Digital Catapult collaborates with the South London Partnership’s InnOvaTe Project

Digital Catapult has announced a new partnership with the South London Partnership (SLP) InnOvaTe Project, an initiative exploring the use of Internet of Things (IoT) technologies to address community challenges and deliver sustainable economic growth.

The project will see SLP – a sub-regional collaboration of five London boroughs (Croydon, Kingston upon Thames, Merton, Richmond upon Thames and Sutton) – work with Digital Catapult to develop IoT solutions that address relevant use cases for citizens and local businesses and to improve service provision, with the ultimate aim of delivering a multi-purpose IoT platform.

The project aims to support business retention and sustainable economic growth, while assessing pilots’ potential to deliver significant savings to further borough councils.

Commenting on the project, Alex Gluhak, Head of Technology IoT at Digital Catapult, said: “We’re incredibly excited to be supporting the South London Partnership on this groundbreaking and market-leading initiative. By integrating connected technologies into our community spaces and built environment, we can gain a far clearer picture of how these are being used. Equipped with this data-insight, councils will be in a far better position to make decisions on a whole range of issues.”

Councillor Ruth Dombey, Leader of Sutton Council, said: “This project is a great example of how we are being ambitious for Sutton. We could use air quality and location data to show how people’s health is affected in certain areas, allowing us to make plans to reduce pollutants to create cleaner and healthier places and help businesses to thrive in more vibrant town centres. We could investigate smart street lighting systems that selectively dim or brighten the lights depending on weather, traffic flows, the time of day or upon requests from emergency services. Smart traffic lights could improve traffic flow, reducing emissions, saving fuel. Local restaurants could tailor their opening times based on where and when people visit certain locations. Drivers could detect the nearest available parking spot, saving time and fuel. These are just a few ideas that could help regenerate the borough. The benefits to residents and businesses could be huge, making Sutton an even greater place to live, work and raise a family.”

Digital Catapult will act as advisory and assurance partner to support SLP in their stakeholder engagement to develop a programme of activities as well as supporting the delivery of this activity as required. This begins with a series of five targeted innovation workshops to engage businesses, the local community and internal stakeholders within each of the SLP councils. The workshops will take place in September and November 2019 in respective boroughs and are free to attend by SLP stakeholder groups.

SLP was awarded £4 million for the InnOvaTe project by the Strategic Investment Pot (SIP) as part of the London Councils Business Rates Retention scheme, administered by the City of London Corporation.

The learnings from the InnOvaTe project will be used to inform possible future adoption of this new technology at a much larger scale.