The UK fashion and textile industry contributes \>£32bn pa to the UK economy, yet it is an industry facing significant challenges. Consumer demands on the industry -- from fast fashion at competitive prices to manufacturing of luxury, high quality products, there is a need to ensure sustainability and ethical practices as well as address the needs of multiple channels from high-street to on-line portals. Then COVID-19 disrupted manufacturing supply chains and retail, creating unsold inventory and placing financial pressure on many businesses. This has accelerated the need to do things differently; leveraging technology, changing key processes, redesigning supply chains; to build back better with more sustainable, less wasteful and more cost effective processes, that better match customers needs with the right products, and supporting all manufacturing suppliers, logistics organisations and raw materials producers, to grow. Such capability would make the UK industry a true global leader. This project will build out a new industry digital platform that directly address these issues. It will allow manufacturers and retailers to meet emerging customer needs, more effectively managing day-to-day business delivery and global supply chains, infusing the system with more insight and transparency, using new digital technology to map organisations businesses and help them re-balance supply and demand using a new prototype set of digital tools. These same digital tools will enable us to address the long-standing environmental and social impacts of the Industry, transforming UK Fashion & Textiles into one of the most sustainable and resilient eco-systems in the world, strengthening the UK's competitive position and accelerating economic growth. Finally, the approach will also help to 'future proof' delivery, enabling issues such as the demands of Brexit to be managed as part of the solution. The defined framework will allow any size of UKFT business to participate, improving overall industry competitiveness and resilience. The project consortia has been brought together by the Future Fashion Factory Programme, one of nine ISCF-funded Creative Industries Cluster Programmes.

This project brings innovative and disruptive technologies together from IBM, Rothamsted Research, The University of Sheffield, 2Excel, STFC-Hartree Centre and Syngenta to transform the crop management market with blackgrass as its first use case. Blackgrass is a weed costing farmers more than £0.58bn/year, however data, management strategies and expertise are fragmented in the agronomy sector, slowing down UK production and competitiveness. This project aims to end this fragmentation through the provisioning of an artificial-intelligence (AI) and Big Data platform approach, where all data and expertise is collated, allowing researchers to create new evidence-based models and offer easy exploitation routes. Our newly-generated blackgrass forecasting models will be served from this platform through targeted apps or integration into existing offerings from agri-service providers. The platform will be built in an open, innovative way to enable collaboration, innovation and ease route to market for generated insights. Such disruptive, data-driven approaches will empower the UK agriculture sector to become world-leaders in the area of smart agriculture.

To implement model-based & machine learning methods & tools which enable transformation from Financial and Operational Performance Management spreadsheets into Cognitive models and provide guidance for consultants working with spreadsheets and Cognitive models in solving their clients’ problems.

The rail industry is growing fast but passenger experience within stations is often poor, particularly for the disadvantaged. But, without engaging passengers to innovate and develop solutions, the track record of success are low. The project, led by Milne Research with Costain, IBM and Institute for Manufacturing, aims to solve this problem by developing a digital & physical industry-wide innovation infrastructure for passenger engagement and innovation – Passenger Engagement and Innovation Infrastructure (PEII). Firstly, passengers need a physical interface so we will build Innovation Hubs at London Bridge and Euston stations enabling passengers to input their ideas and problems or trial and test real innovations in-the-making such as signage systems or seat designs. Often more imporant is process innovation such as making it better and easier to find your train, book or change a ticket - even letting someone know the toilets are not working! Secondly, for industry to be able to engage with passengers at the scale necessary, unlocking the power of IT is essential. Therefore, the innovation hubs will be kitted out with interactive touchscreens, VR booths and headsets etc. The entire digital innovation infrastructure will be accessible through the web, social media and integrated into a range of travel apps. In this digital world, passengers can continue to be engaged – also rewarded and recognised for their contributions. This is an industry first and we look forward to working with all passengers to help make UK rail the best in the world.