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Our Mission

Our mission is to help British businesses address the grand challenges of today in order to create Connected Places, fit for the future.

New and emerging technologies promise to deliver many benefits to the ways we live and travel in towns, cities and rural areas.

However, the complexity of the systems which must be navigated to introduce new products and services in this space, coupled with strict regulatory environments, place a constraint on businesses seeking to exploit such opportunities.

Meanwhile conservative commissioning cultures and constrained public budgets similarly limits demand, meaning that the much-needed upgrades – and their benefits – are not easily achieved. This is the market failure that the Connected Places Catapult exists to address.

Our Role

As part of the Catapult Network we:

  • work with industry, together with regional, national and international partners, to commercialise innovation in a way that drives long-term benefit to the UK economy;
  • provide businesses in the sector or technology domain with access to the appropriate mixture of expertise, skills, facilities and equipment needed for them to invest in innovation and commercialisation where these are not readily available due to market failure or commercial risk;
  • work collaboratively with other Catapults, and with the wider R&D ecosystem, to enable the development of innovative solutions to key challenges in the Catapult’s sector;
  • take an active role in removing industry-wide barriers to innovation and commercialisation where they exist.

As a systems Catapult, our role is to work across boundaries and bureaucracies, bringing demand and supply sides together to unlock new markets and drive growth within complex systems – we do the ‘difficult first thing’ that enables new possibilities and new value. We are less concerned with proving that an innovative technology works than with demonstrating and validating how it might be used within a given system – and what issues and implications its use may have.

Crucially, despite the huge potential benefits of reforming these markets, regulation-driven inertia and the vested interests of providers who benefit from maintaining the complex and fragmented status quo quashes any efforts from within the system to resolve its own failings. Bringing sovereign bodies to the same table to wrestle out shared standards and approaches, challenging the grip of vested interests, and doing so with honest neutrality demands public investment.

For the Connected Places Catapult, this translates into:

  • Boosting demand for innovation through investment in tools, resources and platforms that cultivate confidence and capability among buyers, helping them to be intelligent and progressive customers of innovation.
  • Increasing the supply of proven products and services that meet market demand through investing in technology demonstration, impact assessment, development of interoperable standards and business showcasing.
  • Fostering new markets through investing in expanding access to data, bringing our multidisciplinary academic networks and diverse SME ecosystems together in new and unusual combinations, market analysis and partnerships with government departments and regulators that leverage the power of the state to dismantle market barriers and open new spaces for experimentation.