Made Smarter Innovation Sustainability Accelerator

Made Smarter Innovation Sustainability Accelerator Programme

Accelerating sustainability through innovation

Funded by the Made Smarter Innovation Challenge and Innovate UK, the programme is led and delivered by Digital Catapult.

In a world where sustainability is paramount, the UK government has set a clear target of achieving net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. This ambitious commitment underscores the need for transformative change across industries, especially in manufacturing.

The Made Smarter Innovation Sustainability Accelerator is a national programme, designed to enable UK manufacturers to fast forward their adoption of digital solutions that deliver resource efficiency and energy efficiency (REEE).

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.

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:

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.

To help you understand if your initiative fits into what we’re looking for, we specifically would like to welcome entries at the Technology Readiness Level 4-5 (TRL 4-5).