Dates:
Competition closes: 15th January 2025, 11am
Invite to interview: 18th February 2025
Interview panel start and end: 10th-21st March 2025
Applicants notified: 28th March 2025
Project start date: 1st July 2025
Scope – Your project must focus on the following:
- The application of extended reality: A digital therapeutic for mental health through the application of Extended Reality (XR) which includes creative technologies, virtual reality, networked or augmented reality, mixed reality, haptics, holograms, immersive software and immersive audio.
- Solutions for moderate and severe mental health conditions: Solutions for those living with moderate (where the condition makes daily life difficult) and severe (where conditions make daily life extremely difficult) mental health illness. Specifically, XR therapeutic solutions that positively improve the impairment, disability and distress experienced by those living with mental health difficulties at any point in their life course. Solutions are strongly encouraged, in particular, where the mental health difficulties have an impact on education, employment and daily life.
- Solutions that can be applied at all clinical levels: Solutions for use at any point in the care pathway, at all clinical levels, which have the ambition to seek regulatory approval, adoption and scale, as and where appropriate.
Projects that will not be funded
- early stage, feasibility research
- unsuitable for potential trial following an R&D cycle of between 12 to 18 months
- not using immersive or XR technologies
- not focused on developing digital therapeutics for mental health conditions
- targeted at primarily mild conditions in the generalised wellbeing space
Eligibility
- Project must be led by a UK registered business of any size and can be single-applicant or collaborative in nature.
- A business can only lead on one application in this competition but can be included as a collaborator in two further applications.
- R&D work must be carried out in the UK and project results exploited from UK.
- Subcontractors, preferably UK based, with costs justified and appropriate to the total project costs.
Funding rates
- Total eligible project costs between £200,000 and £300,000 (£3.7M pot).
| Project maturity (up to but not including commercialisation) | |
| Organisation size | Industrial Research |
| Micro/small business | <70% |
| Medium sized business | <60% |
| Large business | <50% |
Research organisations in your consortium can share up to 30% of the UK total eligible project costs.
How PNO can support you
The UK team has a strong track record in securing funding through the Smart programme, with a full understanding of how a project should be presented to stand the highest chance of success in this highly competitive scheme. Each year in the UK alone, we are responsible for the submission of more than 100 funding applications to Innovate UK managed programmes (with around 40 applications specifically to the Smart programme). Based on this extensive experience and through careful project selection we consistently achieve success rates that are more than 5 times the typical success rates for the programme.
For further information or to discuss a project idea please contact PNO Consultants
0161 488 3488 | info.uk@pnoconsultants.com
