Client: Innovate UK

Innovate UK (formerly the Technology Strategy Board) is the vehicle by which the UK government supports innovation within industry and commerce.

The organisation offers grant and innovation support across the UK totaling £600m per year. This represents a total investment exceeding £1 billion worth of UK research and development activity per annum.

Innovate UK Website

Innovate UK is a non-departmental executive body sponsored by the UK Government's Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy but a number of other public sector organisations are involved including the research councils, other government departments and agencies and divolved administrations.

A typical project involves 5 partners, has a total cost of £1m with 45% coming from the grant and runs for 3 years.

Hi Consulting was part of the contracted team that developed and delivered the funding programme systems for the TSB. Our specific responsibilities and contributions have included:

providing strategic input on the choice of ICT topics for funding. We have carried out market assessments and competition justification work for 4 potential ICT competitions, 2 of which have been funded
assisting in the development of application assessment criteria and application processes including those for special large scale and fast track application tracks
managing the liaison with the Research Councils' joint electronic submission service for collection of academic applicant financial data.
developing funding and financial rules and strategies for micro-organisations.
developing and managing the project monitoring system. This system now successfully monitors up to 1,800 projects at a time with quarterly reporting using over 250 monitoring officers
providing the monitoring overview for all the ICT projects
developing the evaluation criteria and process for completed projects
briefing all applicants on the assessment process and funding financial rules
briefing all assessors on the assessment criteria and process
briefing all new monitoring officers
carrying out assessments within the ICT area for Collaborative R&D and SMART programmes

Currently we provide project monitoring and assessment services to Innovate UK having successfully transferred the developed processes to the internal staff.

Hi Consulting is able to offer similar services to other funding organisations, please contact us to discuss your requirements.