If you are successful and have received an email with a grant offer, you will be asked to complete the project set up process on the Innovation Funding Service (IFS).
We will ask for information to undertake mandatory checks on your organisation and the eligibility of your costs, as well as review the documentation for your project.
Watch our video YouTube on the steps to take before a project starts.
You will be assigned a Competition Delivery Executive who will help guide you through the whole project set up process.
Timescales for submitting information
After your email notification you will need to add information to the IFS portal within the following timescales (these include weekends and holidays).
Within five days
If you have project partners, they will need to complete their sections of the portal individually.
The information we need within five days is:
- the name and contact details of the project manager, this must be a person from the lead organisation
- a project finance contact
- the project location
- the lead organisation’s correspondence address
- your organisation’s business bank account details
The project manager role can be assigned by the lead applicant to anyone in their organisation that was part of the original application, or a new person can be invited. The finance contact for each organisation can be selected from their application team or a new person can be invited for each organisation. The project manager and finance contact for the lead organisation can be the same person.
Within 30 days
Your assigned project manager will need to upload additional documents within 30 days:
- an exploitation plan
- a collaboration agreement if collaborative
Within 90 days
You will have a maximum of 90 days to complete all your project set up. Your notification will contain instruction if this time frame is different. Within this time, you will also be required to submit:
- answers to any financial queries we have requested
- any requested documentation to support your project
Each organisation is responsible for completing their assigned section of the set up portal. The project manager and finance contacts must regularly monitor the portal and answer any queries that have been raised.
Your funding offer may be withdrawn if project setup is not completed within the 90 days or an alternative timeframe as advised by Innovate UK.
Monitoring service provider
As part of your project set up, Innovate UK will assign a monitoring service provider (MSP) who will engage with you throughout the funded duration of your project.
They will help you make sure your project complies with our terms and conditions and will report to Innovate UK on its progress. They are not responsible for project management.
Your assigned MSP will be in contact with you to set up an initial meeting when your project has been given permission to start. During the meeting they will discuss how they can support you in undertaking your project within the terms of your Innovate UK funding. The MSP will arrange regular meetings throughout the duration of the project to monitor progress and send reports to Innovate UK.
Watch our video on how successful projects are monitored on YouTube.
Bank details
To process your grant claims, you must make sure your organisation has a valid UK business bank account. You can use the sort code checker to check your bank will meet our funding criteria. If you input the sort code and find a tick next to the ‘BACS Direct Credit payments can be sent to this sort code’, this will give you an indication that the bank account you hold is acceptable.
To confirm your bank account details, we may ask the finance contact for your organisation to upload a copy of a redacted bank statement.
The statement will need to:
- be less than three months old
- show the account name that exactly matches the organisation name used in your application
- show the sort code and account number
- show the organisation’s address
- be redacted, with transactions and balances crossed out
Finance checks
We will carry out checks to make sure you are an established organisation with access to the funds necessary to complete the project. Our financial accountants will also scrutinise your project costs to ensure they are eligible and project specific. This forms part of our responsibilities in managing public money.
Your finance contact must check the IFS portal regularly and respond to any requests we have sent for additional information to avoid any delays.
As part of our due diligence, we may ask for copies of:
- recent filed accounts
- management accounts
- bank statements showing balances
- evidence of access to funding, for example the support of investors
Exploitation plan
Your project will be required to produce and upload an exploitation plan for the potential project outcomes.
The aim of the exploitation plan is to confirm the projects business case and describe activities towards exploitation of the results of the project.
The document is designed as a live project resource to allow Innovate UK and your monitoring service provider to review:
- changes in the commercial environment are monitored and accounted for
- to ensure adequate project resources are being committed to exploitation
- continued progress is made towards exploitation of the project outcome
Your projects outputs and achievements should be quantified and supported by specifics where appropriate.
Your exploitation plan must not include highly sensitive commercial information that would not normally be transmitted by email outside of your organisation.
The exploitation plan should be kept as a separate document from other project resources and created using Innovate UK’s latest exploitation plan template.
Your assigned MSP will review the uploaded plan during project set up and when acceptable, authorise the version on your IFS project set up portal. The exploitation plan will then be reviewed on an ongoing basis at each project progress review meeting.
Collaboration agreement
If your project is collaborative, your project manager will be asked to upload a signed collaboration agreement. The collaboration agreement sets out the terms between, and responsibilities of, each organisation in the project. This can include the ownership and use of any IP, and exploitation of or access to outcomes from the project.
The agreement will need to be signed by all collaborative partners in the project.
Example agreements can be found in the Lambert toolkit.
Spend Profile
Once your project finances have been approved on the IFS portal, we will open the Spend profile section. If the project is collaborative a profile will be generated for each organisation.
The initial spend profile will appear ‘flat lined’, with your organisations total project costs divided by the number of months in the duration of your project. The Finance Contact for your organisation will need to amend the figures to give an initial indication of when in a project’s duration, spending is due to be incurred. The totals will need to match the total spend for each category of costs in your original application.
It is the responsibility of the project manager to upload all completed spend profiles onto the IFS portal and submit them for review by the projects assigned MSP.
During the duration of the project, your organisations finance contact will be required to reforecast the spend profile for the remaining project duration after each grant claim.
Your grant offer letter
Once you have successfully completed project setup, we will issue your grant offer letter (GOL). The GOL is the formal agreement between Innovate UK and all organisations eligible for grant that are involved in a project.
Your GOL will reflect the terms and conditions (T&Cs) for your grant as signed up to when creating and submitting your original application. In addition to the initial T&Cs your GOL will include your application number, project title and project duration. It will also show the total project costs of each organisation, the amount of grant awarded and the subsidy status the award is being made under.
It is your responsibility to check the GOL and the details for your organisation.
The GOL will be made available for you to download from your IFS portal. You and any grant claiming partners will need to sign the GOL and add your agreed project start and end dates.
All projects must have a first of the month start date and an end of the month end date.
The signatory for each organisation must be an authorised person that has the authority to sign contracts, for example a director.
The project manager is responsible for uploading the signed GOL to IFS for us to approve.
If your GOL is approved on or before the fifteenth of the month, your project start date can be dated from the first of that month. If your GOL is approved after the fifteenth, your project start date will be the first of the next month. Any delays in returning a signed GOL may result in you having to shorten the duration of your project.
Starting your project
Once the uploaded GOL has been approved by Innovate UK, we will send you a ’go live’ email with permission to start your project on your confirmed start date.
You must not start your project before receiving your ‘go live’ email. Any costs incurred before your agreed start date cannot be claimed as part of your grant.