If you work in local government, a combined authority, a university, or any organisation that sits at the intersection of civic life and innovation, you've probably heard of the Local Innovation Partnerships Fund. If you haven't, it's worth getting up to speed quickly because it's already shaping how public bodies will run innovation programmes for the next several years.
What LIPF Is, Briefly
The Local Innovation Partnerships Fund (LIPF) is a £500 million UKRI-led programme designed to grow high-potential innovation clusters across the UK. It builds directly on the Innovation Accelerators programme, the regional pilots that ran in Greater Manchester, the West Midlands and Glasgow, and scales that model significantly.
Guidance first dropped in July 2025, with further detailed guidance following in October. The fund has two strands. Ten regions (Greater Manchester, West Midlands, South Yorkshire, West Yorkshire, Liverpool City Region, the North East, Greater London, Glasgow City Region, Cardiff Capital Region and the Belfast to Londonderry Corridor) each received earmarked allocations of up to £30 million. A competed strand, open to the rest of the UK, invites other partnerships to bid for up to £20 million each.
The programme is now well underway. Several earmarked regions, including the North East, are already running open calls for project proposals from local organisations, with portfolio submissions to UKRI due in spring 2026. Funding decisions and project mobilisation are expected from summer 2026 onwards.
What the Fund Is Actually Trying to Do
LIPF has a fairly specific theory of change, and it's worth understanding it clearly.
The fund supports what it calls the "triple helix": partnerships between local government, business, and research and innovation organisations. The goal is to take near-to-market research and turn it into commercial products, services and technologies (i.e. the things that raise productivity, attract investment, and create skilled jobs in the regions).
UKRI expects the £500 million to generate over £1 billion of co-investment and an additional £700 million of value to local economies. That's a significant return assumption, and it tells you something about the kind of projects that will succeed in this process: they need to demonstrate strong commercial application, matched funding, and scalable impact. This isn't a grant for exploratory research or good intentions.
The fund also places real emphasis on local decision-making. In a notable departure from typical UKRI processes, partnerships can nominate a local anchor entity, a combined authority, a research organisation, or another local government body, to administer grants to businesses on UKRI's behalf. That's a meaningful shift, and it means that combined authorities and mayoral strategic authorities are being positioned not just as recipients of innovation funding, but as active funders and conveners in their own right.
Why This Matters Beyond the Ten Named Regions
The competed strand means LIPF isn't just for the ten earmarked places. Any region with a credible cluster, strong partnerships and a clear case for economic impact can apply. The fund is explicitly designed to surface strengths that exist across the UK and not just in the places that already had Innovation Accelerator pilots.
For organisations in regions not in the earmarked list, the window is still open. But the process is demanding: a two-stage selection involving an expression of interest, co-development of a detailed proposal with UKRI, and independent assessment. Getting that right requires preparation.
What This Means for Innovation Programme Design
Here's the broader point, and why we find LIPF significant beyond the funding numbers.
This is the public sector trying to systematise something that has historically been messy and ad hoc: regional innovation partnerships. The fund essentially provides a structural template: convene the right partners, define your cluster, demonstrate near-to-market potential, match public funding with private investment, and operate through a local governance structure that UKRI can work with.
For organisations like combined authorities, NHS bodies, universities and research institutions, this means that the innovation challenges, open calls, and cluster-development activities they run over the next few years will increasingly be funded through vehicles like LIPF, not one-off discretionary budgets. That has implications for how those programmes are designed and run.
Specifically: conditions-based funding at this scale, with matched investment requirements and impact reporting obligations to UKRI, demands proper programme infrastructure. An open call for local businesses to bring forward innovation projects, managed via shared email inboxes and spreadsheets, isn't going to cut it when you need to demonstrate portfolio coherence, track commercial milestones, and report back to a national funder.
The Operational Challenge Nobody Talks About
A lot of the conversation around LIPF rightly focuses on strategy. Which clusters? Which sectors? Who are the anchor partners?
But there's an operational question that tends to come later, and by then it's often too late to answer it well: how are you actually going to manage the programme?
Running a multi-project innovation portfolio under a fund like LIPF means managing applicant pipelines, coordinating assessment processes across partners, tracking project progress against defined milestones, and producing coherent impact evidence for UKRI. Add in the expectation of co-investment leverage and private sector engagement, and you're running something that looks more like a structured investment programme than a traditional grant round.
That's exactly the kind of complexity that SimplyDo is designed to handle. Our platform helps public sector organisations run open innovation calls, manage multi-stage applications, coordinate assessment panels, and track programme outcomes at the scale and rigour that a fund like LIPF requires.
If You're Working on LIPF, or Something Like It
Whether you're in one of the ten earmarked regions building out your portfolio, or exploring an application through the competed strand, the window to get your programme infrastructure in place is narrow.
We work with organisations across government, healthcare and other public sector bodies to help them run structured innovation programmes well. If LIPF, or the next iteration of place-based innovation funding, is on your roadmap, we'd welcome a conversation about how we can help.
Further guidance on LIPF, including the competed strand application process, is available via UKRI's website.
.jpg)
