Dates:
Canadian Partner EOI Registration: 8 January 2025
Canadian Partner EOI submission: 15 January 2025
Competition closes: 16 April 2025, 11am
Applicants notified: 13 June 2025
Project start date & duration: by 1 September 2025, 12-24 month
Scope
Your project must demonstrate (non-exhaustive)
• Life Sciences, including engineering biology, biomanufacturing, and agricultural technologies.
• Digital and emerging technologies, including, quantum, artificial intelligence, semiconductors.
• Sustainability and net zero, including critical minerals, ocean sciences and technologies, clean energy
technologies.
Eligibility
• Projects must be collaborative and all businesses in a consortium must be separate legal and nonlinked entities.
• UK partners must carry out their project work in the UK and exploit the results from or in the UK.
• UK participants must apply to Innovate UK and Canadian partners must apply to the National
Research Council of Canada Industrial Research Assistance Program (NRC IRAP). Both UK and
German applications must be successful to receive grant funding.
• The registration deadline for Canadian small or medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) is 8 January 2025.
The EoI deadline for Canadian, small or medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) is 15 January 2025.
Canadian funding applicants who do not complete an EoI and have not been invited to proceed will
not be eligible for funding through this competition.
• To lead a project from the UK side, you must be a UK registered business of any size, collaborate with
at least one Canadian registered SME and be or involve at least one UK SME.
• Subsidy Control and State Aid funding rules apply.
• UK subcontractor costs must be no more than 20% of UK organisations total eligible costs.
Subcontractors from UK and Canada can be used, selected through your usual procurement process.
Projects we will not fund
• fundamental research
• dependent on export performance, for example, giving a subsidy to a baker on the condition that it
exports a certain quantity of bread to another country
• dependent on domestic inputs usage, for example, giving a subsidy to a baker on the condition that it
uses 50% UK flour in their product
Funding Rates
- Your project’s UK partners grant funding request must not exceed £300K in total. Total funding request for all
Canadian partners combined can be up to CA$500,000 for each application.
| Project maturity (up to but not including commercialisation) | ||
| Organisation size | Industrial Research (TRL3-5) |
Experimental Development (TRL6-7) |
| Micro/small business | <70% | <45% |
| Medium sized business | <60% | <35% |
| Large business | <50% | <25% |
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 some of the most competitive national and European grants on behalf of its clients, with a full understanding of how a project should be presented to stand the highest chance of success. Each year in the UK alone, we are responsible for the submission of more than 100 funding applications across all sectors and priority areas. Based on this extensive experience, through careful project selection and using key insight into how a project should be best positioned, we consistently achieve success rates that are more than 5 times the typical success rates for UK national schemes and EU programmes.
