Innovation Development Award

Innovation Development Award

Funds King's College London researcher innovations advancing toward commercial application.

The Innovation Development Award (IDA) is an internal seed-funding programme administered by King's Innovation Catalyst, the technology-transfer office of King's College London. Launched in February 2026, the programme draws on a £500,000 internal fund to help KCL researchers advance innovations toward commercial application across all faculties — including healthcare, physical sciences, social sciences, and the arts and humanities. The award is available on a rolling basis, reflecting King's Innovation Catalyst's mission to connect research with industry and funders throughout the academic year.

Eligibility is restricted to KCL researchers; external organisations, individual entrepreneurs, and other universities cannot apply directly. Awards are funded from the £500,000 programme pool, though individual award sizes and any per-project ceiling are not published in available materials. The Intellectual Property and Licensing Team — which has a track record including the 2019 PLG Licensing Deal of the Year for a Merck drug-development licence — provides commercialisation expertise alongside the funding. Researchers initiate contact through innovation@kcl.ac.uk; no open online application portal has been identified.

The IDA sits within a broader translational support ecosystem that includes the Translational Research Office, signposting to external schemes such as the MRC Impact Acceleration Account and NIHR i4i, and access to King's Ventures for spinout formation. Winning an IDA is best positioned as a bridge grant: funding early-stage proof-of-concept or IP-protection work that unlocks eligibility for larger external translational schemes at TRL 2–5. Applicants from medtech and life-sciences disciplines are likely to find the strongest institutional support given KCL's London Institute for Healthcare Engineering and its history of high-value biomedical licensing.