Eligibility
Eligibility
The Advantage Proof of Concept Grant Fund is backed by Advantage West Midlands and the European Regional Development Fund and is designed to support innovation and product development in the West Midlands. The Fund operates under strict eligibility criteria for both applicants and projects. These eligibility criteria are provided below for your information, however, it should be noted that this is not an exhaustive list and whilst your application may meet all of these criteria, the Fund is competitive and applications may be rejected for a number of reasons at any stage of the process.
Applicant Status
Applicants must be located in the West Midlands and must either conform to the European Small and Medium Enterprise definition (click here to read the SME definition as defined by the European Commission) or be a university based in the West Midlands.
Innovation
The Advantage Proof of Concept Grant Fund is designed to support established and start-up businesses developing innovative new products and processes and to assist in the spin-out of new enterprises from universities in the West Midlands. It supports applicants to investigate, advance and protect early stage innovative business ideas and to commercialise new innovations.
Applications will be required to demonstrate a high level of technical innovation and innovation within the market sector in which they operate. This innovation must be articulated clearly within the application.
Project Priority Sectors
All high quality applications will be considered regardless of sector, however, priority will be given to five key technology areas:
- Advanced Materials;
- Healthcare Technology;
- Energy Technology;
- Transportation Technology;
- Digital Media.
Use of Funds
Projects that can be supported by the fund must fall into one of the five categories below:
- Market assessment;
- IPR protection of innovative ideas;
- Basic prototyping;
- Outline business planning;
- Limited management support to establish the commercial viability of business concepts.
Applicants need not balance their applications to draw money from every category and applications focussing on one category will be considered. However, in most cases the latter two categories will be used to support activities covered in the first three.
External Costs Only
The Fund is only able to award money toward costs external to the company and will only pay grants retrospectively based on 75% of the value, net of recoverable VAT, of defrayed invoices.
Internal costs to the company will not be considered eligible in any circumstances.
Grant Values
The Fund is worth approximately £5.8 million. Applicants may apply for grants of between £5k and £30k which represents up to 75% of total project costs. However, it is expected that other than in exceptional circumstances, awards of less than £15k will not be considered.
When to Apply
The fund will be awarding grants on a rolling basis at the rate of 10 to 20 per month until 31st March 2010.