The RISE Impact competition seeks to encourage and accelerate the translation and pull through of research from Secure Hardware & Embedded Systems Security into practical tools and technologies that can be applied to solve real world challenges. The competition seeks to foster a culture of innovation and entrepreneurship within the RISE community.
One of the key challenges in commercialising University research through either licensing or the creation of a spin-out, is access to the early-stage funding necessary to take a novel idea to an early stage of proof – thereby validating the commercial potential in order to attract additional investment. To help address this challenge RISE has developed the Impact Competition Fund (ICF) to support projects and individuals to identify potential to deliver economic impact via a licence, open sourcing or creation of a spin-out.
Awards of up to £40,000 will be granted for projects of up to 6 months in duration with the intention of moving research concepts to the next stage of proof, for example, to develop an early prototype, more in-depth market understanding or the generation of additional data to support validation of the idea.
The focus of ICF is to provide short-term investment to develop early-stage ideas and outputs from research projects relevant to RISE, where there are some preliminary findings, but no clear route to the marketplace.
The competition has been designed to help you prepare your knowledge and technology for commercialisation. The programme is not intended to support the extension of research projects. Applications that simply seek to extend research projects or target outputs of only research papers or future research grant applications are unlikely to be successful. It is designed to help academics demonstrate the potential for economic impact (via either licensing, open sourcing or creation of a spin-out) of a new concept, technology or invention and to highlight the need for, and type of, additional development support that would be required to take the technology further up Technology Readiness Levels (TRL) and closer to the market place.
Note: All IP ownership will remain with the University within which the research was conducted. There will be no dilution of any IP ownership in availing of this funding.
Application forms can be downloaded from here.
Applications close 4pm Wednesday 21st May 2025