Digital Supply Chain Programme: Made Smarter Innovation | Digital Supply Chain Hub
Creating a virtual hub, data observatory and network of industrial living labs to optimise information flows across manufacturing supply chains.
Digital Catapult, the deep tech innovation organisation, has launched its latest Industry Challenge Led Accelerator, delivered through the UK Digital Twin Centre, to create a new route for businesses to accelerate the practical adoption of digital twins. The new programme will bring together industry leaders and innovative UK SMEs to collaborate and solve real-world challenges in high-growth sectors.
Digital twins have the potential to transform how organisations design, operate and maintain complex assets, but widespread adoption remains a challenge and many businesses struggle to identify and deploy high-value use cases. At the same time, SMEs often lack opportunities to demonstrate their technologies in real industrial environments, which can be a barrier to enabling many to scale and commercialise their solutions.
Backed by Innovate UK, the accelerator will support up to 12 UK SMEs, each receiving up to £75,000 to develop proof-of-concept solutions over the nine-month programme. Each SME will work with industry challenge owners Artemis Technologies, BAE Systems, Thales, and Vertical Aerospace to consider how deep tech innovations can be applied to the aerospace and defence sectors.
Successful applicants will join a cohort of high potential businesses and receive mentoring and technical consultancy from experts at Digital Catapult and the UK Digital Twin Centre, access to real-world expertise and insight from the industry challenge owners. Participating companies will have access to specialist facilities as part of the programme and will demonstrate their solutions at a public showcase to connect innovators with industry, investors and future customers, supporting the SMEs to scale.
The programme will support SMEs to tackle a range of real-world challenges across the maritime, aerospace and defence sectors. These include improving object detection and collision avoidance for next generation vessels with Artemis Technologies; enhancing health monitoring and predictive maintenance for uncrewed vessels with Thales; improving the efficiency and safety of safety of aircraft flight testing with Vertical Aerospace; and developing digital twins to support aircraft system health monitoring, predictive maintenance and future fleet management with BAE Systems.
SMEs from across the UK are invited to apply to take part in the accelerator programme here.
