Product Description
Accelerated Knowledge Transfer – Knowledge Transfer Partnerships (ktp-uk.org)
Innovate UK – Accelerated Knowledge Transfer (AKT) is jointly delivered by Innovate UK and Innovate UK KTN.
The programme has been designed to create short-term collaborations between a Business Partner and a UK Knowledge Base* to rapidly inject innovation capacity. Inspired by the highly successful partnership model of KTP (Knowledge Transfer Partnership), Innovate UK – Accelerated Knowledge Transfer’s concept is to deliver a rapid and targeted intervention to accelerate the evaluation or development of an innovation project or concept, which has the potential for significant impact for the Business Partner.
In a 2022/23 pilot competition, a total of 129 projects were funded. The range of projects was diverse – from bilingual communications tools to on-farm carbon capture – representing all kinds of businesses and third-sector organisations from right across the UK. You can find out more about the AKT2i Pilot scheme and its impact, here.
*UK Higher Education (HE), Further Education (FE) institution, Research Organisation (RTO) or Catapult.
Context
Business growth, resilience and sustainability relies on improving productivity and creating faster pathways to innovation. This often requires an input of new knowledge, skills and fresh thinking.
Innovate UK – Accelerated Knowledge Transfer is designed to build an intensive partnership with a specialist academic team to deliver a short, and targeted intervention (two to four months) to accelerate the evaluation or development of an innovation project or concept, which has the potential for significant impact for the Business Partner.
Accelerating Innovation
The value of business-academic collaboration is successfully evidenced by Innovate UK’s Knowledge Transfer Partnership (KTP) programme, which has been delivering positive impacts for businesses for nearly 50 years. As a deep dive approach, KTP is ideal for businesses with a clear, strategic challenge. But for many, particularly SMEs, the real challenge can be identifying the barriers – and solutions – to open innovation, greater productivity, and agency.
For these businesses, a shorter term, more rapid intervention can be the ideal solution. Innovate UK – Accelerated Knowledge Transfer, based on the successful partnership model of KTP, creates a more intensive collaboration that rapidly transfers new knowledge and creates a framework to help business teams:
- Identify innovation blockers
- Evaluate an innovation concept
- Find solutions to immediate as well as longer term challenges
- Accelerate new thinking and processes
- Develop new business models and expand capacity.
Competition Details
If you think an Innovate UK – Accelerated Knowledge Transfer (AKT) could help your organisation identify innovation opportunities or challenges, the scheme is now open for applications. This round will close on Wednesday 13th December at 11.00 a.m.
Applicants can register and apply by visiting: https://grantplatform.ktp-uk.org.
Support
If you have any technical questions about accessing the application platform, please contact us by email.
Please do not send questions relating to the competition without first reviewing the Competition Webinar and reading the Competition Guidance, FAQ and Costing Guidance.
Please note: some web browsers do not work best with this platform; we recommend for your application that you use Google Chrome. When progressing through the form, we recommend that you use the ‘save + next’ or ‘save + close’ to navigate to the next tab to prevent loss of content.
A total of £4.5m is available to support this round. Watch the competition briefing webinar below.