Being successful with Smart Grants
The Innovate UK Smart Grant is the UK government’s grant funding programme to fund game-changing and commercially viable research and development innovation to help businesses to innovate and grow. It awards £125 million to British businesses every year, in any industry, for tech or innovation-based projects. It is highly competitive for example in the October 2025 round only 4% (32/714) of applications for the £500,00 and below were successful and only 4/69 digital health and diagnostics, medical technology and devices applications were successful (1).
What helps to improve your chances of being successful? I found a useful article on Linkedin as the author had interviewed successful businesses who had secured smart grants funding. The author outlined what their key tips were, timings and motivations. It is definitely worth a read as the advice seems to match up to my experience of writing smarts grants and other Innovate UK applications.
The main tips I have are:
Do your market analysis extensively and explain how your innovation will meet a ‘gap in the market’ that solves a problem within healthcare and / or consumer demand.
Explain how the Innovate UK funding is needed to test your innovation robustly and generate vital evidence of impact and acceptability.
Have a clear and honest understanding / description of your competitors and how your innovation is different to theirs - be clear on your USP.
Write a compelling case for the need of your innovation, backed up by research and evidence.
Make sure your commercialisation strategy is realistic and if the NHS is the target market, do your research and identify how / where your solution will be funded.
Remember Innovate UK want your company to become profitable and help UK Plc. Also don’t assume that the assessors understand clinical pathways and how standard NHS patient pathways work, from my experience they don’t seem to have that knowledge.
But, and there’s always a ‘but’ please be aware that smart grants are definitely the most competitive grant programme but as its on a rolling programme it is accessible to all - just take your time and do your research.
1 - https://ukri.disclosurelog.co.uk/case/b94fc121-d919-4ee8-a6cf-af9437866858