Guidance

Competition guidance for UK and South Korea: joint research and development

Updated 3 April 2019

1. Dates and deadlines

Competition opens	18 March 2019
UK online briefing event	8 April 2019
Final date for registration	Midday 5 June 2019
Submission of the full application, (including finance forms, appendices and Je-S forms)	Midday 12 June 2019
Decision to applicants	9 August 2019

Please read the full competition scope before you make your application.

2. Funding

There is up to £1 million of funding available from Innovate UK and up to 1500 million Won from the Korean Institute for Advancement of Technology (KIAT). This is for research and development projects that tackle the technical challenges described in the brief for this competition.

3. Competition process

Innovate UK will use a portfolio approach in partnership with KIAT. This is to make sure that the strategic criteria described in the competition brief are met for all projects considered to be above the quality threshold. This will be based on independent expert assessments.

The process will follow these steps:

• applications submitted through the Innovate UK FTP site will be reviewed to make sure that they are both eligible and in scope for the competition
• Innovate UK will work with KIAT to ensure South Korea partners meet the same requirements
• only projects which meet both UK and South Korea eligibility and scope checks will be put forward for assessment
• UK applications that are in scope will be assessed by up to 5 external UK assessors who are experts in the innovation area identified in your application
• KIAT will run a parallel process for assessment of the South Korea applications
• UK assessors will score all UK applications consistently and in line with scoring matrices, providing written feedback for each marked question
• UK applications will be ranked in descending order
• Innovate UK will work alongside KIAT to build a portfolio of projects that:
  • are high quality
  • demonstrate sufficient innovation, potential return on investment and degree of technical risk
  • demonstrate value for money, include the potential impact of the project relative to its cost, and the cost of other projects under consideration
• the lead applicant in each country will be notified of the funding decision
• all eligible and in scope applications from UK partners will receive assessor feedback

4. How to apply

Before you apply into this competition, it is important to understand the whole application process.

You must nominate one lead applicant from the UK and one from South Korea. One of the lead applicants must download and complete the EUREKA Network application form on behalf of the whole consortium. Each lead applicant needs to submit the completed application to their own country’s submission system.

4.1 UK applicants

You will receive an email from Innovate UK acknowledging your registration to our competition website. Up to 2 working days later you will get a second email from Innovate UK containing:

• a username and password for our secure upload facility
• a unique application number
• the Innovate UK cover sheet

Once you have received your unique username and password, you can sign in to the secure website where you will be able to access the document templates listed below.

You must work together as a consortium to submit the following mandatory shared documents to our secure FTP site:

• your Innovate UK cover sheet with your unique application number for this competition
• your EUREKA application form
• project finance forms for every UK partner in your project that will receive funding
• draft consortium agreement
• risk register in PDF format, maximum 2 A4 pages
• exploitation plan in PDF format, maximum 2 A4 pages
• project plan and Gantt chart in PDF format, maximum 2 A4 pages
• joint UK-South Korea project financial plan
• a Je-S form for each UK academic institution

Your risk register, exploitation plan, project plan and Gantt chart must include details of any dependencies and partnerships with South Korea companies.

There are templates for the consortium agreement, risk register, exploitation plan, project plan and joint financial plan available to download from the secure FTP site.

Innovate UK cover sheet

This sheet requests basic information about your project. The lead organisation must be the same as the lead organisation stated on the EUREKA application form.

Innovate UK finance form

Each UK organisation in your project must complete a project finance form. The lead applicant must submit these to Innovate UK in Excel format with the application form. Each finance form provides a detailed breakdown of each organisation’s total eligible project costs.

We will only accept finance forms named ‘Project Finance Form.xls’. Previous versions of the project finance form are ineligible.

UK academic institutions must submit a Je-S form showing a ‘with council’ status, rather than a project finance form.

Consortium agreement

By the application submission deadline, you must submit a draft collaboration agreement that regulates the terms of co-operation between all partners. The minimum requirements for the collaboration agreement are:

• names of all project partners
• description of the project aims and the different subprojects by each partner, including brief work plans, with effort estimated in person and months
• names of any third party contractors required in the project
• regulation of intellectual property rights (background and arising)
• basic regulation of joint commercialisation and apportioning of benefits
• if research organisations from either country are involved, you must all agree to the publishing rights of each party

Service fees and other charges between parties receiving financial support from national funding bodies under this call are ineligible costs and will not be reimbursed.

4.2 South Korea applicants

South Korea lead applicants can find guidance on how to submit to the KIAT K-Pass site.

5. Assessment process

Scope check

Only applications that meet the eligibility criteria and scope of the competition will be sent for assessment. UK and South Korea leads will be notified if your application is out of scope with a full explanation as to why. Innovate UK and KIAT reserve the right to declare applications as out of scope.

Assessment

Once the scope and eligibility checks have been completed, all applications that are both eligible and in scope are sent for assessment in the UK and South Korea.

Notification

We will notify the lead UK organisations of the outcome of the application by the date stated in the timeline, using the email address provided in the application form.

Feedback

Approximately 4 weeks after you have received your notification email, Innovate UK will give feedback to all UK applications that are assessed. The UK lead applicant can access and download the feedback by signing in to your secure FTP site. It is the responsibility of the UK lead to communicate any feedback to the rest of the consortium. No additional feedback is provided and there will be no further discussion on the application.