Funding Programme - NPL

A new funding programme, Analysis for Innovators (A4I), offers cutting edge R&D, expertise and facilities to UK companies that want to solve an analysis or measurement problem. A share of £6.5 million is available for any UK business to work with world-leading organisations, such as NPL, on solutions that will boost productivity and competitiveness. The competition is open until noon on 1 February and a briefing event is being held on Thursday 12 January. Successful stage 1 applicants must be available to attend mandatory consortium-building events.

The ultimate aim of the programme is to improve companies' overall performance by offering funding and measurement and analysis expertise for projects that can show a positive business impact through solving an existing problem. Types of problems might include:

• improving products through better understanding and control of structure, mechanism or function
• undesirable variation in product or process performance
• repeated unexplained product failures
• extension of asset in-service life
• improving quality and throughput of products

Innovate UK has allocated £3M to fund innovation projects in this competition, and NPL has itself allocated £2M towards the total £6.5M.

The call is open to all sizes of companies and sectors. To be eligible to be involved in an Analysis for Innovators project, you must:

• be a UK-based business
• carry out your project in the UK
• work with one of the four partner organisations, of which NPL is one, in Stage 2

For details visit www.npl.co.uk