The Technology Strategy Board has signalled the government’s commitment to supporting innovation in high value manufacturing by announcing investment of £5m in 22 new research and development feasibility projects.
This is the third investment by the Board in high value manufacturing during the last 18 months and brings the total invested by the government-funded organisation in this area to nearly £50m, in over 80 projects.
The high value manufacturing innovation feasibility projects cover a broad range of enabling technologies, from digital printing to the manufacture of medical implants using laser melting techniques, and from robot-enabled 3D precision assembly to the development of special inks to improve the security of high-value branded products.
A condition of the projects was they should begin to address the challenges set out in two of the Government’s key policy documents for 2009, namely New Industry, New Jobs and the Low Carbon Industrial Strategy. It is anticipated the projects will help establish both technical feasibility and effective collaboration networks, for further innovation work in these important areas of technology development for high value manufacturing.
Explaining the background to the latest investment, Robin Wilson, the Technology Strategy Board’s lead technologist for high value manufacturing, said: “The last funding competition we ran in this area was heavily oversubscribed and we received a huge number of outstanding applications. We were unable to fund many of the requested projects, even though they met our assessment criteria. So we were very pleased the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills made available a further £5m, which has enabled us to fund these exciting and important projects as feasibility projects.”
With a total project value in excess of £10m, the collaborative research and development funding was awarded to 22 separate consortia, with grants ranging from £60,000 to £350,000 and benefiting over 50 UK companies, about half of which are small and medium enterprises. These feasibility projects are designed to be relatively short term, requiring work to be completed by the end of 2010.
