Travel support for UK businesses to attend European events in 2025 & 2026

Innovate UK is offering Travel Support of up to £750 for companies to attend Horizon Europe consortia-building events in Europe.

These opportunities enable innovators to form new collaborative partnerships to help businesses grow by supporting companies who want to expand their networks across Europe and make an impact in innovative international research and development projects. These awards encourage UK participation, engagement and visibility at international events and aim to accelerate UK involvement in European research programmes.

To be eligible for support, you need to be a for-profit UK-based R&D performing SME according to the EU definition (see definition here). If successful in your application for travel and accommodation costs, you will receive pro-active support from Innovate UK to help you maximise the benefit of attending. Please note, that successful applicants will need to adhere to Innovate UK’s policy for reasonable travel expenses (in line with HMRC travel and subsistence overview), a copy will be provided to successful applicants.

Since September 2023, Innovate UK has supported SMEs looking to expand into Europe by providing travel awards to enable innovators to attend events in several different countries and form new collaborative partnerships to help their business grow and simultaneously strengthen the UK economy.

Read more about how these European event travel awards enable UK SMEs to expand their horizons. (Note: Award has been increased since this was published.)

European event travel award testimonials summary

After speaking with those who have previously received travel support, here is an overview of the feedback they shared with us:

These Innovate UK European event travel awards enabled us to meet with experienced companies as well as universities to discuss collaborating on Horizon Europe international projects and learn about collaborative European funding opportunities which was especially useful as the UK is now associated with Horizon Europe. We really enjoyed expanding our international network by joining research groups and forming consortiums with valuable business partners. Working alongside industry specialists from a diverse range of countries to understand how to develop and implement a new technology into the global marketplace provides endless possibilities.

Contact us

If you have any questions about approved Travel Awards, please get in touch with the European Programmes team at finance.global@iukbc.org.uk.