Led by Digital Catapult, the Last Mile Living Lab (LMLL) seeks to explore and develop delivery resource management infrastructure to tackle the challenging and costly "last mile" of delivery.
Made Smarter Innovation Hubs are fully funded test beds, living labs and other development environments. Their purpose is to drive innovation by enabling the testing of digital solutions.
The Digital Supply-Chain Innovation Hub (DSCIH) will establish and nurture an ecosystem that connects expertise from supply-chain experts in many of the UKs most important manufacturing industries with technology providers, research organisations and academics to improve their competitiveness, resilience, productivity, and sustainability. It will combine >£10m in private co-investment with £10m in public funding over 4 years to accelerate commercial integration of industrial digital technologies by a wide range of UK manufacturing supply-chains.
The Hub will be managed by the Digital Catapult, collaborating with HVMC, NPL and TWI. The consortium are already active members of the government's flagship, "Made Smarter" programme of R&D support to the UKs manufacturing sector.
The Hub will rapidly establish a national "network of excellence" in digital supply-chains by cross linking existing networks, seeded by existing relationships and the previous successes of the Made Smarter programme, facilitating collaboration between industries and across supply-chains. Any UK based organisation with supply-chain or digital solution expertise will be able to bid for access to ISCF co-funding, expertise, and testbeds to deliver £8m portfolio of digital innovation projects, helping accelerate digitisation of the UK's critical manufacturing supply-chains.
The Hub will deliver five "flagship" projects which will act as exemplar testbeds:
The Hub will monitor, impact assess and disseminate transferable lessons-learned to accelerate technology transfer between supply-chains.
The Hub will be supported by ISCF Made Smarter funding until March 2025. Thereafter, the Hub will become self-sustaining, funded by industry to ensure UK manufacturing supply-chains continue digital transformation, driving improvements in competitiveness, resilience, and sustainability for decades to come.
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