UKRI and Ofgem announced last week that 18 projects have secured a combined £22.9 million through Cycle 5 of the Strategic Innovation Fund (SIF), the latest round of a programme designed to drive transformation in the UK's energy networks. The projects span robotics, digital twins, AI, hydrogen storage, quantum cybersecurity and community energy models, spread across discovery, alpha and beta stages.
It's a significant announcement, and worth reading. But what strikes us as more interesting than any individual project is what the SIF reveal about where public innovation funding is heading more broadly.
A Staged, Structured Model, And That's the Point
The SIF operates on a phased model: discovery (feasibility), alpha (proof of concept), beta (large-scale demonstration). This cycle includes eight discovery projects, seven alpha projects and three beta projects at very different funding levels, from under £150,000 for early-stage work up to nearly £8 million for beta-stage demonstration.
That structure is deliberate. Not every idea deserves the same investment at the same moment. Some projects need room to test assumptions before anyone commits serious money. Others have already proven themselves in earlier funding rounds and are ready to scale. Two projects in this cycle, in fact, progressed straight to alpha or beta having already received support from other schemes.
This kind of staged, evidence-gated approach to public innovation investment is becoming increasingly standard, and for good reason. It reduces the risk of large commitments to unproven ideas. It creates natural decision points where funders can assess progress before releasing further funds. And it builds a coherent portfolio rather than a collection of disconnected bets.
The 'Programmatic' Shift
Something else in the SIF announcement deserves attention. The commentary from Jodie Giles, Deputy Director of the SIF at Innovate UK, references a shift to a "new SIF programmatic approach", with projects now being supported through Innovation Delivery Groups (IDGs), described as "collaborative communities of projects in a specific innovation challenge area."
This is a meaningful signal. Rather than funding individual projects and leaving them to get on with it, the SIF is now actively facilitating shared learning between projects working on similar challenges, helping them tackle common barriers together, and monitoring progress against challenge-level outcomes rather than just project-level outputs.
That's a more sophisticated model of innovation programme management than most public funders have historically operated. It acknowledges something that practitioners have known for a long time: the value of an innovation programme isn't just in the sum of its individual projects. It's in what happens between them: the cross-pollination of approaches, the shared understanding of what's working and what isn't, the ability to redirect investment when evidence changes.
Marzia Zafar of Ofgem put it clearly: the goal is to ensure "innovation moves beyond demonstration and into real-world deployment." That's a high bar, and it requires infrastructure that most open-call funding models simply don't provide.
What This Pattern Looks Like Across Sectors
The SIF is an energy sector programme, but the model it represents is showing up elsewhere. LIPF is doing something similar for regional innovation clusters. The NHS and NHSX have used phased challenge fund structures in health innovation. Defence and security programmes have long operated on staged gate processes. What's changing is that these models are becoming more common, more deliberate and more demanding in terms of both the organisations running them and the participants within them.
The common thread is that public bodies are increasingly acting not just as funders, but as programme managers and conveners. They're taking responsibility not just for disbursing money, but for shaping a coherent portfolio, facilitating collaboration, and demonstrating impact to a broader set of stakeholders, including regulators, consumers, government departments, and the public.
That's a harder job. And it requires better infrastructure to do it well.
The Operational Implication
Running a multi-stage innovation fund, with different cohorts at different stages, assessment panels, progress monitoring, shared learning facilitation and reporting obligations, is genuinely complex. It demands clear applicant pipelines, structured assessment processes that can flex across stages, and the ability to track a portfolio of projects against challenge-level outcomes, not just individual deliverables.
These are exactly the kinds of operational challenges that organisations come to SimplyDo to solve. Whether you're running an open call, managing a cohort through staged development, or trying to demonstrate portfolio-level impact to a funder or regulator, the administrative overhead of doing it in spreadsheets and email threads scales badly and tends to show up at exactly the moment you can least afford it.
The SIF is a good programme. What makes it a useful reference point is that it illustrates, clearly, the direction of travel: more structured, more programmatic, more evidence-led innovation funding across sectors, across scales. If that's the kind of programme your organisation is building, or running, we'd like to help.
The full list of Cycle 5 SIF projects is available on the UKRI website.
.jpg)
