Digital Catapult

Overview

Our story

Advanced digital technologies can accelerate growth and increase productivity across the UK economy. To help reach this full potential Digital Catapult, in 2017 alone, has had meaningful engagements with 638 startups and scaleups, 42 new industrial collaborations and 31 new academic engagements to drive innovation and adoption of advanced digital technologies. To make this happen, Digital Catapult delivers three core technology programmes, across two industry sectors, driven by three regional centres and a national centre in London.

How Digital Catapult promotes development and the early adoption of advanced digital technology

We provide physical and digital facilities for experimentation and testing that would otherwise not be accessible for smaller companies.
Our innovation programmes drive collaboration and encourage use of the facilities. By bringing together small companies, corporates, researchers and investors, the right solutions are developed to solve industry challenges, increase productivity and open up new markets faster.
We connect corporations, small businesses and academic researchers to get the latest thinking into the heart of industry and discover new ways to solve big challenges in the manufacturing and creative industries.  
We convene and deliver collaborative research and development that leads to commercial exploitation and companies reducing risk.
We leverage public funding to yield increased private investment.

As well as breaking down barriers to technology adoption for startups and scaleups, our work de-risks innovation for large enterprises and uncovers new commercial applications in Immersive, Future Networks, and Artificial Intelligence technologies.

Our technology focus

Digital Catapult specialises in three areas of advanced digital technology namely, Future Networks, Artificial Intelligence and Immersive.

Digital Catapult focuses on these areas because each has demonstrated:

UK strength in both the research base and startups.
Accelerating pre-market innovation indicating that the time to act is now.
A clear global opportunity for UK companies in manufacturing or the creative industries.
A clear opportunity for Digital Catapult to add value and to speed up the processes of digital transformation.

Artificial Intelligence (AI and machine learning)

Digital Catapult is leading technology adoption in the Industrial Strategy’s AI Grand Challenge, where they call the wide range of technologies, tooling and processes involved ‘AI Plumbing’. Like actual plumbing, AI Plumbing can be complex, risky and expensive. To address these challenges, the Digital Catapult has embarked on a number of initiatives: 

They have started to map the AI Plumbing landscape in order to assist discovery, research and planning tasks. We describe the landscape here, and invite feedback.
Running their own machine intelligence projects and having DevOps and systems specialists in-house that work with our machine intelligence team to solve them, they will share how they have overcome specific AI challenges in upcoming blogs, along with useful tips and tools for doing the same.
They host meetups and workshops to illuminate some of the AI Plumbing technologies and strategies.
They have developed an ethics framework that will help companies to implement responsible AI in practice.

Key projects include Machine Intelligence Garage and ContractAI.
Read more

Future Networks (5G and Low Powered Wide Area Networks)

Digital Catapult is driving the development of future networks business models from concept in university labs, to commercial reality with our projects within IoT, 5G and LPWAN that includes Things Connected and the 5G testbed in Brighton.
Read more

Immersive (virtual, augmented, mixed reality and haptics)

Digital Catapult is making the UK the best place in the world to produce immersive content and applications through our projects such as CreativeXR, Augmentor the Immersive Labs and the first European volumetric capture studio.

Our industry focus

Advanced digital technologies have huge potential to accelerate growth and increase productivity if they are applied to real-world challenges. Digital Catapult is working within two industry sectors where we believe we can have the most impact by increasing the use of digital technology. These sectors are manufacturing and the creative industries. 

Within this our goals are to:

Accelerate the number of trailblazer companies working with advanced digital technologies.
Deliver increased applied research, development and innovation in advanced digital technologies.

Digital Catapult is uniquely positioned to bring together the right innovators, academics, corporates and investors to drive early adoption of digital technologies into industry. We run innovation programmes and offer facilities that help to translate world-leading research and innovation into products and services that will transform these industries, increase productivity and secure the UK’s future global competitiveness.
Digital technologies.

Sectors

Manufacture of food products - Manufacture of beverages - Manufacture of tobacco products - Manufacture of leather and related products - Manufacture of machinery and equipment n.e.c. - Manufacture of other non-metallic mineral products - Manufacture of paper and paper products - Printing and reproduction of recorded media - Manufacture of rubber and plastic products - Manufacture of textiles - Manufacture of other transport equipment - Manufacture of wood and of products of wood and cork, except furniture; manufacture of articles of straw and plaiting materials - Mining and quarrying - Mining of coal and lignite - Extraction of crude petroleum and natural gas - Mining of metal ores - Other mining and quarrying - Mining support service activities - Other services activities - Activities of membership organisations - Repair of computers and personal and household goods - Other personal service activities - Other manufacturing - Public administration and defence; compulsory social security - Real estate activities - Professional, scientific and technical activities - Legal and accounting activities - Activities of head offices; management consultancy activities - Architectural and engineering activities; technical testing and analysis - Scientific research and development - Advertising and market research - Other professional, scientific and technical activities - Veterinary activities - Administrative and support service activities - Rental and leasing activities - Employment activities - Travel agency, tour operator and other reservation service and related activities - Security and investigation activities - Services to buildings and landscape activities - Office administrative, office support and other business support activities

Technology

Communication networks - Cyber physical systems - Robotics - Internet of things - Artificial intelligence - Mobility & Location based technologies - Interaction technologies - Cyber security - Advanced, or high performance computing - Big data, data analytics, data handling - Virtual, augmented and extended reality - Simulation, modelling and digital twins - Software as a service and service architectures - Logistics - New media technologies

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