Carbon Connections £3m investment fund
From today onwards, Carbon Connections can fund any carbon reduction project partnership between any UK education institution and UK based business
With £3 million to invest in innovative carbon reduction project partnerships it fills the gap between good ideas and development of market-ready solutions to reduce carbon in the UK.
The aim is to facilitate knowledge transfer between business communities, universities and research laboratories. By nurturing each project in a higher education-business partnership, Carbon Connections' funding model is expected to speed commercial development of technological or behavioural carbon-saving projects.
Based at the UK's leading school of environmental sciences at University of East Anglia, Carbon Connections is now linked to every university and college in the UK. Funding of up to £200,000 is available for each successful applicant. It is hoped that expansion of the programme will help launch ventures that will go on to attract corporate or venture capital investment.
Prof Trevor Davies, pro-vice-chancellor of UEA, said: "Carbon Connections has received more than 150 expressions of interest and we are delighted that we have already been able to fund a number of novel, exciting carbon-cutting projects. However, spreading the net to all Higher Education Institutions will enable us to capture more ideas and an even greater breadth of expertise."
Programme Director Dr Chris Harrison said: "We have already seen a fantastic range of outline concepts as part of our first phase. It is evident that the HE sector has a great deal of know-how, research output and intellectual property that can be applied to the issues of CO2 emissions and climate change. We look forward to receiving proposals and to supporting our second stage of projects."
The current group of 154 institutions has expanded from an original group of 8 that were mainly in the East of England. As projects are measured over a 12-month cycle, all applications must be received by 14 December 2007.
