Future Cities Catapult

Home to more than half the global population, cities are where the world lives, works, plays and learns. They are centres of enterprise, creativity and serendipity - the engines that drive productivity and prosperity. As cities continue to grow and evolve, new solutions are required to keep the engine running smoothly. This includes tackling productivity-sapping congestion, unlocking new space for housing, improving the efficiency of public services, and creating inclusive urban environments that allow citizens of all ages and abilities to participate, contribute and flourish. Fortunately, the UK has a wealth of innovative companies who are working to find solutions to these thorny urban challenges and many others. We call this the ‘Advanced Urban Services’ sector. At the Future Cities Catapult, our mission is to help UK firms develop innovative products and services to meet the changing needs of cities, and to sell them to the world. In doing so, we will support the emerging Advanced Urban Services sector in becoming an enabler of national productivity and a central plank of the UK economy. We develop ambitious and impactful new projects that leverage our established strengths as a neutral convenor, helping buyers better articulate their needs to the market, working with suppliers to respond to those needs, engaging academic leaders to translate the latest R&D into application, driving the dissemination of evidence that unlocks investment and adoption, and provoking creative disruption in services and systems overdue for innovative transformation. In short, we are dismantling the barriers to market success, ensuring that British innovators and entrepreneurs are positioned to enjoy a disproportionately large share of the global market for advanced urban services – a market estimated to value $1 trillion globally by 2023.