R&D grant funding involves a competitive and often time-consuming application process. To ensure a successful approach you need to have a defined project before commencing the bid writing process. By doing this, you’ll ensure the right grant fit for your project whilst keeping a consistent narrative and alignment to your wider company strategy, catching the attention of the assessors and improving the quality of the proposition.
In this blog, our grant writing team has put together 5 key focus areas to help you develop a grant fundable project, think of it as a pre-bid sanity check!
For your project to be considered an investable, credible business opportunity worthy of funding, your outcomes and objectives need to be well defined. The first thing an assessor will be looking to establish is whether there is a clear and researched business opportunity, and a consistent link between the problem you are looking to solve and the solution you are proposing to address.
Be sure to also include up-to-date market research to outline your strategy for market entry: What does the current market look like? Is it growing? How fast? What trends affect it? What is the competition? What are the barriers to entry?
Next, consider how you will generate commercial returns from your project. Include realistic outputs and how you’ll execute them, including your sales/service model and growth plans. If you cannot explain how your project will be commercialised you could be marked down.
Agile or Waterfall
Your project objectives and management approach should determine how the project will be executed. Typically, two types of project management methodology are used, Agile and/or Waterfall. Agile is an incremental, iterative approach that separates a project into sprints. Waterfall is a linear and sequential approach that divides a project into phases.
Both are acceptable, however, projects typically need to present a GANTT chart or a similar visualisation. You must be confident that you can present your desired approach, linked to overall project objectives, in the format the funder requires.
Top tips for developing outcomes and objectives:
A common misconception when it comes to the project team and resourcing is that all company staff need to be working on the project 100% of the time. You should instead align the skills and abilities of your team members with each area of your project to deliver the proposed outcomes. Assessors want to see that you are able to achieve the goals you’ve set out in an efficient manner.
Collaborating with partners can also add value to your project and instil further confidence in the success of your objectives. You can benefit from a wide range of skills, experiences, and practical tools that further enhance your project outcomes. Partners can provide a new or different perspective to your product, process, or solution and potentially offer more time to consider the problem and published literature.
The key to finding the right partner for your project is:
Project costs and finances will be under scrutiny from assessors. They will seek evidence that your project can provide suitable value for money.
Your costs need to align with the size and complexity of your project. You can be marked down for costs considered too low as well as too high.
Different funds have different requirements and thresholds for funding amounts available and the proportion of costs that can be claimed. For example, Innovate UK typically defines its funding levels based on both project maturity (Feasibility Study, Industrial Research or Experimental Development) and organisation size (micro/small, medium and large).
As it is the defined project that is funded you need to work out the specific project costs required, rather than, for example, all costs that the organisation is incurring. A good example is staff salaries (through PAYE). A technical lead on the project may be costing the company £60k p/a but only spend half their time on the specific grant project. Their cost to the project would be £30k. However, a technician or developer may be involved in the project for 80% of their time, as it is the main project they are engaging with.
You must be careful that the anticipated costs are as realistic as possible as they will define your project. If successful you will have to provide a spend profile that takes the overarching costs and defines them by quarter and month.
Top tips for costs:
Make sure you clearly define how project outputs will be protected, ensuring that IP will not be lost, and therefore potential commercial returns greatly reduced or even eliminated entirely.
Top tips for IP:
Once you’ve been notified of your project’s success, made it through the due diligence stage, and begun project activities, you will need to remain compliant with the funders reporting requirements.
During the project, there are set reporting intervals with required documentation and milestones such as:
Accurate reporting is critical to the cash flow of a grant-funded project. Seeking the advice of a professional grant project manager will free up your time, and allow you to focus on delivering the project outcomes stated in your successful application.
Top tips for Project Management:
Granted Consultancy has operated in the non-dilutive funding space for over 10 years. Over this time period, we have seen R&D grant funding scoring thresholds continue to increase and the quality of projects dramatically advance. To step up to the competition you need to have a robust project plan of your own creation. You can use our blog to guide you!
As grant writing professionals this is something we can advise on. We can take your project plan and make it a grant fundable application and manage the reporting of your successfully grant-funded project. However, we do not have to deliver the project defined in your application, so the initial plan needs to come from you.
If you have any questions regarding project plans, securing grant funding, or managing your grant-funded project, we are here to support you so get in touch.
