A £2 million fund has been created by the Department for Business, Innovation & Skills for the Innovation Vouchers scheme, running over the next three years.
The vouchers provide £5000 for a UK start-up, micro, small or medium-sized businesses to work with external experts and gain new knowledge to help their business.
The extra £1.1 million announced today is for companies who want to use public open data to commercialise their ideas and develop products and prototypes.
An open data business innovator or inventors could use an Innovation Voucher by:
- Growing services and solutions using open data
- Developing an idea into a working prototypeIntegrating open data with other data sources to develop products and prototypes
- Seeking Intellectual Property advice in respect of ideas incorporating open data
The scheme is already open to businesses who want to develop ideas relating to the Agri-food, Built Environment, Space industries, Energy, Water and Waste sectors, with a hundred vouchers allocated every three months.
The latest figures from round one show that over 200 projects were successful in the draw for Innovation Vouchers for Agri-Food, Built Environment and Space.
Making the announcement, Universities and Science Minister David Willetts said: “This new wave of Innovation Vouchers will give SMEs a great opportunity to bid for funding that can make a real difference to the growth of their business ideas.
“They will be able to develop exciting proposals that can make use of open data, which have the potential to unlock great value and boost economic growth.”
