FAQs

The total budget for the 2011 CRACK IT Challenges research competition was £4.25 million. The individual budget varies for each challenge: the maximum budget for a specific challenge is indicated in the Challenge brief.

Work should start within 6 months of notification that an application has been successful.

This is up to 3 years unless otherwise indicated in the Challenge brief.

The in-kind contributions can be made in various ways as explained in the Challenge brief. These serve as a guide to the applicants who should explain in their application what resources will be required from the industry sponsors to achieve the deliverables.

The applicants should indicate in their applications the resources that they require from the industry sponsors. The industry sponsors will sign an agreement with the NC3Rs to provide what is needed for the project.

The Challenge briefs will be published approximately 2 months before the competition is officially launched in order to give time for potential applicants to consider how the Challenge should be met. The Launch meeting will give an opportunity for potential applicants to speak to the industry sponsors about the Challenges and to network with other possible co-applicants.  The NC3Rs will facilitate further interactions between applicants and sponsors after the Launch meeting if required.

The number of industry sponsors will be indicated in the Challenge brief.  For the 2011 Challenges, these range from 1 to 3.

This issue will need to be addressed by the applicants.  The lead applicant will sign a contract with the NC3Rs agreeing on behalf of the co-applicants with the general principles of access to foreground IP for other parties and for dissemination.  However the arrangements between the parties will be for them to decide and must be outlined in the application.

The applications for each Challenge will be initially considered by one of a number of separate Review Panels whose operation is outlined in the Guide to Participants and described in more detail in the Guide to Review Panel and Review Panel Scoring. The Review Panels will provide a shortlist of applications which will be invited for presentation to the Challenge Panels. At the same time the comments and scores of the Review Panel will be sent to the industry sponsors so that they can consider which applications most interest them and can agree beforehand on the in-kind contributions likely to be needed. Each Challenge will have its own Challenge Panel whose operation is outlined in the Guide to Participants and described in more detail in the Guide to Challenge Panels which will be made available to the shortlisted applicants. The membership of the Review Panel and Challenge Panels will be published in November, 2011.

IP is the property of the Contractor and Subcontractors. Although the NC3Rs is not a joint owner of any IP arising from a project, it is a condition of funding from the NC3Rs that work furthering the 3Rs must be made available to the rest of the bioscience sector. Industry sponsors are also not joint owners of any IP arising from a project. Sponsors benefit from early access to any new technology during the term of the project. Access beyond the project duration might be through granting of royalty-free licences or through favourable pricing for an agreed period. Expectations of the sponsors in this respect are detailed in the individual Challenge proposals. More information is provided in section 4.4 of the Guide for Participants. For those successful in securing a CRACK IT award there could also be additional negotiations between the organisations involved but that will be on a case by case basis so we cannot speculate on what this might cover.