Ten steps to a winning medtech grant funding application
Alistair Williamson, managing director at Lucid Group highlights the essential steps to writing a winning grant application.
Funding from government and charitable competitions can deliver a significant boost to early-stage and risky innovation. In healthcare and wellness markets, many commercial funders view success as a useful pre-validation of the prospects for your innovation.
Most awards are non-repayable and don’t involve sharing equity, but they are certainly not free money. Good applications require considerable skill and know-how and can take several weeks of unpaid work to prepare. With success rates in many awards lower than 1 in 20, that’s a risky and significant opportunity cost to any business.
If you are planning to apply for funding, start by being brutally honest with yourself. If you can summarise compelling reasons to buy into your proposal in a few bullet points, it may be worth applying. If not, stop and reconsider.
My experience suggests 10 factors are pivotal in successful funding applications:
1. Fit
Funding bodies employ a diverse group of people and assess a lot of applications in a short timeframe. For consistency, most follow well defined marking criteria. Applications that directly address competition criteria are far easier to assess positively. You can make scoring decisions easier.
Clearly describe your fit versus the scope and objectives of the competition, in the plainest English possible. Address every part of every question, explicitly and simply.
Indirect, underlying reasons supporting funding, such as policy or trends in environmental or macro-economic factors, should be included if you have the word-count available.
2. Ideas are not everything
Invention or innovation are important, but small parts of a winning application. Satisfying real needs by overcoming uncertainty, with a clear vision, experienced leadership, a strong team and practical plan and impact are critical.
Discussion of customer, user, influencer, sales-team, and manufacturer involvement will significantly improve your application credibility whilst explaining how an award could leave positive legacy benefits is important too. Consider impacts such as upskilling, new employment, export potential and business resilience.
3. Inventive step
Competitions usually require significant innovation, business transformation and societal benefits. Proposing minor improvements or developing “me too” products is not enough.
Do desk research about your idea - search the internet, do patent and literature searches that evidence your idea’s novelty and competitive context.
Demonstrating that your idea could be patentable, and that the IP has value can help your application.
Above all, demonstrate a clear market need – interesting research projects with little external impact are unlikely to attract funding.
4. Know your stuff
Successful applications need to inspire confidence that the team’s knowledge, skills and experience are state-of-the-art. Bear in mind that the assessors may be experts in your field, or relative novices.
To be successful, you must build a team of named experts ideally with clearly relevant CVs and back up your projections and claims with relevant statistics and credible, referenced quotes.
Where word-count is restrictive – which is often the case, use any available appendices to provide this information.
5. Market focus
The clearer the link between the applicant and end-user, the better. Good applications clearly explain who target customers are, explaining how, why and when they could justify purchasing your product.
Paying tax on your potential future profits is positive in the eyes of the funding bodies, so don’t be shy about explaining how you could make money. Funders want to see a return on their investment for the public purse.
Applications must demonstrate clear knowledge of how purchasing functions operate and could change in future and proposals for new routes to market, or healthcare pathway change will require significant justification and insight.
6. Objectives
Simple, clear objectives clearly linked to market needs will help assessors quickly gain confidence in your proposal. Demonstrating the potential for significant quality-of-life, organisational, legal and quantifiable financial impacts in a clearly identified sector also makes for a compelling application.
Clarity in R&D approach, methodology, milestones, stages and work-packages is essential. Assessors will expect to see a focussed, realistic, achievable schedule and the resources to achieve it.
Remember that your overall research approach should be justified and clearly explained, ideally comparing to alternatives.
7. Collaboration
Many competitions encourage partnership. Lucid has successfully applied for, and delivered, a number of projects involving collaboration with clinical, academic, and commercial healthcare organisations.
Collaboration can be challenging, with partners balancing concurrent and different priorities during a project. The more consistent and aligned commercial and research interests are, the greater your chances of success.
When competitions call for a collaborative approach, evidencing experienced project and risk management is vital – as is a detailed budget. Previous successful multi-disciplinary teamwork will add to your credibility significantly and do specify the partnership IP position in advance.
Irrespective of whether you will be working collaboratively or not, always demonstrate good-practice in risk-management within your application.
8. Costs
The simpler, more complete justification you can provide, the better when it comes to project costs.
Most competitions require budgets to be divided into labour, overheads, subcontracting, materials, capital, travel “and” other costings.
Never underestimate! Most funding won’t cover full commercial costs. You will need to demonstrate that you can afford to be fully committed to delivering your project.
Give careful consideration when using subcontractors as proportionately high subcontract costs can lead assessors to question legacy impacts. Some funders prefer collaborative partnerships over significant subcontracting.
Where a “manager” delivers R&D inputs, it’s important to be explicit about the value of that contribution. Assessors may question “management” along with travel, subsistence, capital and “other” costs.
9. Presentation
Following competition guidance to the letter is essential to maximise your score. Assessors can be very pedantic, and a point lost can be critical.
- Stick rigidly to suggested page/word counts, font sizes and any guidance on legibility.
- Spell check, grammar check and sense check your application thoroughly before submission.
- Clear images can paint a thousand words – and with limited word-count, that can be very important.
10. Perseverance
Competition is fierce and funding priorities can change. So sometimes if you don’t succeed, it is worth noting the feedback, improving an application, and trying again.
Be careful addressing feedback - some assessors get things wrong. Ill-informed comments can be an indication that you could explain your application more clearly. However, avoid re-submitting exactly the same application; some funders won’t permit it.