Tips on how to submit a great proposal to the Centre for Defence Enterprise
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The document provides guidance on creating a proposal for an Innovation Network event hosted by the CDE Technology Manager. It instructs applicants to include details about their innovative idea, its relevance to defense and security, a work plan, and plans for exploitation. Proposals will be assessed on their potential impact, likelihood of exploitation, advancement of science/technology, innovation/quality, and technical challenge. The document ends with reminders and an offer to answer any questions.
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Tips on how to submit a great proposal to the Centre for Defence Enterprise
- 1. Create a great proposal Innovation Network event CDE Technology Manager
- 3. Submit a CDE proposal
- 9. Idea
- 12. Relevance
- 13. Work plan
- 14. Work plan
- 15. Exploitation
- 18. 4/5
- 20. Watermarking
- 21. CDE assessment A. Impact on defence and securityB. Likelihood of exploitation
- 22. CDE assessment C. Advancing important science and technology D. Innovation and scientific qualityE. Technical challenge
- 23. Final reminders
- 25. Questions
Editor's Notes
- Hello –I’m Technology Manager at the Centre for Defence Enterprise. You’ve heard today about the funding opportunities that CDE offers. But what you’ll hear more about in this session, really importantly, is that the ONLY way for you to access the funding is to actually submit a research proposal to us. And the only way to do that is through our online submission service - but more about that in just a minute. When you submit your proposal to us, you need to make sure it’s a good one! CDE looks to fund great ideas for Defence and these need to included in a quality proposal. In this session, I’ll explain to you what goes into making a quality proposal and what we train our assessors to look for. [NEXT SLIDE]
- What you can see here is the front page of our online submission service and the orange box shows the URL to access it directly. It launched in December 2015, and is built on the needs of our users. If any of you were familiar with our old submission portal, you’ll be pleased to know that this is a vast improvement and has received lots of excellent feedback. The first thing you need to do is set up an account. Even if you had an account on the old CDE portal, you’ll need to sign up again for the new submission service. The service is very clear and intuitive, with guidance information given throughout, as and when you need it. Don’t forget though, whatever your idea is about – your proposal mustn’t include any classified information – this is very important as CDE competitions are run at an unclassified level. [NEXT SLIDE]
- You can also find the submission service by using a search engine and typing in ‘Submit a CDE proposal’. If you do that you’ll find the link to our website on GOV.UK, explaining all you need to know about submitting a CDE proposal. [NEXT SLIDE]
- Also, you could go directly to our website and what you can see here is the front page: gov/uk/dstl/cde. [CLICK] If you click ‘Submit a proposal’, it will take you to all the guidance you need, and a direct link through to the submission service. [NEXT SLIDE]
- So, back onto the submission service… When you start a new proposal, there’s a clear sequence of steps from 1 to 5. Step 1 is to tell us which of our competitions you’re entering. All you need to do here is to here is select from the available entries. The titles of available themed competitions are displayed for you to select, along with their specific challenges. Also available is our always-open enduring competition and the 9 Challenge areas. When you’ve done this you will need to click to show you accept the terms and conditions of CDE competitions. There’s a hyperlink to read more on our website about our current standard contract (called DEFCON 705) and other important commercial information. Soon to be added here is the option to choose another form of contract. Later this year, we’ll be trialling a “short-form” contract – the aim of which is to simplify the contract information and make it easier to understand. It’s not ready yet, but watch this space! Once you’ve made your selections you can SAVE AND CONTINUE. [NEXT SLIDE]
- In step 2 - the Summary - you need to give your proposal a title and to briefly summarise what it’s about and what work you intend to do. There’s much more space in step 3 to go into detail, so you only need to be brief here, but clear enough to help us to make sure we get the right assessors to look at your proposal. We also ask you to let us know what technology area your proposal covers. To make it easy for you we have provided drop down boxes for you to select the technology area most relevant to your proposal. The final thing on this screen is where we ask if your proposal is a re-submission of a previous competition bid. If it is, you need to let us know what the previous reference number was. When you’ve done these things you can SAVE AND CONTINUE. [NEXT SLIDE]
- Step 3 - INNOVATION DETAILS - is where you need to put the meat of your proposal, so I’ll spend a bit longer on this one. [NEXT SLIDE]
- Step 3 is split into 4 sub-sections. It’s important to get all of the right information across in these to make a good proposal. The 4 sub-sections are… (click) The idea Defence and security relevance Your work plan and research approach Exploitation beyond the proof-of-concept stage [NEXT SLIDE]
- So, let’s talk about the first sub-section – the idea. What you need to do here, is to describe your idea in detail. Tell us how it works and what it does. Take care to explain in what ways it’s innovative. [CLICK] You’ll be pleased to know that there’s helpful guidance within the submission service itself, to have to hand while you write your proposal, telling you exactly the things you need to include. [CLICK] Clicking on this question will open up further guidance… [NEXT SLIDE]
