The Funding Maze

Working in an environment where mechanisms for public funding are virtually a daily topic of conversation, it is all too easy to slip into jargon almost incomprehensible to the outsider. Quite rightly the government has launched a Business Support Simplification Programme to try to address this issue.

Talking to attendees at a recent academic / business forum, I realised that this type of obscurity extended to cover academic funding as well. For example, businesses are often asked to contribute to Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council EPSRC funded projects. This is fair enough, since the reason for including industrial support is to direct such research down a path that is likely to have industrial benefit. It also presumes that there is a good understanding amongst the industrial partners of how this type of academic co-funding works and what constitutes a reasonable expectation of project deliverables, and ownership of intellectual property. Clearly this is not always the case.

I have had the good fortune to meet some companies that are expert in accessing and applying public funding to the benefit of their companies technical capability. Talking to these companies, it seems to me that there are a few guidelines to help companies to understand what type of funding and projects are right for them:

• Research projects between a Company and a University help generate technical capability and allow tight control over ownership of intellectual property. These include Industrial CASE studentships and other EPSRC funded research projects.
• Projects involving multiple companies and maybe one or more universities are best suited for developing markets and applications where the background intellectual property is already owned by the partners. This includes Technology Strategy Board funding and European funding.
• There also exists a range of national and regional funding often called "interventions" or "products" that serve to help companies bring a product to market. One well known example used to be called the "SMART" award but is now called Grant for Research and Development (GRD). A name that describes it purpose rather well.
  

This is a great simplification of a complex topic governed by many national and EU regulations, but it is at least a digestible starting point.