Science, Innovation and Technology Committee
Oral evidence: Innovation showcase, HC 523
Tuesday 18 March 2025
Ordered by the House of Commons to be published on 18 March 2025.
Members present: Chi Onwurah (Chair); Emily Darlington; George Freeman; Jon Pearce; Dr Lauren Sullivan; Adam Thompson; Martin Wrigley.
Culture, Media and Sport Committee member present: Paul Waugh.
Question 10
Witness
I: Professor Svetan Ratchev, Professor of Production Engineering and Director of the Institute for Advanced Manufacturing, Faculty of Engineering, University of Nottingham.
Witness: Professor Svetan Ratchev.
Chair: Good morning, everybody, and welcome to our innovation showcase. The Committee for Science, Innovation and Technology is keen to understand how the UK supports innovators and also what more can be done. To inform our work, each member of the Committee takes turns to select an innovator to share their story before our main evidence session. This week’s innovator is presented by Adam.
Q10 Adam Thompson: Thanks, Chair. It is lovely to be here and it is a very great pleasure of mine to welcome Professor Svetan Ratchev. Svetan is the director of the Institute for Advanced Manufacturing, among many other things. Prior to the election, I worked at the Institute for Advanced Manufacturing, first as a PhD student, then as a research fellow and then a senior research fellow, so Svetan and I have interacted many times over the years. He worked very closely with my former boss, Professor Richard Leach, when he was also at the university.
It is a great pleasure to invite Svetan here today to talk about some of the fantastic work they are doing at the University of Nottingham. Of course, Svetan has various other roles in the Manufacturing and Technology Centre, part of the High Value Manufacturing Catapult, and lots of other things. Over to you, Svetan.
Professor Ratchev: Thank you, Adam. Thank you, Committee, for inviting me. I am director of the Institute for Advanced Manufacturing at the University of Nottingham. It is a centre with more than 400 academics, researchers and PhD students, predominantly working on developing world-class skills and manufacturing technologies, facilitating their implementation in industry. At the moment, we have more than £90 million of externally funded research programmes. We are very proud to count the Member for Erewash as one of our distinguished alumni.
We have a variety of different research topics, where we have world-class centres. I will talk today about one part of our centre’s activity. This is about developing the industrial infrastructure for the future. Where we focus is looking at how we develop highly agile, connected factories and supply chains with the ability to respond cost-effectively to changes in supply and demand, as well as being able to integrate the latest digital technologies—artificial intelligence and data analytics—dramatically to improve productivity, resilience and sustainability. At the same time, we are looking at new behaviour of future factories around how they can adapt, repurpose and reuse available production capabilities. Considering the current geopolitical environment, we feel it is critically important for our industry to be able to deliver that. In essence, we are working on transforming the UK manufacturing sector into a highly agile, responsive and very competitive environment.
In terms of end users, predominantly we work with aerospace and defence, automotive, and food and beverages as key industrial sectors in the UK. Also, we support a variety of SMEs, which form the supply chains. There, the emphasis is on how we can develop the supply chains to be more localised, more secure and greener. We are looking at the wider impact, the industrial impact based on improved productivity, competitiveness and sustainability. We are also looking at the social and economic impact, because strong manufacturing delivers more cohesive local communities and prosperity. That is why those are critically important technologies for us.
How do we achieve that? We very much focus on how we can bring basic research and applications together to deliver the accelerated implementation of new technologies in industry. An example of currently funded programmes that support our activities is the Made Smarter centre for connected morphing factories, which I lead. It is a joint activity between Nottingham, Cambridge and Sheffield universities. It is a large programme defining new manufacturing concepts like elastic manufacturing systems, systems that can have elasticity in responding to market demand; this is a joint activity with Cambridge, and we have a variety of industrially funded programmes.
All these activities are epitomised by a facility we call the Omnifactory, which is very popular in our community. It is an investment of £3.8 million by the Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund. In effect, we have created a large model factory, which is a national technology demonstrator. It is unique, without parallel in the world. What the Omnifactory does in terms of key facets is a blueprint for the infrastructure of the future. It provides automated processes, using the latest AI, data analytics and robotics technologies. It can be configured and repurposed to deliver different products within the same environment. Where manufacturing knowledge can be captured, reused and monetised, we define it in the form of manufacturing hubs.
It allows us completely to integrate the product lifecycle from product requirements, design, defining manufacturing facilities and supply chain to reuse and re-manufacture in a common digitally integrated environment. That delivers a variety of different benefits. Our technology solutions have been implemented by a number of major OEMs, including large aerospace and defence companies, Airbus, BAE Systems, Rolls-Royce, GKN, Nestlé and BMW. We also work very closely with Siemens on applying some of their technologies and products.
A very important function of the Omnifactory is promoting engineering to future generations. We work with local schools to bring them in and show them how manufacturing will look in the future, and change the perception of manufacturing from something that is not very popular to something that is really exciting for future generations.
There are several elements in how the political environment and the Government can support research and innovation. One is that we need to create a true innovation ecosystem by better linking basic research, applied research and industrial implementation. We need to maximise innovation and all the commercial societal and economic impacts of research by linking them together and accelerating some excellent research into industrial applications. We are still not very good at that in terms of the integrated funding landscape and support for applications. One good example is the Made Smarter initiative. In the Made Smarter initiatives, we had almost 50% basic research, 45% applied research and about 5% of the funding for engagement and promotion of engineering. That is critically important. Finally, we need to improve the support for SMEs, because SMEs are critical; supply chains are critical for delivering manufacturing.
Being in this wonderful House, I want to finish with a letter from Matthew Boulton to James Watt from 1762 when he said, “I presumed that your engine would require money, very accurate workmanship and extensive correspondence. It would not be worth my while to make it for three counties only, but I find it well worth my while to make it for the whole world.”
Chair: Thank you so much, Professor Svetan Ratchev. That is a really fascinating and interesting summary of the work you are doing and some of the history behind it. It is particularly relevant to our innovation, growth and the regions inquiry, where we heard evidence of the importance of driving productivity in the industrial environment across our country. That is the work you are doing. Thank you very much.
Thank you very much, Adam. That was a fantastic presentation.
Adam Thompson: Thank you.