A UK innovation agency that helps businesses, councils and government try out new ideas in cities, transport and places, including self-driving vehicles.
Connected Places Catapult is a UK innovation agency focused on cities, transport and places. Catapults are national centres set up to help new ideas get from the lab into real use, and this one concentrates on how people live, travel and work in towns and cities. It works with start-ups, large companies, councils and universities. Its research areas include intelligent transport systems and automated driving, which is why it matters to anyone interested in self-driving cars, delivery robots and smart streets.
The organisation was formed on 1 April 2019 by joining two earlier centres: the Future Cities Catapult, which opened in London in 2013 to help develop smart cities, and the Transport Systems Catapult, which opened in Milton Keynes in June 2014. Sir David King, the former government chief scientific adviser, was the first chairman of the Future Cities Catapult. The organisation describes itself as an innovation agency that works on cities, transport and place leadership. We did not find a longer mission statement to quote.
Connected Places Catapult has its offices in London and Milton Keynes, and the Milton Keynes site, in Central Milton Keynes, is close to a town well known for trials of self-driving pods and delivery robots. A news item describes it opening an office in Leeds to help small and medium businesses with innovation. It works closely with Innovate UK, the government's innovation agency, which is based in Swindon, though that is a separate organisation. In July 2018, before it merged, the Transport Systems Catapult signed a Deep Academic Alliance agreement with a group of UK universities, and it also worked with the start-up programme Wayra UK.
We read little about the culture, and the pages we could access did not give staff numbers. Job listings found in search suggest roles such as consultants, economists, infrastructure specialists and executive assistants, which shows that the organisation employs policy and business people as well as technical ones. These are only listings, so we cannot judge the working environment.
A Catapult employs people in many different jobs: consultants and analysts who study how places and transport work, technologists who run trials of new systems, innovation managers who connect small firms with big customers, economists, communications and events staff, and people in finance and operations. Subjects such as engineering, geography, planning, economics, data and computing all lead here. The Catapult website is the place to check current vacancies.
Website: cp.catapult.org.uk
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