About us and the Digital Catapult

David DunnCEO, Sunderland Software City

Sunderland Software City – What we Do

80% of our time is spent supporting businesses:• Technical Due Diligence• Market Understanding an Access• Creating Opportunity

20% of our time is spent developing skills:• Market awareness• Connecting supply and demand

• Precision Medicine Catapult

• Energy Systems Catapult

DEFINITION: Catapult

A catapult is a technology and innovation centre where the best of the UK's businesses, scientists and engineers can work side by side on research and development, transforming ideas into new products and services to generate economic growth.

Catapults add an important new dimension to complement existing research and development programmes established by Innovate UK.

All catapults use the power of people and organisations working closely together to unlock opportunity, reduce innovating risk and speed new products and services towards commercial reality.

Catapult centres will help businesses to adopt, develop and exploit innovative products and technologies. They offer concentrated expertise, access to cutting edge equipment and specialist facilities to develop and test ideas in reality.

Controlled Delivery of Data

KEY FACTS• Project work relevant to ‘digital’ and ‘non-digital’ companies

• Focus on sharing data for mutual benefit and overcoming all the problems associated with sharing

• £500k of Digital Catapult spend in the region (≈£2m project)

• Builds on current expertise to carve out an international reputation for the North East and its businesses

• Physical Centre in Sunderland

• Benefits of close links to a national project

• Ground work to find some early examples of data owners releasing data

• Big push on engaging non-digital companies (i.e. your customers)

• Physical centre opening in March with calendar of events

• More opportunities to engage on Digital Catapult Projects

Between now and September ‘15

It’s not all Catapult…

North East Specialisms• Machine to Machine Communications• Cloud Computing / SaaS • System Design & Integration

TECH NORTH

Areas of Focus• Teacher – Business Connections• CSR awards for SMEs• Apprenticeship Hub• Apprenticeship Pilots• Aggregating Demand

Call to Action

1. Identify potential candidate projects• Non-digital companies with challenges

and data2. Identify digital companies who can help

on projects (NE initially)3. Support the process4. Skills – get involved

QUESTIONS?