submit their Expression of Interest by 23rd April 2009 and this will be reviewed

and feedback given on 11th May 2009. During the period 16th March to 15th April applicants will be able to submit their outlines and receive initial comment on an optional and no commitment basis.

For more information about this and other competitions and details of how to register and apply, please see Competitions at www.innovateuk.org, call 01355 272155 or email competitions@tsb.gov.uk.