Innovator International is one of three commercial endorsing bodies approved by the UK Home Office after the 2022 rationalisation that cut the field from roughly 100 endorsers down to three commercial operators plus one government-sponsored body. Richard Harrison, who runs the endorsement assessment side, has been unusually public about the framework he uses — and about the behaviour he rejects.
His framework is tighter than most applicants realise. It turns on a deceptively simple equation, a specific capital rule, and a specific scalability benchmark. If your application fails on any of these three, it fails regardless of how the rest looks.
The innovation equation
Harrison's framing of innovation is formal. There is no room for interpretation:
Innovation equals something different plus someone who wants it plus someone who can sell it — and if you don't have all three components there then you don't have innovation.
Source: innovatorinternational.com.
Three components. Miss one, fail the pillar.
Something different is the novelty component — the product, service, methodology, or technical approach that doesn't already exist in the UK market in a form close enough to be a substitute.
Someone who wants it is the demand component — evidence that a real customer will pay for the thing, not a belief that they might. Desk research is not enough (see the UK market research evidence endorsing bodies accept). Harrison is blunt:
We expect engagement with your customer base that says 'hey this solution resonates with us, we like it and we would potentially or we would purchase it.' So we need some sort of engagement.
Someone who can sell it is the founder component — the applicant's ability to translate the technical proposition into revenue inside a UK regulatory and commercial context. "Someone who can sell it" is usually the founder. If the founder has no sales track record in the sector, the equation wobbles.
The four innovation questions
Harrison's assessors run every application against four questions:
- Is it sufficiently unique compared to alternative solutions?
- Who is the target client base and how do they benefit?
- Could it be relatively easily copied without extensive research?
- Has the founder played a key role in the research, design and implementation?
Question four is the one that trips ghost-written applications. If the founder can't describe the design choices in their own words, the assessor knows.
The displacement test
Innovator International rejects applications that would displace existing UK businesses. This is a criterion that doesn't appear in every endorsing body's framework, but it's a first-class filter here.
The purpose of this program is they want to bring businesses into the UK that have intellectual property but they don't want to do that with no net financial gain. They don't want to displace or put out of business the UK resident businesses that already exist.
Harrison gives a specific example of a rejection:
We had a superb application from a packaging company saying 'Hey we've got this amazing packaging solution we want to bring it into the UK,' but it wasn't substantially different to what already existed and that would displace existing packaging businesses in the UK.
The logic: the visa is designed for net economic contribution. If your business succeeds by taking market share from an existing UK competitor rather than by creating new demand, you've moved revenue around rather than added to the economy. Covered in depth in the displacement test.
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Get your assessmentThe £100k-per-employee rule
Scalability has a specific numerical anchor at Innovator International, and it's the single most actionable benchmark in either public interview with either endorsing body:
A business should generate £100,000 per employee. So a good consultant would generate £100,000 a year. A 10-person business should generate minimum of a million a year.
This is a rule of thumb, not a hard floor — but it's the number the assessor is calculating when they read your financial forecast. If your headcount projection says 10 employees by year three and your revenue projection says £600k, the assessor sees a £60k-per-employee business. That fails the scalability test by Harrison's framing.
The rule works at both ends. You can't claim you'll employ 20 people on £500k revenue — the unit economics don't support it. You also can't claim £3m revenue with two employees — the execution model doesn't hold up.
See £100k per employee: the hidden scalability benchmark for how to build the forecast, and why viability of the applicant is the #1 assessment factor for the companion piece on how Envestors weights the founder.
The 20% Prince2 contingency
The old £50,000 investment threshold is gone. What replaced it is stricter in practice:
If a company needs £80,000 to get to a point where it's sustainable they have to provide that £80,000.
The funding must match the applicant's own cash-flow forecast through to break-even. Harrison then layers on a project-management contingency:
Add a 20% contingency — the Prince2 project planning standard. If they need 80, I'd say if they've got close to 100 they're probably in a good place.
