Innovate UK’s latest competition will see it invest up to £10m in ‘createch’ startups. The good news being that music startups are very much invited to the party.
The ‘Next Wave: Breakthrough Wave 1’ competition will offer grant funding for projects with total costs of between £100k and £500k, from micro, small and medium-sized companies in the UK.
It’s focused on early-stage projects: research around “clearly innovative and ambitious” ideas that could create new revenue streams around new products, services or IP, and which could be market-ready within 12 months of the research project being completed.
Innovate UK is the UK’s national innovation agency, part of UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), a public body sponsored (but not part of) the UK government’s Department for Science, Innovation and Technology.
Four sectors (or “frontier industries” in government parlance) are the focus for the competition: music, performing and visual arts is one of them alongside video games, advertising and marketing, and film and TV.
This is the group that the UK government more widely has adopted the term ‘createch’ for, as a way of classifying and promoting it alongside sectors like fintech, medtech, cleantech and edtech.
You can see the full details of the competition here and read more about how Innovate UK sees the ‘createch’ world here.
Emma Cooper, creative industries knowledge transfer manager at Innovate UK Business Connect – a strategic delivery partner to Innovate UK – spoke at our recent Music Ally NEXT conference to encourage music startups to apply.
“Effectively, we’ve set ourselves this challenge that we want to double the amount of high-growth creative businesses in the UK by 2035,” explained Cooper, on the bigger picture. “This investment will be concentrated where the UK has strong global positioning, and scalable business models.
“The UK is incredibly good at having ideas. We’re really brilliant at startups. What we’ve struggled with in the past is growing those startups and scaling them into really big businesses. That’s where we’re going to be concentrating,” she added.
Cooper highlighted that a variety of music startups would be relevant for the competition, from products or services supporting recorded music and live performance through to advertising and marketing tools.
“There is between £100k and £500k available to apply for, depending on the size of your organisation. You will be up to 70% funded for that, so effectively you will need to find 30% of the cost of that project,” noted Cooper.
The ‘Next Wave: Breakthrough Wave 1’ competition, as its name implies, is the first in a planned series (or ‘waves’) of activity focused on the UK’s createch sector.
Other waves will focus on ‘engines and anchors’ (digital platforms and big cultural organisations) well as on investment.
Applying for funding can be daunting to startups who haven’t done it before, but Cooper stressed the Innovate UK Business Connect team will be working hard to help companies navigate the process.
“My job, and the job of the team that I work with, is to support you to navigate all this,” she said, addressing startups who may be interested in applying. “We are on your side: we want you to get funded, and we want you to solve these super-big challenges!”
