Bridging for Innovators (B4I)

About B4I

The Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) is a research and innovation organisation at the forefront of UK science and technology. Through collaboration with industry and long-term research and development, STFC underpins sectors that contribute billions of pounds annually to the UK economy, including space, pharmaceuticals, digital communication, microelectronics and physics-based manufacturing.

Swansea University and TWI jointly won the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) call for a collaborative Regional Centre in Wales (RCW) under the Bridging for Innovators (B4I) funding programme. Under the COVID-19 global pandemic, RCW is still working hard to provide local companies with support through the B4I funding. Instead of linking project to STFC facilities, RCW is now offering local assists to the industrial companies by using available facilities in Swansea University and TWI. See Regional Centre Wales (RCW) below to know more about our capabilities.

Bridging for Innovators (B4I) programme

B4I is an Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund (ISCF) programme that opens up STFC’s national–level scientific research facilities (e.g. Diamond Light Source, ISIS Neutron Source, Central Laser Facility, Hartree High Performance Computing) to industry for short and long-term R&D projects to overcome challenging product, manufacturing or process performance issues. B4I brings together research and industry, allowing companies the opportunity to engage with world-class researchers and innovation specialists. B4I offers businesses access to a suite of high-tech scientific capabilities, and a large range of complementary technologies and facilities, enabling analysis between the extremes of scales – from sub-atomic materials analysis to computational modelling.

Funding is available to specifically help companies overcome difficult product, manufacturing or process performance issues by leveraging more than £2billion worth of Government investment in large-scale scientific infrastructure. The B4I programme aligns with the government’s Industrial Strategy to boost productivity and earning power throughout the UK.

Regional Centre Wales (RCW)

Regional Centre Wales (RCW) is an industry-led collaborative centre between Swansea University and TWI, focussed on guiding Welsh Companies through the B4I programme.

RCW will fully support the company’s B4I application, providing guidance and funded access to the RCW’s local state-of-the-art resource (within Swansea University’s AIM Facility and at TWI) to conduct ‘proof of concept’ experiments that prove a need to undertake experiments at STFCs national-level facilities.

This exercise promotes knowledge exchange that will subsequently increase the skills-base, inspiring competitiveness through future R & D activity, meanwhile strengthening the company’s B4I application. Where required, RCW will fully support the analyses of data, and perform impact tracking throughout the process, to both ensure that the results can be implemented, and to monitor the gradual impact of the R & D project on the company.

RCW team member’s dedicated guidance will support the company’s B4I application, and where required, support the analysis of the results to ensure that they can be implemented.

Application Guidance

To be eligible for funding you must:

Be a Wales based business of any size registered at Companies House
Have a manufacturing base for the relevant product in the UK or provide the relevant service in the UK
Intend to exploit the results in the UK

The initial application process requires companies to submit a concise (approx. 500 words) Challenge Statement describing their problem. Companies are not required to describe the project they want to do; instead they will need to describe the problem: its nature, any techniques already tried and the value of solving it.

If approved, companies will work together with RCW scientists to develop a fully costed project proposal. Projects will be selected on the greatest impact to productivity, the value to the company and the availability of a suitable technique or expertise within STFC to address the problem.