Eligibility Requirements for UK and Indian Businesses
Your Project
Your project must:
- have a grant funding request of between £100,000 and £300,000
- start by 1 September 2025
- end by 31 March 2027
- last between 6 and 18 months
The majority of the project work must be undertaken in the UK and India. UK project partners must carry out the majority of their project work in the UK and intend to exploit the results from or in the UK.
The consortium must include at least one business registered in India that is a separate legal entity and not linked to the UK partners. This is to ensure that projects encourage genuine international collaboration, not internal company research. Linked companies are considered a single entity under the parent company.
Your project must demonstrate a balanced technological contribution by the participants from both countries and must be equally significant to all participants.
No one country or project partner can represent more than 70% of the total project work packages. Innovate UK will review your Common Proposal Form and if it is found that your project is not genuinely collaborative you will be made ineligible.
Your proposal must demonstrate a clear intention to commercially exploit the results of the project domestically or globally.
You must only include eligible project costs in your application. See our overview of eligible project costs. For specific guidance, see the eligibility section in this competition.
Roles and Terminology
The ‘lead applicant’, is the organisation that starts the application on the Innovation Funding Service. This must be a UK organisation.
UK lead applicant
To start an application on the Innovation Funding Service (IFS), your organisation must be a UK registered business of any size.
You must:
- be or involve at least one grant claiming micro, small or medium-sized enterprise (SME)
- collaborate with at least one Indian registered business applying to the Technology Development Board programme, which must be a separate legal entity, not linked to the UK partners
Indian Limited Liability Partnerships (LLPs) are not considered eligible for funding by TDB. If your consortium consists of an Indian LLP you will be made ineligible.
More information on the different types of UK organisations can be found in our Funding rules.
UK Project team
To collaborate with the lead, your organisation must be one of the following UK registered:
- business of any size
- academic institution
- research and technology organisation (RTO)
Only UK registered partners must be listed in the Project Partner section of your application on the Innovation Funding Service (IFS). Your Indian partner will not receive any of this UK competition funding. Indian partners will be funded by the TDB programme following a parallel application.
Each organisation in your consortium will receive funding from its respective national funding body.
Indian partners must not be invited onto Innovate UK’s IFS application platform. Their involvement in the project is listed as part of your answers to the questions.
Each UK partner organisation must be invited into IFS by the lead to collaborate on a project. Once accepted, partners will be asked to login or to create an account and enter their own project costs and complete their Project Impact questions into IFS.
Non-funded partners
Your project can include partners that do not receive any of this competition’s funding. Their eligible costs will count towards the total eligible project costs.
Indian partners
Indian partners do not need to be invited into Innovate UK’s application on the Innovation Funding Service.
Indian partners will be funded by TDB following a parallel application.
Subcontractors
Subcontractors are allowed in this competition, but they are limited to no more than 20% of the total eligible costs of the UK participation.
Subcontractors can be from anywhere in the UK and you must select them through your usual procurement process.
You can use subcontractors from other countries but must make the case in your application as to why you could not use suppliers from the countries providing grant funding for the project.
You must provide a detailed rationale, evidence of the potential UK contractors you approached and the reasons why they were unable to work with you. We will not accept a cheaper cost as a sufficient reason to use a subcontractor from a third country.
All subcontractor costs must be justified and appropriate to the total project costs.
Number of applications
A UK registered business can only lead on one application but can be included as a collaborator in two further applications.
If a UK registered business is not leading an application it can collaborate in up to three applications.
A UK registered academic institution or RTO can collaborate in any number of applications.
Sanctions
This competition will not fund you, or provide any financial benefit to any individual or entities directly or indirectly involved with you, which would expose Innovate UK or any direct or indirect beneficiary of funding from Innovate UK to UK Sanctions. For example, through any procurement, commercial, business development or supply chain activity with any entity as lead, partner or subcontractor related to these countries, administrations and terrorist groups.
We recognise partner countries’ approach to countries listed under UK Sanctions may differ from our own and respect the right of our partners to choose who they partner with
Use of animals in research and innovation
Innovate UK expects and supports the provision and safeguarding of welfare standards for animals used in research and innovation, according to best practice and up to date guidance.
Applicants must ensure that all of the proposed work within projects, both that in the UK and internationally, will comply with the UKRI guidance on the use of animals in research and innovation.
Any projects selected for funding which involve animals will be asked to provide additional information on welfare and ethical considerations, as well as compliance with any relevant legislation as part of the project start-up process. This information will be reviewed before an award is made.
Previous Applications
You can use a previously submitted application to apply for this competition.
If you have previously submitted an application that reached our assessment stage, you can re-apply once more with the same proposal.
If there are minor differences to the proposal, but it is judged by us to be ‘not materially different’, the same rule applies.
We will not award you funding if you have:
- failed to exploit a previously funded project
- an overdue independent accountant’s report
- failed to comply with grant terms and conditions
