A year ago, exited entrepreneur Tom Adeyoola took the reins of Innovate UK, the national innovation agency.
“Coming into it, it felt like it was a big complicated organisation,” Adeyoola tells Sifted — and he wasn’t the only one.
Innovate UK is best-known for handing out grants to innovative businesses but, like many public organisations, its inner workings are harder to decipher from the outside.
Adeyoola wants to change that — and make it super clear what the organisation can do to support great British businesses.
“We want to enable breakthrough ideas to become industry giants, and shift from just funding projects to supporting companies,” he says.
“And we want to make it simpler and easier for companies to work with us.”
Innovate UK grants
Innovate UK has £4.4bn to spend until 2030 — so there's no shortage of firepower.
Since launch in 2007, Innovate UK has supported over 24k businesses via grants, programmes and 'catapults' — research and development centres based all around the UK. It can make grants of anywhere between £50k to £250m (and last year handed out 2,901 of them) — but it wants to do more than just that.
Adeyoola’s big focus is on not just identifying promising technologies and helping commercialise research — but on ensuring the companies spun out of that are as well set up as they can be from a follow-on funding, regulation and policy standpoint to have real economic impact.
To achieve that, Innovate UK is shifting to an “account manager type structure” — so the onus is on its team to make it clear to companies how it can help them, rather than hope they figure it out themselves.
“We need to be proactive in understanding high potential businesses coming through and signposting the type of support we can offer them.”
“Founders are intensely busy,” adds Adeyoola — and they don’t need any extra distractions. “Everything we do needs to be a propellant.”
Grant applications will get a makeover in the near future, Adeyoola says. “Within 12 months, because of ChatGPT, you won’t be able to tell the difference between a good and a bad application, so we have to change that process.”
“The shift going forwards will be understanding the people presenting the ideas’ ability to execute and hit key milestones,” he adds. “It will no longer be highly optimised on the written process.”
Advocating for innovation
But Innovate UK does more than grants, Adeyoola is keen to stress.
“One undervalued part of Innovate UK is providing access to policymakers, regulators and further funders,” he says. Those further funders can — and often do — include public funds like the British Business Bank and NSSIF, the National Security Strategic Investment Fund.
Beyond that hands-on support for companies in its network, Adeyoola wants Innovate UK to “prepare the ground” for frontier technologies of the future, ensuring there is enough growth funding down the track, and that regulators and policymakers have these technologies in their sights and understand their potential.
Emerging technologies Innovate UK is focused on today include engineering biology, cyber, AI and quantum. “We need to do the right thing to make sure they anchor here in the UK,” says Adeyoola.
Innovation Britain
This shift in focus for Innovate UK comes alongside a raft of other measures from the UK government, aimed at making Britain the best place in the world to start and scale technology businesses.
Just this week, UK finance minister Rachel Reeves unveiled a £2bn package of support for quantum computing companies. It follows the launch of a £500m venture fund, the Sovereign AI Unit, focused on backing UK-based companies working on priority areas like biotech, cyber, fintech and quantum.
Since the start of the year, there have also been announcements and allocations of funding to bolster the British space sector, to invest in national supercomputers and boost robotics innovations.
For Adeyoola, the chance to drive economic growth was a key draw to the role at Innovate UK. “It felt like there was an opportunity to make change that could have an economic and growth impact on the UK,” he says. “I felt that I couldn’t not take on this role.”
