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East Midlands Pathfinder grant has been replaced with the Proof of Market grant
21/05/2009
The East Midlands Pathfinder grant has now come to a close but there is good news. As this pilot product has been replaced by a very similar product - the ‘Proof of Market grant’ under the ‘Grant for Research and Development’ (GRD) suite of products run by EMDA. Bringing this grant under the GRD suite of products is part of the governments ‘Business Support Simplification Programme’ (BSSP).
Coupled with this, EMDA have just secured a further £2.9m in funding from the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) for the scheme. The additional ERDF funding will allow for a significant increase in the support offered to businesses in the East Midlands and enable EMDA to deliver the scheme until at least 2011.
The EMDA region remains one of the most successful regions in England for the GRD scheme due to the way EMDA works in filtering projects through an outline proposal stage.
UK Grants, an independent grant consultancy who specialise in GRD funding across all of England believe that the EMDA grant team lead the way in their approach to working with companies in ensuring high pass rates and only quality projects go through to full application. Ian Heywood, Director of UK Grants says “We have researched grant data on the GRD scheme and its predecessor ‘Smart’ all the way back to 1996 and the data shows consistently that the EMDA region maintains the highest pass rates for full application above all other RDAs”.
Submitted by Sarah Crennell