Innovate UK is to invest up to £4 million in collaborative research and development (R&D) projects that tackle the growing risks of disruption to internet-enabled businesses and their digital supply chains.

With the Internet of Things providing new sources of data and end-users’ ever-increasing digital footprint, it is difficult to adequately protect the interests of a business, industry or sector. There is also a lack of understanding of the effects disruption may have.

We are seeking proposals that address the challenge of protecting a business, industry or sector from digital disruption that could compromise data across the digital supply chain.

We want to identify and fund industrial research that will strengthen the protection and resilience of such data, so businesses and the public can place higher levels of confidence in the delivery of digitally enabled business products and services.

In Scope

This competition seeks better ways for UK organisations to mitigate these risks when operating in a digitally enabled environment, either within the UK or globally.

These may include (but are not limited to) innovative software, hardware, infrastructure or processes that target legacy, existing or new internet-based systems that are part of an organisation’s digital supply chain.

While we seek to fund industrial research and development projects to address this challenge, our primary goal is to achieve economic growth through new business success. As a result, we want to see a business model, sector or industry as the main focus of the proposed innovation.

We will therefore fund projects conducting industrial research whose outputs increase data protection, awareness and resilience:

• In an industry: suppliers, manufacturers, distributors and service partners form a supply chain that relies on accurate, reliable and trustworthy data within (and between) each organisation in order to directly, or indirectly, produce goods (physical or digital). Data of this type includes schematics, logistical information, creative artwork, payroll and employee details and passwords
• Between different sectors with their own data-reliant supply chains (e.g. transport and healthcare): the Internet of Things demonstrates the almost endless possibilities for greater collaboration between sectors. However, data not typically exposed to public networks is now being used in ‘big data’ analytics across multiple organisations, which may or may not have a relationship with the original data owner. Data has become a key asset that is being traded between organisations and may come from a variety of sources, including end-users themselves
• For data that is to be used to make critical decisions for a business model, industry or sector: for example, what impact would compromised traffic-light data have on an autonomous vehicle? Or what would be the effects of a malicious attack on the stock market where the decimal point is shifted forwards one place?

Proposals must be collaborative and led by a business. We expect to fund mainly industrial research projects in which a business partner will generally attract up to 50% public funding for their project costs (60% for SMEs).

We expect projects to range in size from total costs of £150,000 to £750,000, although we may consider projects outside this range.

This is a two-stage competition that opens for applicants on 23 March 2015. The deadline for registration is at noon on 29 April 2015.

The deadline for expressions of interest is at noon on 6 May 2015.

For more information click here https://interact.innovateuk.org/competition-display-page/-/asset_publisher/RqEt2AKmEBhi/content/protecting-data-in-industry

If you are interested and require support please contact Naomi Arblaster in ECD: N.Arblaster@staffs.ac.uk, Tel: 01785 353519