Old name, new purpose: why we’ve gone back to RNID

Innovation Seed Fund

Through our Innovation Seed Fund grants, we aim to pump-prime innovative research into the causes, treatment and diagnosis of hearing loss, tinnitus and other hearing-related conditions. 

We want to support novel research ideas with the aim of making them more competitive and able to secure follow-on funding.  

The fund will also support small-scale projects at the translational stage, such as proof-of-concept studies or pre-clinical validation studies, again with the aim of making novel approaches more competitive for further funding.  

All proposals should be able to demonstrate how they will contribute to ultimately bringing benefit to people with hearing loss, tinnitus or other hearing-related conditions. They should be highly novel and/or innovative – potentially risky ideas are welcome.  

Awards are usually made in March each year.

Innovation Seed Fund panel

If you’re a post-doctoral researcher or early-career fellow, you can join our Innovation Seed Fund panel.

Recent projects we have funded

  • Exploring a novel approach for preventing otitis media and associated hearing loss in children, University of Tasmania, Tasmania 
  • Closing the gap: Leveraging long-read sequencing to identify mRNA defects in probands with inherited hearing loss, Radboud University Medical Center, Netherlands 
  • Preventing cisplatin induced hearing loss, University College London, UK 
  • Teaching Old Dog New Tricks: Repurposing Clicks to Concurrently Estimate Middle ear, Cochlear, and Auditory Neural Health, National Acoustic Laboratories, Australia 
  • A James Lind Alliance Priority Setting Partnership in Dementia and Hearing Conditions, NIHR Nottingham Biomedical Research Centre, UK.

Summary of grant

Deadline

Wednesday 20 December 2023

Value

Up to a maximum of £10,000

Eligibility

Applicants can be from a university, research institute, or small or medium enterprise based anywhere in the world

In the last round of Flexi Grant funding (March 2023), we received 24 applications and awarded funding to 5 projects.

How to apply

All applications should be submitted via our online grant management system, Flexi-Grant. There’s further guidance on Flexi-Grant about how to complete your application below.

Before applying, please read the supporting documents.

Selection procedure 

All proposals are reviewed by our Innovation Seed Fund review panel (usually three members per proposal). They judge the scientific merit of the proposal, as well as its novelty and feasibility. RNID use these reviews to select the best projects to fund. 
 
Applicants will be notified of the outcome as soon as possible, usually within three months of the application deadline. 
 
Everyone involved in the review process of any grant application is asked to abide by our code of conduct.

Innovation Seed Fund review panel

The Innovation Seed Fund panel is being refreshed this year – we will update the membership on this page once this process is complete.

Europe PubMed Central (Europe PMC) and open access publications

RNID is a member of the Europe PMC Funders’ Group. We support open access publications and require RNID grant holders to make their publications open access.

Read our open access publication policy for more information and visit the Europe PMC website.


Contact us

For more information about the Innovation Seed Fund review panel, please get in touch.

Phone
020 3227 6158

Page last updated: 25 October 2023

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