Inclusion rules

Who appears on Novatlas

Novatlas is the open atlas of innovation support. It lists every publicly funded organisation, programme and service that helps people and organisations innovate, described the same way and kept up to date. These rules decide who appears on the map and why. We publish them so anyone can check our work.

The test

A support appears on Novatlas when the answer to all three questions is yes.

1. Is it publicly funded? It is paid for in whole or in significant part by public money: government, a state agency, a local authority or the European Union. It can be delivered by a public body, a university, a charity or a private company, as long as the support itself is publicly funded.
2. Does it help people innovate? It helps people or organisations develop new products, services, processes or ways of working, or build the skills to do so.
3. Can people actually use it? It is open to applications, enquiries or referrals from the people it is meant for, in an area that a Novatlas edition covers.

What we include

• Funding: grants, vouchers, loans and public investment funds for innovation
• Advice and mentoring: one-to-one support, diagnostics and business advisers
• Skills and training: courses, programmes and resources that build innovation capability
• Research and technology: research centres, technology centres and university partners open to industry
• Places and infrastructure: incubators, labs, test beds and innovation hubs
• Networks and clusters: publicly funded networks, clusters and partnership programmes
• Organisations: the agencies and bodies that run any of the above

What we don’t include

• Services funded only by private money, such as consultancies, private accelerators or membership bodies, unless they deliver a publicly funded programme, in which case the programme is listed
• Internal schemes open only to an organisation’s own staff
• Programmes that have closed for good. We keep these in our archive, so the record of what existed isn’t lost
• General information pages with no service behind them

How every entry is described

Every entry uses the same common taxonomy. That means the same fields, the same categories and the same plain language, so supports can be compared like with like. No entry is ranked, scored or placed above another. Each one shows where its information came from and the date it was last checked.

Keeping the map current

Providers can update their own entries through a verified process, and our team reviews every change. We also check each entry at least once a year. If something looks out of date, anyone can tell us.

Asking to be added, changed or removed

We’re doing our best to keep this rich data as accurate as possible but it's a big job to keep on top of all of it so if we’ve missed anything, or the details have changed, let us know.

• To be added: send us the details of your organisation or programme and we’ll check it against the test above.
• To correct an entry: use the “Suggest a change” link on any entry.
• If we decline: we’ll explain which part of the test wasn’t met. You can ask us to look again, and a second member of the team will review it.

Because Novatlas maps public money, a publicly funded support that meets the test stays on the map, so that the people it was set up to serve can find it.