Building industrial capability to meet Defence priorities

To be competitive you must score highly against all of the merit criteria:

• Merit criterion 1: The extent to which your project will help you contribute to Defence's Sovereign Industrial Capability Priorities (50 points).
• Merit criterion 2: Your capacity, capability and resources to deliver the project (30 points).
• Merit criterion 3: The impact of grant funding (20 points).

Applications are batched and assessed every 8 to 12 weeks.

We assess your application against the eligibility criteria and then against the merit criteria. Only eligible applications will proceed to the merit assessment stage.

We refer eligible applications to an assessment panel made up of representatives of the CDIC and the Department of Defence. The panel may also seek additional advice from independent technical experts.

The panel will assess your application against the merit criteria and compare it to other eligible applications before recommending which projects to fund.

To be successful an application must score highly against each merit criterion. While we assess all applications against the same merit criteria, we will score your application relative to the project’s size and complexity, and the grant amount requested. The evidence you provide to support your application should be proportional to the size and complexity of your project.

The program delegate will make the final decision.

We will email you outlining the reasons you were unsuccessful and give you an opportunity to discuss the outcome with us.

We will email you and include in the email any specific conditions attached to the grant. 

Successful applicants must enter into a grant agreement with the Commonwealth. The grant agreement will specify the:

• reporting requirements
• payment schedule 
• milestones to receive payments

As part of the grant agreement your business must apply for membership of the Defence Industry Security Program (or be an existing member of the program). 

We'll make an initial payment on execution of the grant agreement. We'll make subsequent payments in arrears as you achieve milestones, based on your actual eligible expenditure. Payments are subject to satisfactory progress on the project.

We set aside 10% of the total grant funding for the final payment. We'll pay this when you submit a satisfactory end of project report demonstrating that you have completed any outstanding obligations for the project.

Payments will be made by direct credit into a nominated bank account.