MBDA seeking proposals to fund innovation and technology projects

Concept art of missile
© Mourad Cherfi.

The Complex Weapons Innovation and Technology Partnership (CW ITP) is making its second annual offer of funding. The Anglo-French programme is looking to collaborate with Industry, SMEs and Academia on pioneering research projects that can, or are, developing novel and exploitable technologies.

Sponsored by the UK Ministry of Defence and France’s Direction générale de l’armement (DGA), the CW ITP has a budget of up to €13M per year to deliver a research framework and fund proposals that will mature technologies that could provide the next major advance in complex weapons.

Technology applications and collaborations

Whilst the vision for the technologies is to enhance the UK and France’s complex weapons capability for the 2030’s and beyond, the CW ITP welcomes proposals from in and outside the defence sector. In particular, from SMEs, academic institutions and research centres in the UK and France.

Projects will also collaborate with French or British Global Defence Industry players – MBDA, CEA, Leonardo UK, Roxel, Safran and Thales – who head up the Technical Areas of the CW ITP that the technologies would be applicable to.

A new challenge

Projects and research proposed do not have to restrict themselves to a singular Technical Area of the CW ITP. This call is also setting a ‘Dynamic Challenge’ for proposals with a focus on rapid development & manufacturing. These can, or will, cut across all or some of existing those areas and are welcomed.

These could be new and innovative manufacturing technologies minimize operating costs, or adapting existing commercial components or civil manufacturing techniques to Complex Weapons, or even technologies that enable modularity in Complex Weapons.

An example of an ongoing funded proposal

A good example of the types of projects that CW ITP is looking to fund is SimTAI, and sits in the programme’s Mission Systems & Algorithms Technical Area.

The aim of project is to explore novel concepts and propose innovative methodologies to use multi-domain (EO/RF) physics-based Simulation to Train Artificial Intelligence (SimTAI) systems.

The project is led by OKTAL, a French SME, and the company is collaborating with Newcastle University in the UK, Numalis – another French SME and MBDA UK.

Get involved or encourage others

Dan Jones, the new Head of the CW ITP, said, “As we reflect on the global climate for defence, our ability to inform and respond to future capability needs via Innovation remains critical. The CW ITP provides a unique environment within which innovation and invention can flourish. This call for proposals is one of the main ways to get involved, and so we encourage universities, SMEs and larger companies to contribute, either directly by submitting innovative proposals, or by simply informing their network that the CW ITP call for proposals is live.”

Submissions

The submission deadline for proposals is 31st January 2023, and the projects selected will need to be ready to start in June 2023. Funding will be for 12 months or more.

CW-ITP-ETA-and-Dynamic-Challenge-timeline-for-project-call-October-2022

If you are not a member of the CW ITP and want to know more visit www.cwitp.com

If you are a member of CW ITP already, you can login find out more on the details of the submission process at https://cwitp.com/members-portal/

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