Funding innovation across 40+ countries

The platform we helped build for UK innovation funding didn’t stay in the UK. The EUREKA network adopted it to run cross-border R&D funding for more than forty countries.

The MyEureka competition search: a black GOV.UK-style masthead reading Eureka, Project Management Platform, above the page heading Innovation calls.

The public competition search at myeurekaproject.org. The masthead, the type and the service rule are the GOV.UK Design System, the same one the Innovation Funding Service is built on.

An international network, one platform

EUREKA is an intergovernmental network for research and development that spans more than forty countries. Its flagship programme, Eurostars, is the world’s largest funding programme for R&D-performing SMEs — backing international consortia to build innovative products and bring them to market. The platform applicants use to apply, MyEureka, is the same grant-management system we helped build for the UK, adapted to work across borders.

A harder problem than one country

A national funding service has one funder, one set of rules, one budget. EUREKA has none of those luxuries. Its model is decentralised: a project is run by a consortium of organisations from at least two different countries, and each country’s own national funding body funds its own participants, under its own rules. One application, many funders, many jurisdictions — all kept in step. That coordination problem is exactly what the platform has to make simple.

The decentralised model EUREKA runs on: a cross-border consortium applies once through MyEureka, and each country’s national funding body funds its own participants under its own rules.

Built on a platform that already worked

MyEureka didn’t start from scratch. It’s built on the Innovation Funding Service, the same open-source, GOV.UK-pattern grant platform we helped build for Innovate UK — the same hard-won handling of competitions, applications, assessment and finance, reshaped for an international, multi-funder programme. Reusing a platform that already worked is how you de-risk taking something this consequential across borders.

Our part

We were among the engineers on that platform, for Innovate UK and for its EUREKA incarnation, and were closely involved in adapting it for the international programme. It went well beyond application code: much of the work was infrastructure and platform engineering, and the build-and-deploy pipeline that runs the whole thing, alongside the Java services themselves. The Innovation Funding Service case study has the verifiable, open-source detail of the contribution; MyEureka is what the same work made possible once it crossed the Channel.

Why it matters

It’s a neat proof of the thing we care about most: software built well enough, and kept adaptable enough, that it can be picked up and pointed at a much bigger problem than the one it was first written for. From one country’s innovation grants to R&D funding across a continent — same foundations, far greater reach.

Want software that can grow into problems you haven’t hit yet? Let’s talk.