Small Business Research Initiative competition launches

The Small Business Research Initiative (SBRI) competition is awarding applicant organisations a share of £1.25M to devise new methods of surveying house building using satellite imagery in order to help urban planners to make better informed decisions.

The competition is based around investigating the use of technology to monitor the developments that are underway in the Waltham Forest Council area of East London after a briefing was held at TechUK in London on the start date of the competition, Monday 15^th July 2019.

Fuelling the idea behind the competition is the fact that councils do not usually have clear information about how new developments in their area are progressing and therefore they seek a system which builds an accurate timeline of development that helps urban planners to make the aforesaid informed decisions.

The potential £1.25M in funding will be provided by the GovTech Catalyst which aims to help public sector bodies take advantage of new technologies.

Throughout the course of the competition, applicants should blend existing Waltham Forest Council records, regarding items such as council tax, with others sets of data including the likes of postal addresses. They should also explore how new technologies, such as satellite imaging and a collaborative maintenance of data, can be applied to collection and analysis of data. And lastly, they need to investigate how a system may assess uncertainty in data sources as a means of increasing the accuracy of statistics for the forecasting of completion dates.

The competition has a total of two phases wherein, during the first phase, applicants will be required to carry out feasibility studies on their proposals with the potential reward for an expected number of five projects consisting of £250,000 (including VAT).

Phases two, by contrast, will entail organisations testing and developing prototypes of their projects with the two most promising projects receiving £500,000 each.

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