About us
About the High Value Manufacturing Catapult
The High Value Manufacturing (HVM) Catapult helps drive economic growth across the country by keeping UK manufacturing innovative, productive and globally competitive.
Each year, thousands of businesses come to HVM Catapult seeking solutions to a particular problem or looking for ways to improve the products they sell, the way they make them and the skills of their workforce which could help them attract inward investment and prosper in the global marketplace.
HVM Catapult’s national network of centres and employees provide those companies with access to world-class facilities and expertise that would otherwise be out of reach.
As part of the Innovate UK Catapult Network, HVM Catapult is the link between academia and industry to apply research, commercialising the UK’s most advanced manufacturing ideas. Working at scale and across the UK, our centres are a strategic research and innovation hub for UK industry, collaborating to accelerate industrial transformation by tackling key objectives in support of net zero, healthy living and national security.
As a delivery partner to government, we help deliver the industrial strategy and are working to ensure the UK has the people, the places and the potential to be a net zero manufacturing superpower.
Some key numbers
HVM Catapult history, funding and governance
HVM Catapult’s six centres of industrial innovation were brought together in 2011 by Innovate UK, the UK’s innovation agency, to accelerate the commercialisation of innovative new products and processes.
The Catapult concept was first proposed by Lord Mandelson and the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills in 2010, and was established by the coalition in 2011 as a long-term initiative to create new national capability in critical strategic areas.
Catapults are a flagship initiative in Innovate UK’s portfolio and recognised as a vital national innovation asset. Funding from Innovate UK has enabled the Catapult Network to develop world-leading centres of excellence in sectors which will have a significant impact on the UK’s future economy.
HVM Catapult was the first Catapult to open.
Around a third of HVM Catapult’s funding comes from government, through the core grant from Innovate UK.
Each year, HVM Catapult submits details to Innovate UK of how it proposes to utilise the grant funding allocation via the Grant Work Programme (GWP) and Outputs and Outcomes (O&O) documents. The activities proposed include a mixture of short-term projects and others which may be part of larger multi-year programmes.
HVM Catapult centres invest their allocation of core grant to develop new manufacturing technologies, aligned to the Catapult’s technical strategy and supporting their own areas of specialism.
This investment may be in:
- Capital equipment, often to prove and demonstrate a new technology, and to allow companies to trial the technology in their own application;
- Revenue activities, seeding early-stage research, developing technologies and accelerating their delivery towards application readiness. Core revenue is also deployed to convene the community that is interested in change, attract co-investment, and to build the critical mass to ensure technologies are available when required.
Other funding streams are collaborative R&D and commercial funding through our centres’ services. Based on internationally benchmarked best practices, HVM Catapult strives to secure broadly equal amounts of income from:
- Core public funding from Innovate UK for long term investment in infrastructure, expertise and capability
- Collaborative R&D projects funded jointly by the public and private sectors and awarded on a competitive basis
- Commercially funded R&D contracts
HVM Catapult is a private company limited by guarantee, but in utilising public funding, there is clear accountability to government in how it is used.
For example, there are regular meeting with Innovate UK to update on progress, and HVM Catapult also submits quarterly impact reports and an overall annual impact report to Innovate UK. Note that these documents contain commercially confidential information, but key information is released to the public via HVM Catapult’s annual report.
The HVM Catapult Board – comprised of Chair, Chief Executive Officer and Chief Operations Officer and non-executive directors – has oversight of delivery of the total HVM Catapult core grant and financial and risk management.
The HVM Catapult Management Board is comprised of the HVM Catapult Executive Leadership Team and CEOs (or approved representatives) from each of the six centres. It meets quarterly for strategic alignment and delivery reporting.
Strategic priorities
Grant funding
HVM Catapult receives grant funding annually from the UK government through Innovate UK.
This enables research and development across a range of strategic priority areas that may otherwise not occur if reliant solely upon private sector investment.
It is a critical element of HVM Catapult’s ability to bridge the so-called “valley of death” in technology readiness levels. This is the stage in development of an idea or a technology between concept and commercialisation, which is often considered high risk for investors.
Grant funding is provided to support four agreed key priority sectors within manufacturing, plus a fifth area which provides enabling activities in support of the four.
The four priority areas are:
- Industrial sustainability
- Net zero: clean energy transition
- Healthy living
- National security capability
The fifth priority is landscape transformation and it is divided into key workstreams:
- SME
- People and skills
- Supply chain
- Scale-up and invest
- Place
Grant funding is allocated across all HVM Catapult centres and is divided into two main categories:
- Core Grant: This comprises much of the grant funding and is allocated to individual centres for projects where they can bring their capabilities and expertise to a particular industry challenge.
- Special Programmes Funding (SPF): This is an allocation within the overall grant which focuses on building capability for nationally significant programmes in support of the government’s national priorities. They invariably involve all or many of our centres working collaboratively.
Our approach to equality, diversity & inclusion (ED&I)
- As part of the Innovate UK Catapult Network, HVM Catapult has been a leading partner in the Inclusivity in Innovation charter, promoting a vision for diverse and inclusive workplaces in innovation.
- We are passionate about developing an inclusive culture and environment and celebrate ED&I because it leads to better decisions, better innovation and makes our working life more rewarding and more productive. All staff should have equal opportunity and participation, and feel valued, respected and secure in their workplace.
- We will hold ED&I to include the characteristics outlined in the Equality Act 2010 {Age; Sex (and Gender); Race (and Ethnicity); Disability; Religion or belief; Sexual orientation; Gender reassignment; Marriage or civil partnerships; Pregnancy and maternity}, but also other historic barriers to opportunity, such as “class”, nationality, dialect, education and other forms of socio-economic exclusion.