If you are looking for companies that are innovating within very niche technology areas, sometimes our 'Description' search may still be too broad.
For instance, if you're looking for e.g. defence companies developing BVLOS (beyond visual line of sight) technology, or perhaps pharmaceutical companies developing treatments for IBD (Inflammatory Bowel Disease), then their description may only label them as 'Defence systems' or 'Pharmaceuticals' and may omit any activity in the specific area. This means it will be impossible to find them with a website description keyword search.
However, they may have received a funded project from Innovate UK to develop this technology from Innovate UK. In this case, we can find these companies in the following way:
Search 1: Defence companies developing BVLOS
Head to Advanced Search, the click: 'Add company criteria' -> 'Funding received' -> 'Received grant where' -> 'Innovate UK project the grant is a part of', and then finally 'Project title or abstract':
You can then input any keywords you wish to search across.
See our page on 'How to search using description keywords' for a reminder of the difference between 'description contains any of these words (near match)' and 'description contains all of these words (exact match)' etc.
Note: You can also change the 'Any' drop-down highlighted in the below screenshot if you want to input a range of specialised keywords/acronyms
This will then return any companies which have received Innovate UK grants which mention these keywords.
For reference, searching over "BVLOS" using the IUK Grant method returns around 100 results, but if we were just relying on the basic 'Description' keyword search, we get fewer than 10 results:
Verifying the results:
To verify which grants these companies received to make them show up in the search, we can head onto their profiles and view their grant history in the Transactions tab:
Search 2: Pharmaceutical companies developing bowel inflammation treatments
Here is another example of how to use our IUK Grant search to identify pharmaceutical companies specifically innovating in the IBD (Inflammatory Bowel Disease) space:
For reference, when searching over 'IBD/Inflammatory Bowel Disease' using the standard Description keyword search, we get fewer than 10 results. Instead, by using the InnovateUK Grant search, we found over 40.
Searching using standard 'Description' keyword searches:
Searching using Innovate UK Grant search:
If you would like any help building your own similar searches across specialist technology areas, please get in touch with your support team who will be happy to help!