Digital Catapult launches Technology Accelerator

Last week, Digital Catapult launched the Made Smarter Technology Accelerator by calling on medium and large manufacturing industry partners to participate. The programme aims to help manufacturers solve some of their key challenges, as well as fast-forwarding and shaping the UK’s technology adoption directly into industry.

Following a successful onboarding, partners will work together to set industry challenges that will see companies from the UK’s world-leading digital technology innovation community develop prototypes that will ultimately answer and solve these problems.

The Made Smarter Technology Accelerator is seeking partners in the following five themes:

• Intelligent factory management and control
• Intelligent product verification and validation
• Transparent and data-driven procurement
• Digitally enabled factory workforce
• Resource measurement and analytics

By focusing on these themes, digital innovators will drive multiple outcomes for the manufacturing sectors: to aid economic recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic, improve productivity, increase market capitalisation, export growth and accelerate sectors towards industrial net zero.

Dr Jeremy Silver, CEO of Digital Catapult, said: “This last year has been incredibly difficult for many industries, and manufacturing has not escaped the impact of COVID-19. At the same time, the industry is grappling with the major global challenge of reaching net zero by 2050 and figuring out how technology can help to do that. The combination of these forces means that innovation and collaboration have never been more necessary. The Made Smarter Technology Accelerator is designed to help boost productivity and aid the recovery of industry. Ultimately, we hope this will lead to the creation of a more sustainable and resilient manufacturing sector in the UK.”

There are different levels of involvement for partners depending on the level of investment. Eight industry Challenge Owners are being invited to shape and set the challenges to be addressed by the start-ups and scale-ups with their tech innovations. In return, partners will gain direct access to the outputs and learnings of the programme as well as have prototypes developed for challenges they set.

Jürgen Maier, Chair of Digital Catapult and Co-Chair of Made Smarter, added: “In the tumultuous times we face, it can be tempting to simply cut costs rather than invest. Yet, in the long-term, this approach runs the risk of businesses getting left behind. For the UK manufacturing sector to thrive and become a world leader, we need to find ways to encourage innovation and adoption of digital technologies. The Made Smarter Technology Accelerator – and the wider Made Smarter national movement – is designed to do just that by fostering relationships between technology innovators and manufacturers to solve genuine industry challenges.”

The programme is set to drive forward the adoption of technologies in four focus area, with solutions in the following technology areas:

• Artificial intelligence and machine learning (natural language processing, machine vision, deep learning etc.)
• Immersive technologies including extended reality (virtual, augmented, mixed reality and haptics)
• Future networks and advanced digital infrastructure (5G, low powered wide area networks, the internet of things, NB-IoT, LIFI etc.)
• Distributed systems (distributed ledger technologies such as blockchain)

This programme is part of the Made Smarter national movement and is delivered by Digital Catapult and funded by UKRI through the Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund. Businesses – both industry partners and those in the digital technology innovation community – can register their interest via madesmartertech.uk.

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