- When the list opens… [CLICK] it provides lots of detail about what evidence we’re expecting to find in this section. Where further explanation of certain points may be needed – like you can see here about technology readiness levels (or TRLs) - hyperlinks are provided to specific guidance held elsewhere. Regarding technology readiness levels, CDE phase-1 competitions seek innovative technologies that have reached TRL 2 to 3, meaning a technology concept has been formulated. We fund projects to develop these to TRL 3 (or higher). CDE doesn’t fund the very early stage research where basic principles have been observed and reported and which take projects from TRL 1 to 2 CDE phase-2 projects seek to develop phase 1 ideas to TRL 6 and no higher. In order to create a proposal which is going to resonate with assessors you must be prepared to address these points and provide answers within your submission [NEXT SLIDE]
- In the details box, you can write all of the information you want to include in each relevant section. You can also enter rich text and format it as you wish… [CLICK] including underlined, bold, italics, bulleted and numbered lists. A spell checker isn’t currently included - but this will be added as soon as possible. We know that often proposals come about as the result of collaborations, perhaps with a number of people working together to write a proposal and we know that many people use MS Word to build their content as its easy to attach to emails. [CLICK] If this is how you work, it’s possible to cut and paste your text directly from MS Word into your online proposal form and keep the original formatting. [NEXT SLIDE]
- Onto the second sub-section – defence and security relevance. Here you need to outline how you believe your idea will be of use in defence and security. Remembering that the aim of CDE is to help provide the best technology capability for the military and national security. [CLICK] In every sub-section in this step on the submission service, helpful guidance is to hand…. [CLICK] …explaining exactly the sorts of things you should include. I know many of you struggle to understand how the military operates but honestly it’s very similar to most large businesses. Defence tries to: 1 - Reduce its operating costs and timescales through lower-cost materials or skills savings 2 - Gain an advantage over adversaries from using better quality equipment or better training 3 – Look after the health and safety of its employees If you find yourself stuck and can’t see an application or what the benefits might be for your innovation, then talk to our Military Advisors at our events or book a face-to-face meeting to discuss your idea in greater detail with defence experts. When you do identify what you believe are benefits to defence and security - try hard here to provide some form of numerical estimate of the size of the benefit. Big claims are great – but credible evidence is also important. [NEXT SLIDE]
- In the third sub-section – your work plan and research approach – our assessors need to see a clear, detailed plan of the activities you’ll carry out. The plan should be logical and fully describe the outputs we’ll see - we call these ‘deliverables’. [CLICK] The guidance will tell you what you need to include. Timescales and resource requirements should be included, as should dependencies and potential risks and their mitigations. Collaborations with other organisations are seen as a positive thing, so don’t worry that your proposal will look bad because you need help from others to do the work. Gantt chart and work-breakdown structures are useful to include in any proposal as they help assessors to quickly grasp your proposed approach at high level. In the submission service you can easily upload image attachments – in JPG or PNG formats, by browsing for a file on your computer, or dragging and dropping. [CONTINUED]
- We want to see a well-articulated description of deliverables so we can be sure about what you’re offering. For each deliverable you must provide us with what’s called a ‘full-rights’ version. You can read more about what this means through the hyperlink to our website. Full-rights deliverables contain only intellectual property (IP) generated through the CDE project, limited-rights deliverables may include some background IP from previous work. We also want to know what tests you're going to carry out to assess the performance of your deliverables. We want to be confident that your deliverables can be judged to have some of the improved performance benefits you claim within your proposal. Experience has shown the most effective way for you to do this is for you to define some credible measures of performance, which your trials or experiments will provide the data for. Finally, please remember to watch out for ethics. If you think your proposal involves humans or animals - even simple things like questionnaires (for humans that is!) you should check out our website for something called MODREC (MOD research ethics committee) approval before you submit a proposal. [NEXT SLIDE]
- The final sub-section in step 3 is exploitation beyond the proof-of-concept stage. We need to see evidence that your proposed idea could be developed into a mature, usable product in the future. [CLICK] So, using the guidance given, you need to think about how you would progress the work at the end of the project. [NEXT SLIDE]
- Now, we’re done with step 3…on to step 4 – finance and delivery schedule. Please tell us how much money you’ll need and how you plan to spend it. We normally fund phase-1 proof-of-concept projects costing between £40,000 to £100,000. We can’t consider projects costing £150,000 or more. All costs must be excluding VAT. In this step, there are easy-to-use tables to put in your LABOUR costs, CAPITAL costs, OVERHEADS, CONSUMABLES, SUBCONTRACTOR costs and for TRAVEL EXPENSES that your proposed project might incur. You can also add a profit margin at the bottom, and my advice is that this should be reasonable and commensurate with the other proposed rates in your cost breakdown. When you’ve entered these costs we ask you to name your DELIVERABLES and put together a schedule for their delivery, again marking them as full rights or limited rights. There must be a full-rights version of each deliverable. As has always been the case, the Ministry of Defence doesn’t pay in advance for work to be carried out. BUT if you think waiting till you’ve finished all your work is going to be a problem, you can create deliverables such as interim progress reports, which highlight work done and the results obtained to date and link them to STAGE PAYMENTS. Up to 6 can be made during the project. When you’ve completed these parts you can SAVE AND CONTINUE to the final step of the submission process. [NEXT SLIDE]
