Since 2007, Innovate UK has invested around £2.5bn to help businesses across the country to innovate, with match funding from industry taking the total value of projects above £4.3bn.
Innovate UK has helped 8,500 organisations create around 70,000 jobs and added an estimated £18bn of value to the UK economy. In the period 2019/2020, Innovate UK received 5,794 applications for grant funding and made 949 awards. £645,886 was awarded in terms of grant funding, 24% of the total amount applied for.
Afternoonify Limited Industry Sector: Marketing software
Afternoonify Limited, a St Albans based digital media benchmarking company, has applied to Innovate UK for grant funding for a collaborative R&D project that concerns adapting and extending existing Digital Media Quality Management technology and techniques.
Afternoonify state that PerceptSME will help SMEs and the local economies and communities in which they exist, by enabling them to cost-effectively deploy sophisticated online advertising techniques to better compete with larger online retail and service providers in the face of the hugely adverse economic impact of COVID-19, which threatens business continuation for many Micro/SMEs, their employees, and the self-employed sector.
Afternoonify state that the project will deliver specific innovations relating to the recommendation of bundles or ‘playbooks’ of actions to deliver outcomes, along with the ability to understand how better outcomes can be achieved by altering and moving ad spend across different ad platforms such as Google and Facebook. The application for grant funding was successful and the project has received £162,798 by way of funding.
Seven Brands Global Limited Industry Sector: Marketing software
Seven Brands Global Limited, an international branding agency, has applied to Innovate UK for grant funding to enable the exploration of the development of an algorithm that mimics the human creative processes used by ad agencies, to create an app that SMEs can use to automatically produce tailored and effective digital advertisements to help them survive, prosper and adapt, to an advertising landscape suddenly reshaped by Covid-19.
Seven state that Covid-19 had made many traditional forms of advertising such as billboards and posters less effective and companies have been forced to move advertising online. In addition, Covid-19 has led to a massive change in consumer behaviour with many previous non digital shoppers moving to online shopping. Seven states that SMEs must learn to take their advertising online if they are to survive beyond the pandemic.
Seven state that once they have written the algorithm, they will build a web app that will put an ad agency in the pocket of every SME in the UK, allowing them to create advertising using nothing more than a mobile phone in a way that is affordable, accessible, effective at driving demand, measurable and transformative.
The application for grant funding was successful and Seven has received £130,505 by way of funding.
Walktrue Limited Industry Sector: CGI, Animation & Virtual reality
Walktrue Limited, experts in CGI, animation and virtual reality, applied to Innovate UK for grant funding to carry out feasibility studies into True Events- a 3D virtual events platform. The package has four elements: 1. Website/Application 2. Virtual Reality 3D modelling 3. Webinar hosting 4.
Content creation and on-site support Walktrue received funding of £73,734 to enable feasibility studies to be carried out.
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