Innovation and Digital Transformation has become a strategic priority for the UK MOD. Recognising that military technological superiority is no longer a reality, UK Defence leadership has embraced ‘innovation’ and ‘digital transformation’ as the processes by which the Armed Forces and the Defence and Technology Industrial Base can build and sustain capability advantage as a single actor and as part of the NATO Alliance.
Additionally, the UK Armed Forces, like its core allies and partners, has shifted towards a more agile, domain-agnostic, digitally-enabled and information-centric concept of operations. This has fostered enthusiasm for working more closely with the UK’s innovation ecosystem and adopting user-oriented concept exploration, problem-solving, and digital technology generation/integration to engender more rapid testing, experimentation and acquisition of new software and digital architectures. By their very nature, multi-domain or ‘system of systems’ military operational constructs require multi-disciplinary thinking and cross-sector ideas generation within the broader UK Defence and industrial ecosystem.
Defence secretary Ben Wallace and chief scientific adviser, Angela McLean, unveiled UK’s new Science and Technology Strategy in July 2020 under which plans to boost Innovation in UK defence industry. Building on the UK’s rich heritage in science and technology, this new strategy will focus on finding and funding the breakthroughs that will shape the future, and ensure the armed forces are equipped to meet tomorrow’s threats. It will also have a renewed focus on data, including capture and curation, which will underpin research to identify threat trends and deliver generation-after-next military hardware.
The UK government will spend an extra £2 billion a year by 2020-21– a 20 per cent increase in government research and development spending- on collaboration between business and scientists as well as creating a technology fund modelled on the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa).
The UK government is proposing to set up a funding body as part of “a new approach” to backing emerging fields of research and technology, to be broadly modelled on the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which claims credit for technologies including the global positioning system and the internet. The ambition to create structures that allow for even more rapid and flexible funding chimes with proposals contained in a forthcoming government report setting out a broad vision for the UK’s post-Brexit research system.
There will also be a second stream of funding to “increase research capacity and business innovation, to further support the UK’s world-leading research base and to unlock its full potential”. The UK’s new research body, UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), will award this funding on the basis of “national excellence”, while there will also be more grant funding for Innovate UK.
The extra £2 billion , will be distributed by UK research councils and Innovate UK in two funding streams. The first is an “Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund”, a cross-disciplinary fund that will “support collaborations between business and the UK’s science base, which will set identifiable challenges for UK researchers to tackle”. Based on Darpa, the fund will back technologies “decided by an evidence-based process”.
Sarah Main, director of the Campaign for Science and Engineering (CaSE), said that the announcement was “truly exciting”. “To stay cutting edge, it will be vital that balance is maintained between discovery-led and challenge-led programmes, but I am encouraged that these decisions will rest with UKRI,” she said. Alice Gast, president of Imperial College London, said that the extra money showed that the chancellor had “recognised that investing in research and innovation is the best way to raise productivity”.
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