Summary
Innovate UK, part of UK Research and Innovation, will invest up to £20million in innovation projects. These will be for innovation in digital technologies to reduce environmental impact within manufacturing processes.
The aim of this competition is to develop digital innovations to improve the sustainability of manufacturing processes. This must result in either reduced material or reduced energy consumption.
Your proposal must deliver sustainable solutions through applying digital technology development to manufacturing processes within a production facility.
Your project must demonstrate the digital innovations that will deliver sustainability improvements.
Eligibility
This competition is split into 2strands:
· Strand 1 -Digital innovation with manufacturing data
· Strand 2 -Digital innovation in manufacturing processes
Your project must apply to either Strand 1 or Strand 2.
Your project must:
· have total eligible costs between £1 million and £8 million
· not exceed the maximum grant limit of 50% of your total eligible costs for strand 1
· not exceed the maximum grant limit of 40% of your total eligible costs for strand 2
· start by 1 September 2022
· last between 12 and 24 months
· involve a single factory or multiple factories
· include both manufacturing and digital technology capabilities
The lead and at least one other organisation must claim funding by entering their costs during the application.
Scope
The aim of this competition is to develop digital innovations to improve the sustainability of manufacturing processes, resulting in either reduced material or reduced energy consumption.
Your project must apply digital technology development to improve manufacturing processes within a production facility, to deliver more environmentally sustainable production processes.
Your project must focus on developing digital solutions to:
· reduce the amount of waste or other in-process material losses through the manufacturing steps
· reduce the energy consumed by a manufacturing process
· better sequence or schedule the manufacturing operations to reduce material or energy consumption
· better separate waste materials to facilitate material reuse
Your project must be an innovative development or novel application of data or an industrial digital technology (IDT). This must result in either reduced material consumption or reduced energy consumption.
Your project must estimate the material or energy savings using the Resource Efficiency and Energy Efficiency (REEE) definitions. Savings must be from the manufacturing process, including any savings from reduction material purchases and associated embodied CO2e reduction.
Your planned outputs must be:
· a tested proposal for digital solutions to deliver more sustainable manufacturing processes
· a deployment within a manufacturing facility or very near equivalent for example a comparable development facility
· a case study outlining the digital solution, the results of the project, and qualitative and quantitative evidence of benefits identified
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