10 June 2024
by Jonathan Andrews
The UK’s Infrastructure Industry Innovation Partnership (i3p) will move to a new home at Connected Places Catapult, the UK’s innovation accelerator for cities, to better access innovation expertise from across the public and private sectors.
The move aims to support collaboration and to take advantage of the Catapult’s close proximity to existing links to the infrastructure sector including the Digital Twin Hub, Freight Innovation Fund Cluster and 3Ci (the Cities Commission for Climate Investment).
“Cities are the places where many forms of infrastructure meet,” Paul Wilson, Chief Business Officer at Connected Places Catapult, told Cities Today. “We are increasingly understanding cities as systems of systems and identifying the interrelationships and dependencies between different types of infrastructure. Cities will benefit from how innovations will be scaled more quickly when we work together across sectors in common themes.”
i3P’s mission is to facilitate impactful collaborative innovation, enabling the UK infrastructure industry to deliver improved and more sustainable infrastructure assets for society and the UK economy. The body also aims to grow its membership and extend its impact in this next phase.
“By supporting the infrastructure industry to embrace innovative new solutions, cities will bear witness to the wide range of benefits that infrastructure improvements can provide across areas including decarbonisation, productivity and safety,” added Wilson.
Since 2016, i3P has been hosted within Innovate UK Business Connect, where it was co-created in partnership with industry in 2016. After a review of potential new host organisations, Connected Places Catapult was identified as being best placed to support i3P’s new ambitions and will move in the coming months.
John Norton, Head of Technical Strategy and Innovation at Nuclear Restoration Services and co-chair of i3P said: “i3P exists to make collaborative transformational innovation happen. By moving to Connected Places Catapult I’m confident we can be even more effective at supporting major infrastructure projects to innovate.”
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