All grant awards are funded at 100% FEC for directly incurred and directly allocated costs.
Funding for at least ten business interaction vouchers (BIV) (up to £50,000 each) will be available. These funds will support projects of up to six months in duration that strengthen collaborations between academia and industry whilst aiming to address key scientific questions relevant to INFORM. Industrial contributions, in-kind (e.g. access to facilities or materials), will be encouraged.
Feasibility Awards Collaborative Research and Innovation
The Hub will provide funding for a minimum of five feasibility projects. These will be up to £100,000. Industrial collaborators must make matched cash or in-kind contributions for these awards. These projects will be more advanced than BIV ones and will be used to enable translation and commercialisation activities leading to innovation. This could include developing and validating target populations of novel functional foods.
Flexible Mobility Awards (FMA)
A minimum of five FMA awards are available to support mobility between academia and industry within the remit of INFORM. Awards will support early career researchers, technicians, and industry workers who wish to expand their skill base. New skills should be deemed relevant to developing profiles, aiding research growth within the field, broadening collaborations and industrial/academic relationships and gathering evidence from research on how functional foods could support health in practice.
We are offering two types of Flexible mobility awards:
- Flexible mobility award – placements
These awards are for up to £40,000 in value for supporting Early Career Researchers (ECR) or technical staff from academia wishing to explore work in a company or a private organisation, or staff from industry (including technicians, specialists, engineers, researchers, etc.) wanting to further their career progression through work experience in a public research organisation. Placement opportunities for up to six months, leading to the awardee’s upskilling will be considered. Applications for shorter placements are welcomed so multiple awards can be made.
- Flexible mobility award – Impact reports
These awards are for up to £25,000 in value for supporting academia and industry to work together to write impact documents. The duration of the award is up to six months.
To drive policy changes, it is important to present information about the impact of functional foods to those in a position to make changes. The FMA-Impact awards, offered by INFORM, will support a working group in creating an impact document. Ideally, this document will include a cost analysis that estimates how much can be saved by the NHS or in lost workdays by different sections of the population by consuming these functional foods.
The group should be led by an ECR, responsible for organising meetings, setting goals and facilitating document completion. The teams working on these documents are expected to include Industry members, economists and Academics, emphasising the inclusion of ECRs on these teams.
For grant eligibility, the definition of an ECR is someone who is either:
- within eight years of their PhD award (this is from the time of the PhD ‘viva’ oral test) or equivalent professional training
- within six years of their first academic appointment (the first full or part-time paid employment contract that lists research or teaching as the primary function).
You must be a Hub member to apply for these funding opportunities. All applications will go through a peer-review process by four independent reviewers who are experts in the project’s field. The application assessment criteria will include scientific excellence, timeliness, importance to the theme, and industrial relevance.
Are you looking for a collaborative partner?
Are you interested in exploring a research topic further? Contact Lorraine Bailey, INFORM Hub’s Knowledge Exchange Fellow, who can assist with your search for a collaborative partner from across the hub’s members and associations.
Email Lorraine at lorraine.bailey@reading.ac.uk