Innovate UK to fulfil funding promise after social media backlash

Innovate UK has found itself at the centre of a social media storm, following its decision to award only half of the intended grants in its Women in Innovation awards programme.

The Women in Innovation grant aims to support female entrepreneurs by providing funding to develop groundbreaking ideas and innovations. This year, the program received 1,452 applications from female founders across the country, all vying for the £75k grant. The total funding pot allocated for this initiative was £4m, which should have resulted in 50 awards being distributed to the most promising applicants.

However, Innovate UK’s announcement last week revealed that only 25 of these grants had been awarded. This decision sparked outrage, particularly given that some applications that did not receive funding had scored more than 90% in the evaluation process.

It issued a public apology this afternoon (Sep 2), acknowledging the mistake and the negative impact its decision had on the applicants and the wider community. The organisation has confirmed that it will fund the full 50 awards, therefore committing to a total investment of £4m.

Innovate UK said: “For this year’s Women in Innovation awards, we said that we’d fund a portfolio of up to 50 projects.

“Last week, we communicated that 25 applicants had been successful for funding. As public funders, we must manage our budgets carefully. The decision to only award this number was a mistake and we prioritised wrongly.

“We recognise the impact this has had on the many applicants and on the community as a whole, and we apologise wholeheartedly.”

The non-departmental public body has committed to contacting all applicants to highlight available support and to support and increase opportunities across the system for women innovators.

Widespread backlash was triggered on social media over Friday after Liverpool-based dearbump founder Emma Jarvis called on Innovate UK to deliver the 50 awards as promised.

Grassroots movement Let’s Fund More Women since called upon founders, investors, and supporters over the weekend to ask Innovate UK to:

• Allocate the remaining £2.125m to fund the top-scoring applicants who were initially overlooked.
• Engage to address the issues raised by applicants and implement necessary reforms.
• A thorough review of the assessment process to prevent similar discrepancies in the future.
• Introduce a new Women in Innovation programme in 2025 with a clear, transparent funding allocation and scoring process to restore confidence in Innovate UK’s commitment to gender equity in innovation.

The campaign was led by Becky Lodge, a notable figure in the tech industry, recognised as one of TechRound’s ‘Women in Tech to Watch’ and one of Computer Weekly’s Top 100 UK Tech Leaders.

Lodge said: “The Women in Innovation Awards have fallen short of their intended goals, and we are calling on Innovate UK to take immediate action to ensure that future awards are more equitable, transparent, and supportive of female founders. Women-led businesses are significantly underfunded in comparison to their male counterparts and we rely on a public body to exercise fairness and equity when it comes to distributing public money.

“As part of their acknowledgement of their failings, we would also like Innovate UK’s CEO, Indro Mukerjee, to publicly apologise to the 1,400 women who have spent – on average – 80 hours* completing the onerous application process, only to receive inconsistent feedback from assessors. In some cases, we’ve heard of people scoring over 95% and still not being successful. It’s just not good enough.”

Lodge is the founder of Little Kanga and StartUp Disruptors, the largest online community for under-represented founders and minorities in the U.K. She was also one of the founding signatories that, as part of InvestHER, saw the last Government make a u-turn on their plans to increase the thresholds for Angel Investment.

She launched Let’s Fund More Women alongside Zandra Moore and Tara Attfield-Tomes, two leading voices in the female investment space.

Leeds-based Zandra Moore is CEO and co-founder of Panintelligence and sat on the UK Government’s Taskforce for Women Led High Growth Enterprises. Her work has led to the creation of The Lifted Project, a data and ecosystem-led approach to increasing the flow of capital to regional, high-growth female founders.

Tara Attfield-Tomes is co-chair of The Lifted Project’s Birmingham Board and is the founder of PR agency EAST VILLAGE., which works with female-founded, female-led, and female-serving brands and The 51% Club, a community that helps female founders scale.

The campaign is also supported by Emmie Faust, founder of Female Founders Rise, which has over 7,000 members nationwide. She is an exited entrepreneur, a micro angel investor in over 30 female-led businesses and a Dragons Den winner.

A survey of unsuccessful applicants is underway, revealing significant challenges, including excessive time commitments and a lack of clarity in the assessment process.

Managing the collation of data is Zandra Moore, who comments: “As a data-driven professional, I knew the importance of capturing these experiences in black and white. But the reality is that there are thousands of women who are deflated and defeated by a process that should have been there to serve them. I am one of them. Having spent significant time on this application process only to receive such vague feedback and from assessors who I know nothing about, is a kick in the teeth.

“We hear the stats around there being £250 billion left on the table from underfunded women – it’s a huge part of the work we did with the taskforce – and yet we’re letting public money be spent so inefficiently. Reform is needed because there are thousands of female-led innovations simply not making it out alive.”