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Life Sciences Warwick Crop Centre

Funding

BBSRC schemes

Food security is a BBSRC priority and they aim to encourage research that will enable industry, consumers and governments to manage the challenges facing the food system. The BBSRC is increasingly interested in funding research that has a more direct impact on industry.

BBSRC initiatives for industry include

  • Industrial Partnership Awards - the BBSRC provides up to 90% of the funding for such projects, with the remainder coming from industry partners.
  • CASE studentships which allow bioscience graduates to undertake PhD research within a collaboration between academic and partner organisations.
  • LINK projects for collaborative research between at least one company and one science-base partner, where at least 50% of the project cost comes from industry, much of which can be ‘in-kind’.

Innovate UK

Innovate UK was set up by government to stimulate business innovation. It invests around £400m per year. Its primary customer is business and the objective is to help UK businesses make a step-change. The first tranche of funding for agriculture was through the Sustainable Agriculture and Food Innovation Platform (SAF-IP). Calls have been themed and projects have been industry-led with industry or academic partners. A new SAF-IP programme is being developed.

Innovate UK also manage the Agritech Catalyst scheme as part of the Agritech Strategy, within which there are three funding streams:

  • ‘Early Stage’ is for pre-industrial research feasibility studies.
  • ‘Industrial Research’ is for evaluating technical feasibility, proof-of-concept and routes to exploitation.
  • ‘Late stage’ is for feasibility studies.

Four Centres for Agricultural Innovation have been established. Warwick is a partner in the Centre for Crop Health and Protection (CHAP), which offers opportunities for collaboration on the grand challenges facing the industry. To learn more about how to work with us in CHAP, please contact
Rosemary Collier at Rosemary dot Collier at warwick dot ac dot uk

Innovate UK also sponsors Knowledge Transfer Partnerships (KTPs) which support UK businesses in accessing the knowledge and expertise available within UK Universities and Colleges.