- This last step is where you have an opportunity to view how your proposal will look to the assessors. As you progress through each step of the previous 4 steps of the submission service - the software tells you if you have forgotten to tick a box or include something important. If you still have any of these things missing when you reach this final step - the SUBMIT button will be greyed out. You’ll need to go back and fix the missing bits before you can submit your proposal. If you’ve completed everything you need to, you’ll see the SUBMIT button – so when you’re completely happy you’ve added everything you need to and you are satisfied with the way it looks – click the SUBMIT button. When you’ve done this you will be greeted by a “THANK YOU” page, which tells you that your submission has been received by CDE. [NEXT SLIDE]
- From the “Thank You” page you can return to what’s known as your BIDDER DASHBOARD - which is basically your home screen. It’s split in DRAFT and COMPLETED proposals. If you’ve submitted a proposal to us, it will have been allocated a CDE reference number [CLICK] You can also see that unlike the DRAFT proposals, the completed one has a STATUS of SUBMITTED – [CLICK] and again this is another easy way to check your proposal has gone through to us. [NEXT SLIDE]
- COMPLETED proposals will have a status of 1 of these 4 options: SUBMITTED means we’ve got your proposal IN ASSESSMENT means the proposal is being assessed or a final decision on funding hasn’t been made yet FUND or NO FUND will be the status you will see on your dashboard when we’ve made a decision. If you have a ‘NO FUND’ decision, soon after you will also get feedback as to why you weren’t successful. [NEXT SLIDE]
- Just a quick word on security. I’m sure you know, CDE takes very seriously its responsibilities as a trusted guardian of your supplier IP. We’ve introduced a watermark feature that displays the name of the submission service user right across your proposal when on screen and if printed out. This feature is active for suppliers such as yourselves and internally for our assessors and moderators. [NEXT SLIDE]
- So now onto how your proposals will be assessed. All CDE proposals are assessed using the following criteria. CDE trains all assessors on these, so our experts know what to be looking out for. For each proposal, a panel of assessors score against each of the criteria, and a moderator then makes a recommendation of whether to fund it or not. This recommendation is then subject to internal peer review before final decisions are made. The 5 assessment criteria are: [CLICK] Impact on defence and security - we’re looking for clear evidence that your innovation will significantly improve our defence and security capabilities. We’ll consider things like what the innovation will do, who would use it and where, and the potential benefit to UK defence and security. [CLICK] B. Likelihood of exploitation - We’re looking for evidence that your proposed idea can be developed into a mature, usable product. We’ll consider things like your plan for development beyond the proof-of-concept stage, and the usability and cost of the final product. [CONTINUED]
- C. Advancing important science and technology - we want to develop important science and technology - and not necessarily just in relation to defence and security. We’ll consider things like whether or not your project will substantially progress science and technology in relation to UK defence and security, and whether it might have uses in other market sectors. [CLICK] D. Innovation and scientific quality - we’d like to know if the science proposed is innovative and if it’s going to be done to the highest standard. We’ll consider things like how innovative your idea is, and the detail in your science and your work plan. [CLICK] E. Technical challenge - CDE competitions are designed to make possible exciting and innovative work. The perfect project will be highly challenging with a high potential benefit to UK defence and security. We’ll consider things like whether there’s evidence of very ambitious science and technology and rigorous testing. We also want deliverables that help us to determine whether or not the project has been a success. [NEXT SLIDE]
- So some important points to finish on: Please be clear and concise when filling in your proposal – as much as our assessors love learning about new science and technology, they are extremely busy people and they will have only around 60 minutes to read and give their opinions, so ask yourself how much you can read and digest in 60 mins – this should be your guide on the length of your proposal. Do use diagrams – photos – tables etc to support your descriptions, you can upload JPGs and PNGs to each subsection of the innovation details step – this really helps us to digest your proposal quickly and effectively. Remember to find commercial alternatives, so that your proposals don’t rely on Government-provided things to do the work – we hate to say NO FUND to a proposal just because we can’t guarantee to be able to give you the information, equipment or resource you need. And please remember - in order to create a proposal which is going to resonate with assessors you must be prepared to address the points raised in the “what do I need to include” links. [CLICK] And finally, particularly in the case of Themed Competitions, DON’T leave your submissions to the last moment before submitting them. Give yourself plenty of time. Don’t miss the deadline!!!! If you do, the submission service won’t allow you to submit your proposal to that themed competition. If it’s for the enduring competition, then you will go into the next month’s submission cycle – but for themed competitions, you’ll have missed the boat! [NEXT SLIDE]
- So that’s it….give it a try. The CDE submission service is easy to use and the online help makes it clearer, at point of use, exactly what content we need from you. And hopefully that will result is our assessors getting to review lots of exciting, innovative, high-quality proposals! [NEXT SLIDE]
- Thanks very much for listening - I’m happy to take any questions now!