This £3 million fund includes new, easy-to-access funding designed specifically for SMEs and micros under ‘feasibility’ projects – so encouraging applications which can be quickly submitted from companies with bright ideas. This is your chance to develop your thinking and get some government funding from the Technology Strategy Board (TSB).

Feasibility Studies for Digital Britain

One project is targeted at the innovation priorities of the Digital Britain agenda"



Overall, the drive of this £30M program is to look at issues of innovation and technology development that lie beyond the immediate policy challenges. Our aim is to bring together the players across the value chain for digital services, and so support the industry to develop new business propositions enabled by technology and cooperation. The announcement of the £2M call for ideas can be found by clicking here

Feasibility Studies for Technology-Inspired Innovation

The other project is a more general £1M call for ideas across our six priority technology sectors: ICT, Electronics/Photonics/Electrical Systems, Advanced Materials, Nanotechnology, Biosciences and High Value Manufacturing, further details can be found by clicking here

In both cases, the TSB are offering to 75%-fund feasibility studies up to £33k (ie up to £25k grant) to work ideas up to the stage of maturity where they can bid for project funds to take them onwards.

The feasibility studies calls are therefore designed to guide participants towards the opportunities that will be presented by further competitions next year (from about Easter onwards). These will aim to concentrate further investment, to help businesses develop their ideas towards prototypes and demonstrators. It won’t be necessary to have done a study to enter those competitions when they arrive.

Note that, unusually for TSB, single companies can apply into the competitions for feasibility studies, as well as collaborations between companies.



Both competitions close on 01 October 2009, so the window is quite short

Keep an eye on our website as we are trying to organise a Finance for Innovation briefing event in the next week.