Connected Places Catapult

Connected Places Catapult is the UK’s innovation accelerator for cities, transport, and place leadership. They provide impartial ‘innovation as a service’ for public bodies, businesses, and infrastructure providers to catalyse step-change improvements in the way people live, work and travel. They connect businesses and public sector leaders to cutting-edge research to spark innovation and grow new markets and run technology demonstrators and SME accelerators to scale new solutions that drive growth, spread prosperity, and reduce carbon emissions. The Catapult has been growing its impact in the maritime sector over recent years, and sees formalising its partnership with Maritime UK as an excellent way to continue working with the sector, scaling impact and bringing expertise from across multiple other markets in the UK and globally.

The Catapult offers multi-disciplinary, systems-focussed support to the great challenges and opportunities facing global communities today, from decarbonisation of infrastructure and transport to the digitalisation of future cities. In the maritime sector, the Catapult has worked closely with industry, innovators, academia and government to deliver key work such as the UK Ports of the Future Blueprint, the Freeports Playbook, the recently announced Moving on the Mersey initiative and more, including four recent Clean Maritime Demonstrator Competition projects. The Catapult supports industry to understand the potential value of new technologies, better targeting investment and building on cross-sector experience whilst accelerCating innovative solutions to market, working together with larger technology organisations, SMEs and academia.