Delivering impact at scale
Dr Lynne O’Hare
Chief Portfolio Officer, HVM Catapult
The High Value Manufacturing Catapult launched a portfolio of priority programmes in 2024 to enhance our domestic capabilities, give our businesses competitive advantage in a global marketplace and help UK industry deliver positive change.
The four priority areas target the journey to net zero, in industrial sustainability and clean energy, national resilience, healthy living and national security. These strategic programmes are underpinned by a suite of critical enablers delivering transformative work in skills, for SMEs, increasing access to finance, focusing on AI and digital technologies, and spanning across the UK’s communities.
Funded by Innovate UK, our programmes in these strategic priority areas will deliver impact at scale by bringing together the considerable capabilities of the HVM Catapult centres and key partners.
Focusing on a small number of challenges, we will tackle challenges at scale and pace to deliver significant impact across our portfolio.
We are bringing together the collective expertise of the 3,500 people that work within HVM Catapult, leveraging billions of pounds of investment in the network to date and collaborating with government, regulators, industry and academia to solve our greatest industrial challenges.
This may include developing new technology to make diagnosis, treatment and prevention in the NHS more efficient, resulting in significant cost savings. Or it could include uprating UK industry to have a greater role in manufacturing for the defence sector at a time of increased global uncertainty.
It could include supporting the creation of a hydrogen economy, as set out in our flagship Hydrogen Innovation Initiative. Equally, it could see UK manufacturing evolve and grow to help us shift from a net importer to a net exporter of goods, balancing the service industry.
The general election in July saw a new government with an increased emphasis on economic growth and the redoubling of efforts in achieving the UK’s legally binding net zero targets. Manufacturing has a major role in reaching those goals.
Greater emphasis on green energy and green jobs with sustained economic growth will require innovation to achieve success. That’s where HVM Catapult can make the biggest impact for UK manufacturers and where our priority programmes will target those areas expected to have the biggest impact.
Our first tranche of projects are set to deliver at the end of the 2024/25 financial year, delivering outcomes which will have an even greater positive impact on our industry industry and our economy.