Fri, 24 January, 2025
TWI Innovation Centres are strategic, academia-industry partnerships between TWI and leading universities, focused on accelerating research and development (R&D) to meet industrial, socio-economic and environmental needs. Working in collaboration, they enable engineering technology projects by leveraging bid capacity and expertise to win grant funding from UK and EU programmes.
This approach sees TWI Innovation Centre partners combining their complementary skills and experience, to develop novel concepts that can be further refined through project consortia and submitted as competitive proposals to funding competitions. Areas of technical expertise and interest include advanced composites, joining technologies for digital manufacturing, smart non-destructive testing, materials for harsh environments and the application of artificial intelligence (AI). Sectors that have benefited from TWI Innovation Centre project outcomes include oil and gas, automotive, renewable energy, aviation, construction and nuclear.
As well as delivering wider impacts, TWI Innovation Centres bring a number of benefits to the university partners including: access to new skills, data and equipment; increased opportunities to contribute to regional growth via the creation of R&D clusters and individual expertise; tangible expansion of the UK knowledge base through the transfer of academic research into real-world, industrial applications; and enhanced Research Excellence Framework (REF) outcomes.
For TWI, the activities of the Innovation Centres are an enabler for moving engineering technology concepts that align with the organisation’s Technology Roadmap from idea through to live project. This also benefits TWI Industrial Member companies, both through involvement in collaborative projects, and access to research, development and innovation outcomes.
Watch our new animation about TWI Innovation Centres now to find out more!