Funded by the Department for Business Innovation and Skills, the Technology Strategy Board (TSB) is planning to fund at least 80 projects on Digital Britain, with a total budget of £2 million. The TSB will fund 75% of feasibility studies proposed by SMEs, small or micro businesses, costing up to £33,000 of innovation in business models, applications, services and technologies.
But if you want to get your hands on this money, you’ll have to move fast – the closing date for proposals is noon on October 1st – and not a minute later.
Creditably, you only need a one page proposal, but you will need to make sure that is well written, concise and compelling, and that the market opportunity is clearly set out. Most importantly, you need to show how the proposal aligns with the scope of the programme:
· Economics of the network
· Economics of content and services
· Access, protection and enablement
One of the four priority areas which the TSB is particularly interested in is “Cost-effective deployment and operation of digital infrastructure”. This is looking for feasibility studies which offer ways of overcoming the cost barriers to next-generation infrastructure development, eg:
· Community initiatives to increase broadband access in a way that reduces costs of deployment
· Ways to reduce the amount of energy used to run telecoms networks
· Ways to reduce running costs of networks
The other priority areas are:
i. Enabling technologies for the internet: core functional technologies that help with areas such as meta-data management of content, revenue distribution and payment processing, quality of service control, personalisation and privacy, or management of data within the home
ii. Access to public service information: eg how to increase accessibility to and public engagement with online public services
iii. Applications and services - ”other”: eg new models for distributing and managing digital content, such as those based on metadata; trusted services models; personalised services and interfaces.
NetStrategics attended the BIS briefing session yesterday, and can help you pull together your proposals. Contact me at huw.williams@netstrategics.co.uk