Three hard constraints on the funding:
- It must be liquid cash. Not house equity, not invoice receivables, not "raising when I arrive."
- It must be demonstrable at application. A bank statement, an investment agreement, or revenue from an existing business that runs through the cash-flow forecast.
- It must reach break-even, not just month 12. If the plan says break-even at month 18, the funding has to cover month 18 plus contingency.
Harrison is specific on the "I'll raise in the UK" problem:
There's this perception that getting investment is easy and as you know, it's far from it.
See the 24-month runway rule and the 20% Prince2 contingency for full treatment.
IP eligibility: the nuances that trap applicants
Intellectual property protection is not mandatory for initial endorsement. But one of the six achievements required for Indefinite Leave to Remain is "R&D that results in an application for IP protection," and the specific types that qualify are narrower than most applicants realise.
Patents and design rights — permitted.
Copyright — ineligible. Harrison's explanation is procedural:
You don't apply for copyright, it's automatically granted, therefore if you can't apply for it you can't use copyright under those specific rules.
Trademarks — permitted only when "intrinsically connected to the outcome of the R&D." A brand name on its own doesn't qualify. A trademark tied to a specific research-derived methodology can.
If I said I'm going to trademark our business maturity matrix which is a specific tool that we developed, designed and tailored — a lot of research went into that tool, so I could potentially trademark the name and have that as an eligible claim.
The underlying principle: what matters is the R&D, not the protection. You can hold a trademark, a patent, or a design right, but the assessor wants evidence of research that produced something genuinely new. Combining three existing methods doesn't count.
The outsourcing boundary
Founders can outsource coding. Founders can outsource manufacturing. Founders cannot outsource the design of the solution itself — that's where the IP is generated.
It's different saying 'hey design me something that manages risk' than it is saying 'right I've designed this solution for risk, I want it to do this, this and this' — that specific spec to a coding company is quite a different thing.
If you wrote the spec and gave it to a development agency, you own the IP. If you said "build me something in fintech" and the agency designed it, the agency owns the IP, and you have an application that fails the "founder played a key role" test.
The 28% endorsement rate
Innovator International publishes that 28% of applications are endorsed. Harrison's reading of the statistic is sharper than most applicants assume:
That doesn't mean you've got a 28% chance of being successful because if I turn that around, most of those failures come from business plan factories.
A business plan factory, in Harrison's terminology, is an intermediary that takes an applicant's CV and generates a plan with minimal founder input — usually for a fee in the thousands, often with success-based bonuses. These applications fail because they can't survive assessor scrutiny.
Backing out that population, the success rate for a genuinely-prepared direct applicant is materially higher than 28%. See ghost-written ideas and buzzword traps for the detection patterns.
The 12- and 24-month checkpoints
Endorsement isn't the finish line. The visa is structured as a contract:
The government have said 'hey you can come into the UK to build your business' but your half of the contract is that you build that business — that's what you signed up to.
At 12 months, the original business plan is the benchmark. At 24 months, the bar is higher. Harrison and his team can and do withdraw endorsement when progress doesn't match the originally endorsed plan. Covered in 12/24/36-month contact point meetings.
External context
The Home Office Innovator Founder Visa guidance sets the underlying criteria that endorsing bodies operationalise. Innovator International is listed among the commercial endorsers approved after the 2022 rationalisation.
Key takeaways
- Innovation = something different + someone who wants it + someone who can sell it. All three components required.
- The displacement test is first-class: an idea that takes market share from a UK incumbent rather than creating new demand will be rejected.
- £100k per employee per year is the scalability benchmark. Forecasts below that ratio fail.
- Funding must reach break-even per your cash-flow forecast, plus a 20% Prince2 contingency, and must be liquid.
- Copyright doesn't qualify for the IP settlement achievement. Patents, design rights, and R&D-linked trademarks do.
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