The impact of state aid on innovative businesses

The impact of state aid on innovative businesses

Frontier’s State Aid Evaluation for Innovate UK (IUK) assesses the impact of IUK’s State aid scheme to better understand the effectiveness and efficiency of its activities.

IUK’s Research, Development and Innovation Scheme provides competitive funding for research and development (R&D) in the form of grants and loans. Its aim is to stimulate economic growth through the support of innovative businesses, in particular SMEs, across all sectors of the economy as well as research organisations. The scheme generally supports R&D which is relatively high risk and far from market, although this varies from programme to programme. Individual projects can run for several years and the final impacts of the scheme are likely to take a long time to materialise fully. 

The funding period covered by this evaluation is 1 January 2015 to 31 December 2020 and Frontier’s analysis was carried out in 2018/19. Therefore, given the timing of this final report, some of the most recent aid awarded will not feature in our evaluation.

 Please click here for the full report.

State Aid Evaluation