Deadline: September 28, 2025
The Defence Testbed Accelerator is part of the Made Smarter Innovation | Digital Supply Chain Hub programme, aiming to enable the Ministry of Defence (MoD) and its supply chain to securely manage and share manufacturing design data to support and increase agility in distributed additive manufacturing of parts.
The focus areas for this opportunity include securely managing manufacturing design data, creating proof-of-concept solutions for challenges around data consolidation and sharing, and enabling secure extraction, transmission, presentation, and use of Technical Data Packs (TDP) metadata to authorised supply chain stakeholders.
The Ministry of Defence faces challenges such as long lead times, part obsolescence, and limited flexibility in traditional manufacturing, and is exploring additive manufacturing technologies to increase agility. To enable effective additive manufacturing, there is a need for a consolidated, secure platform to access, share, and deploy manufacturing design data across the MoD’s supply chain. Currently, manufacturing data is fragmented, held privately by OEMs in isolated systems with limited sharing methods, restricting visibility and integration with additive manufacturing processes.
The Defence Testbed Accelerator seeks up to five UK tech SMEs to develop proof-of-concept solutions addressing two key challenges. The first challenge is to build connector-layer software capable of collecting design metadata from various Product Lifecycle Management systems into a consolidated platform, exposing this metadata in a standardised format for a digital inventory. The second challenge is to develop a federated inventory solution that provides a unified, standardised user interface to view, access, and share this data with appropriate access controls for multiple stakeholder classes, including MoD and manufacturers.
Participants will benefit from access to a testbed simulating real-world manufacturing environments without disrupting day-to-day operations, allowing experimentation with secure data exchange across the UK’s additive manufacturing landscape. Funding of up to £100,000 is available for selected applicants who are UK-based businesses holding Cyber Essentials certification. The programme offers industry partnerships, technical mentorship, validation opportunities, and networking, culminating in the accelerator showcase event in 2026.
Applications close at 23:59 on Sunday 28 September 2025, with interviews for shortlisted applicants in October, and the programme commencing in November 2025. Applicants must undertake the work in the UK and meet financial and security requirements stated by the programme to be eligible.
For more information, visit Digital Catapult.
