Defence and Security Accelerator – November Funding Opportunities

Over the past month we've pushed out a couple of new "Market Explorations". These are attempts to understand the market, to help us decide whether to launch a full competition. We're looking for summaries of ideas in these two areas:

1) Future Policing - we want to gather ideas around future policing initiatives in four broad areas: Data & Information, Automation, Augmentation, and Behaviour. The deadline for submissions is 13 November 2020, and there's a lot more detail here.

2) Surgical Instrument Sterilisation in Austere Environments - we're looking for alternative ways to deliver high standards of decontamination of packed surgical items, when logistics, mobility and time are limited. We're particularly interested in turn-key, fully-integrated novel solutions which provide medical device decontamination capabilities designed for deployment in austere/challenging environments. This one's open until 8th December, and the full details are here.

We've also added a new Innovation Focus Area (IFA) to our Open Call:

3) Quantum Augmented Position, Navigation and Timing - we want proposals on short-term (<6 months) feasibility studies that provide evidence for advancing technological sensing performance and/or enhanced environmental operational capability over a 5-year time frame. Individual proposals are expected to be in the range £100-£150k. More detail here. 

And we have one focussed competition open at the moment:

4) Telexistence - This was in October's update, but as a reminder - £500k is available to develop/demonstrate systems to allow a human user to operate in an environment without physically being there. There are three challenge areas: telepresence, haptics, and robotics. The deadline for submissions is 19th November. Full details here.

5) More generally, as always, our Open Call is available for you to push in any proposals that don't fit into the areas above - the current cycle closes on 3rd December (but if that's too soon you can always aim for the next round) and details are here. If you have ideas and you're not quite sure if/where they fit, you can submit a light-touch "innovation outline" (instructions here) and I or one of my colleagues will be touch to discuss within 10 days.

Finally, a quick plug - the MOD recently published our 2020 "Science and Technology Strategy" - worth a read if you want to understand the direction that MOD is going and what our priorities are for S&T.