The Chancellor of the Exchequer, the Rt Hon Philip Hammond MP has announced today (Friday 10th August 2018) that WMG, at the University of Warwick, has been awarded £100m in Government funding for WMG’s work in the High Value Manufacturing Catapult.
It forms part of a £780 million announcement of which £270.9 million has been awarded to the West Midlands (to WMG and MTC for their work in the High Value Manufacturing Catapult, and the Energy Systems Catapult in Birmingham).
The Chancellor of the Exchequer, Philip Hammond, said:
“It is by backing innovative British companies to grow and create jobs that we will continue this progress and build an economy fit for the future. Today’s £780 million investment will support innovators across the country to create the technologies of the future, and the better, highly-paid jobs we urgently need.”
Archie MacPherson Chief Executive, WMG centre HVM Catapult said:
“We are delighted with the new 5-year funding package for the WMG centre High Value Manufacturing Catapult resulting in £100m funding for WMG. The Catapult programme at WMG focuses on helping the UK become a world leader in Low Emissions Mobility, from lightweighting vehicle components to make cars more fuel efficient, to accelerating the development of next generation technologies for energy efficient and autonomous transport.
The investment will enable WMG to further expand its innovation capability to support companies of all sizes, to help them grow and create highly skilled jobs for the UK, in order to address the challenges of productivity, competitiveness and anchoring product manufacture in the UK.”
Business Secretary the Rt Hon Greg Clark MP added:
“We are a nation of innovators, creators and entrepreneurs. Through our modern Industrial Strategy, backed by the largest investment in R&D in 40 years, we are boosting growth, creating new highly skilled jobs and helping change people’s lives for the better.
This government wants to make the UK the most innovative nation in the world and the investment in our world leading catapult network will play a key role in building on UK strengths, bringing new ideas and products to market and helping drive local economies across the UK.”
Dr Ian Campbell, Interim Executive Chair of Innovate UK, said:
“Today’s significant announcement means our world-class network of catapults can build on their success and continue helping thousands of businesses across the UK to undertake innovative R&D. This long-term investment will mean the catapults can help deliver the Grand Challenges of the Industrial Strategy in their sectors and help the UK achieve its ambition to raise investment in R&D to 2.4% of GDP by 2027.
In their first five years the catapults have supported around 3,000 small businesses to develop and exploit new technologies. They operate more than £850m world-class facilities and are also training hundreds of apprentices and doctoral students, such as at the High Value Manufacturing Catapult where in the last year 900 apprentices have gained invaluable practical experience with cutting-edge technologies used in modern manufacturing.”
The WMG centre HVM Catapult focuses on Low Emission Mobility, Connected and Autonomous Vehicles (CAV) and the supply chain. This is directly aligned to the Government’s ‘Road to Zero’ vision for the transport sector of zero emissions, zero accidents and zero congestion. This is underpinned by WMG’s digital manufacturing capability that drives improvement in productivity and competitiveness across sectors.
The Catapult network supports sectors and technologies that are going to be in high demand in the years ahead. It brings together the best of UK business, science and engineering, such as the world leading applied technology researchers here in WMG, to work side by side in research and development to ‘catapult’ products from ideas to market.
About WMG
WMG is a world leading research and education group and an academic department of the University of Warwick, established by Professor Lord Kumar Bhattacharyya in 1980 in order to reinvigorate UK manufacturing through the application of cutting edge research and effective knowledge transfer.
WMG has pioneered an international model for working with industry, commerce and public sectors and holds a unique position between academia and industry. The Group’s strength is to provide companies with the opportunity to gain a competitive edge by understanding a company’s strategy and working in partnership with them to create, through multidisciplinary research, ground-breaking products, processes and services.
Every year WMG provides education and training to schoolchildren through to senior executives. There is a growing part-time undergraduate programme for apprentices, as well as full-time undergraduates. The postgraduate programmes have over 2,000 students, in the UK and through centres in China, India, Thailand, South Africa and Malaysia.
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