Funding available for early stage Innovation projects

The North East is already home to excellent innovation assets supporting key sectors and facilitating open-innovation across our themes; but we know there are gaps and areas where we could do more. The North East Local Enterprise Partnership (North East LEP) is therefore inviting bids from early stage innovation projects to come forward for development stage funding that will help to prepare Business Cases that can help deliver the ambition set out in our Strategic Economic Plan.

Projects that are able to demonstrate clear links to the SEP and key Government policy (such as the Industrial Strategy), and are anticipated to be over £5m in scale are encouraged to come forward. Funding available through this call is to support the costs of getting projects ready to produce a HM Treasury Compliant, Five-Point Business Case – the funds are not for projects at implementation/build stage.

We anticipate that the North East LEP will be asked to fund around 50% of the costs of the development of a project (subject to State Aid). While there is not upper or lower limit attached to this, but the eventual ‘full’ projects should be anticipated to be of a significant scale (i.e. of at least £5m capital build cost).

Prospective applicants, who can be from public, private or voluntary sector, are encouraged in the first instance to read the Project Call Information document in addition to with other supporting information which can be found on our funding page.