Made Smarter Innovation Sustainability Accelerator – UK

Funded by the Made Smarter Innovation Challenge and Innovate UK, the programme is led and delivered by Digital Catapult, designed to accelerate sustainable manufacturing and leverage cutting-edge technologies to drive environmental impact.

As part of the programme, leading UK manufacturers will work alongside the UK’s pioneering ecosystem of technology innovators to deliver solutions that provide real world benefits to UK manufacturing, speeding up their route to achieving net zero.

By joining this programme, participants will get the opportunity to be at the forefront of driving digital innovation and helping to transform the UK manufacturing industry into a sustainable powerhouse.

Benefits and Support

• The programme offers several benefits to potential participants, targeted towards those who are interested in advancing their ideas or projects. These benefits include:
  • Selected companies will receive £75,000 to develop a challenge focused proof-of-concept
  • Down-selected companies will receive a further £100,000 for continued development of their solution within a pilot environment
  • Support network of industry and technology experts to help develop impactful proof-of-concepts and build new technology prototypes
  • Focused sessions to help develop sustainability business models and build more sustainable technology solutions
  • Engineering expertise to increase confidence in the product development and push the boundaries of the technology
  • The programme will increase a company’s investment readiness level through tailored support.

Who should apply?

• The programme seeks applications from technology innovators from the UK ecosystem who will be interested in developing technology solutions to some of the UK’s core industrial challenges.
• The technology solutions that will be considered for the Made Smarter Innovation Sustainability Accelerator are:
  • Future networks and advanced digital infrastructure (5G and the internet of things including; low powered wide area networks, NB-IoT, LIFI etc. including sensors, edge devices, wearables etc.)
  • Immersive technologies (Extended reality – virtual, augmented, mixed reality and haptics)
  • Artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI & ML)
  • Distributed ledger technologies (blockchain)
  • Quantum technologies
• Applicants will need to illustrate technological expertise that can be applied to the industry challenges set in a way that has the potential to pivot these challenges forward. The solutions proposed will need to sit within the above technology categories to be considered.
• These are the core technology areas and have been identified by us as the ones that offer the most impact and outputs to the manufacturing sector.

For more information, visit Digital Catapult.