Apply: South Africa’s Design Innovation Seed Fund

The Design Innovation Seed Fund (DISF) of South Africa is now accepting applications from designers, innovators, entrepreneurs, and product developers who have pre-revenue inventions for grant funding of up to US$47,000.

The DISF is an initiative of the Craft and Design Institute (CDI), with assistance from the Western Cape Department of Economic Development and Tourism and investment money given by the Technology Innovation Agency (TIA) (DEDAT).

The DISF has completed 26 projects since its start in 2014 and has distributed ZAR15.8 million (US$929,000) in grant financing from TIA. By creating prototypes and testing their presumptions regarding the technical and market-related difficulties, seed financing helps awardees to comprehend their prospects.

Applications from a wide range of industries, including agri-tech, biotech and e-health, construction, advanced manufacturing technology, low-carbon technology, renewable energy, ICT, and software engineering, including data analytics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence, are invited.

Any innovator will tell you that the resources that allow them the ability to move forward are what prevent them from creating new items and expanding their businesses. This is precisely what the DISF does: it jumpstarts an innovator’s next stage and puts them on the road to commercialization. Without a fund like this, very few of the amazing South African discoveries funded over the past eight years by the DISF would have been commercialized, according to Erica Elk, Group CEO at the CDI, which administers the fund.

In addition to establishing sound governance and proper monitoring and evaluation procedures, “We have put a tremendous amount of work into the grant offering, realizing meaningful and sustained impact with the firms we support.”

Applications can be submitted here until July 31 at 5 p.m. SAST.