Drivers such as climate change, supply chain resilience and the cost of energy mean that there is a growing need to invest in manufacturing efficiency, particularly across the Power Electronics Machines and Drives (PEMD) value chain.

Innovate UK’s Driving the Electric Revolution, part of UK Research and Innovation, aims to make the UK PEMD supply chain more globally competitive by investing up to £5 million in projects that enable the scale-up of PEMD manufacturing.

In this strand we are looking to fund collaborative feasibility projects that will facilitate and de-risk the transfer of knowledge, solutions and technologies from other manufacturing sectors into the UK PEMD community.

The aim is to improve manufacturing best practice in these technologies which are critical for net zero.

We would like to see the impact of these innovations on the UK PEMD supply chain demonstrated as part of your application.

Elements of the manufacturing supply chain that are considered in scope include:

- materials processing

- sub-component and component manufacturing

- sub-system integration and assembly

- final assembly of PEMD specific modules

- remanufacturing

- end of life disassembly and recycling

This list is not intended to be exhaustive. Other manufacturing process innovations may be in scope.

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Projects must be able to demonstrate that:

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- the innovation is new to and will positively impact the PEMD supply chain

- there are potential cost and energy savings, productivity and quality benefits to their business

- they will have a positive impact on the environmental, societal and governance (ESG) performance of the PEMD supply chain

- they are exploitable through future activities

- there is the potential to deliver a return on investment should the project be successful

Your project outputs should ideally have potential for cross-sector impact.

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Portfolio approach

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We will be funding a portfolio of projects across both strands that will be exploitable across multiple areas of the PEMD supply chain. These include markets, locations, strands, themes, technologies and technology maturities.

We call this a portfolio approach.

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The Challenge Director reserves the right to make sure that the portfolio of successful projects, across all Driving the Electric Revolution programmes, will have the greatest positive impact to the UK’s PEMD supply chain.

Research categories

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We will fund feasibility projects as defined in the guidance on categories of research.

Projects we will not fund

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We are not funding projects that are:

fundamental research

not collaborative

not industry led

focusing on product development

not developing capability that will enhance UK PEMD supply chains

not demonstrating potential for a credible return on investment

focused around batteries

dependent on export performance

dependent on domestic inputs usage

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