Technology Strategy Board Driving Innovation Competition

I have just attended the Knowledge Transfer Network's Briefing Day for their new innovation competiiton - Technology-Inspired COllaborative Research and Development.

This has six strands the relevant one being Information and Communications Technology (or software as one person put it...

There is a pot of 18 million pounds for people who manage to form collaborative consortia that are usually underpinned by University research. Open Source was mentioned a few times!!

The Technology Strategy Board is keen to support business-oriented innovation across a broad range of technologies that fall within six areas.

All projects must contain a significant element of technology innovation.

This competition will focus on projects where recent technological discoveries or breakthroughs have inspired people to innovate in a context of significant technology risk, demanding highly skilled, multi-disciplinary resources, working in a collaborative project teams.

They are especially keen to encourage innovation in new enabling technologies that have the potential to span different disciplines and may not be directly driven by society's challenges. An example is innovations that lead to new technology platforms or 'springboardsa', from which the potential commercial benefits could be realised across multiple applications.

The scope includes taking a new technology into new application areas where significant technical challenges need to be overcome. Projects will generally be at the applied research stage leading to(and possibly including some) experimental development.

ICT STRAND

The ICT Strand of the project involves invitation of proposals regarding:

Engineering of ICT systems - means to configure new and complex end-to-end ICT-based systems that are fit for purpose.

The following topics are also in the scope:

Data-driven systems - techniques and tools to build and deploy whole solutions for continuous and reliable data collection in complex environments, to serve demanding data needs.

Intelligent Systems - ways to design and exploit autonomous and/or autonomic systems that perform safely in dynamic environments, but excluding ways to extract value from collected data and information.

User-centric systems - methodologies and tools to ensure that ICT systems align with user needs, values and preferences.

Sounds like a good remit for any Open Source firms out there - interested? Download the brief here.