Applications open today for a new grant set to bolster New Zealand’s innovation landscape and support businesses to take world-leading innovations to market.

The Ārohia Innovation Trailblazer Full Grant, administered by Callaghan Innovation, is for non research and development activities and encourages New Zealand businesses to operate at the frontier of global innovation – forging a path for others to follow.

Callaghan Innovation Chief Executive Dr Stefan Korn says the Ārohia Full Grant supports innovation that creates wider opportunities for an entire ecosystem and enables new companies to build on the product and services of grant recipients.

“The Ārohia Full Grant is essentially about accelerating the speed to market for new, cutting-edge products and services that have the potential to generate benefits that go far beyond future commercial returns generated by the company who applied for the grant.”

“A wide range of innovation can be supported – including a new product, process, facilities, service or business model or a combination of all of these. However, applicants must be able to explain how their initiative will deliver benefits to other innovators.”

The Ārohia Full Grant provides up to $4 million to successful applicants over 24 months, on a co-funded basis. The minimum grant funding is $100,000. This is a contestable grant with only the best applicants in each round receiving funding. Decisions will be informed by an evaluation panel which includes external members with industry expertise.

The Ārohia Full Grant builds on the Ārohia Innovation Trailblazer Seed Grant, introduced earlier in the year, to support businesses to get the evidence, data and customer validation they need to apply for the Ārohia Full Grant.

The Ārohia Seed Grant launched in April of this year and has 26 successful applications so far, providing up to $25,000 per applicant on a co-funded basis.

“Both Ārohia Innovation Trailblazer are game changers for New Zealand as they allow us to support a broad range of innovative activities in companies rather than just a narrowly defined set of research and development (R&D) activities. The new grant type recognises that R&D is only ever a subset of innovation and commercialisation, and that many other activities are required to turn an R&D outcome into a viable and successful product or service for consumers” Dr Korn says.

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