David Elson Innovate UK
Update from Innovate UK
We are living in most interesting times. It seems all too easy at the moment to adopt a state of concerned bewilderment but I want to focus on some great positives in the marine and maritime sector.
In January 2013 we ran our first collaborative R&D competition focused directly on the needs of the marine and maritime industry. The Vessel efficiency: Piloting UK marine and maritime innovation competition was delivered in partnership with Dstl and sought to deliver viable solutions for more efficient marine vessels. The call resulted in grant funding support to nine projects.
We fully recognise that innovation is challenging and can disrupt business models so these complex projects take time but we are now seeing real tangible outputs. The projects covered a broad range of technologies including energy harvesting, alternative fuels, foil technology, composites, graphene, routing, hybrid systems, vessel design and fouling prevention.
The fact that we have such a diversity of projects demonstrates the depth of capability in the UK marine and maritime sector. It has been a privilege to watch partnerships form, technologies develop and companies grow. It has also become apparent that the benefit of these programmes is far more extensive than the grant funding alone.
Involvement has helped companies to secure further investment. “The Innovate UK award opened the door for the WITT technology to engage with UK manufacturers, it also raised our company profile, both in the UK and overseas, which enabled us to achieve further investment,” Mairi Wickett, Witt Energy.
The programme has helped to reduce risk and enabled the development of IP: “Participation in Innovate UK supported projects has enabled TML to develop an extensive portfolio of wholly owned intellectual property. By sharing time and financial risk with Innovate UK, TML now has a clear route to market for these technologies…” Ken Wittamore, TML.
Some excellent and enduring collaborations have been built: “The partners developed into a great team, we even had some fun, we are still all working together” John Allen, Cox Powertrain. “We gained exposure to a new potential market and have developed relationships with companies involved in this business area” Tom Royle, PE Composites. “Gaining access to the funding was very useful, but key to the project for Fugro was working as a team with both Southampton University and Triskel Marine” Trevor Pitt, Fugro GEOS.
22 Society of Maritime Industries Handbook & Members’ Directory 2017
The quality of these projects provided the impetus to support the industry in three further collaborative R&D competitions covering vessel efficiency and maritime autonomous systems. Details of the programme can be found under the
project title of Marine Vessel Efficiency in the spreadsheet available at the ‘Innovate UK funded projects since 2004’ part of
www.gov.uk
This type of collaborative R&D competition is now being delivered differently as Innovate UK has restructured to simplify our approach. We are now arranged in four sector groups, namely Emerging and Enabling Technologies, Materials and Manufacturing, Infrastructure Systems, and Health and Life Sciences.
Each of these sector groups are running two R&D competitions this financial year which are comparatively broad in scope and in addition there are two open competitions. Many of these calls will have opportunities that are applicable to the sector.
Finally there are more interesting times ahead in the most positive sense as Innovate UK will combine with the research councils in 2018 to become UK Research and Innovation. The details will follow in due course but the extracts below are from the Autumn Statement and outline exciting new opportunities for business innovation.
To help boost UK productivity the National Productivity Investment Fund (NPIF) will provide an additional £4.7 billion by 2020‐21 in R&D funding… Through the NPIF the government will fund:
INDUSTRIAL STRATEGY CHALLENGE FUND – a new cross‐ disciplinary fund to support collaborations between business and the UK’s science base… The fund will be managed by Innovate UK and research councils…
INNOVATION, APPLIED SCIENCE AND RESEARCH – additional funding will be allocated to increase research capacity and business innovation…. Once established, UKRI will award funding on the basis of national excellence and will include a substantial increase in grant funding through Innovate UK.
David Elson is the Lead Technologist for the marine and maritime industry at Innovate UK and can be contacted at
david.elson@innovateuk.gov.uk
For more information on the work of Innovate UK see
www.gov.uk/innovateuk
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