Proposal Guidelines

Proposal guidelines

To allow rapid and fair assessment of all proposals, CDE uses a portal with a secure online submission system

The online system operates on an account basis; details on how to open and operate an account can be found in the Account Manual.

The CDE portal has been designed with a structured set of web forms to help you draw out and highlight the key aspects of your proposal. There are four parts to the web form accessed through top-level tabs. Please complete all parts of the proposal document:

  • Military - How your idea might contribute to defence. You do not have to complete this part, but we encourage you to include your thoughts or ideas. The web form's structure prompts our assessors to use their knowledge and experience to consider how your innovation may contribute to defence and they will identify areas or concepts that you may not have included or even be aware of. Innovation - This is your idea; what it does, and how it fits into wider defence - through connections, integration or dependencies. It also allows you to summarise the intellectual property involved in your innovation and highlight benefits to stakeholders.
  • Innovation - This is your idea; what it does, and how it fits into wider defence - through connections, integration or dependencies. It also allows you to summarise the intellectual property involved in your innovation and highlight benefits to stakeholders.
  • Supply - What you require to realise your idea; including access to the technical capabilities needed to produce and test your innovation and who you may need to work with. As in the Military section, there may be some parts you cannot complete in full but we and our assessors will consider how gaps may be filled to mutual benefit through our wider knowledge of defence capabilities. In this section you are also invited to tell us how your delivery approach may be better, cheaper or faster than others.
  • Commercial - Detail the resources (funding) required by your proposal, identify the preferred Funding and contracts, proposal deliverables and, if appropriate, propose stage payments.

More detailed guidance can be found in the Proposal Manual.

The eventual output from the portal is an automatically generated pdf which can be reviewed and ultimately published and submitted to CDE. For more guidance see Submitting a proposal.

CDE is open to any idea that can contribute to UK defence - on any subject and at any time.

Special topics

Periodically we also call for proposals on special topics. These will use the same submission process but are different in three ways:

  1. they address a specific problem or need;
  2. they have ring-fenced funding;
  3. there is a cut-off date after which the proposals are assessed.

For further information see Call for Proposals.