Consultancy to Create a Testbed for Technology Demonstrators

Tender description

The Catapult is a technology and innovation centre set up by Government to advance innovation, to grow UK companies to make cities better. We have observed that large scale enabling technology infrastructure is expensive to deploy and maintain, while not necessarily providing the best solution for all applications or the flexibility to evolve with new technology and accommodate new applications in the future. Many technology demonstrators and testbeds fall down here with insufficient real use cases to sustain them. Catapult wish to invest in a piece of action research to explore the enabling infrastructure, governance and cultural structures to encourage experimentation and demonstrate tangible IoT solutions in cities. This project aims to develop the Catapult principles, methodology and toolkit for creating valuable, sustainable city testbeds. This will be achieved in part by the selection of a pilot location for an initial testbed project where the principles, methodology and toolkit will be tested and refined as part of a real bottom-up technology-enabled project. The successful Bidder will work closely with the internal Catapult team (made up of design researchers, IoT specialists, data scientist and city engagement lead) on this short but significant project. We wish to test our hypothesis about the value of small, organic and bottom up technology demonstrators by creating a testbed where each application is made up of a suite of smaller interconnected services implemented as required. By using independently deployable components the most suitable technology for each application can be deployed and updated as required, whilst being interoperable with other services. This would enable an evolving, sustainable city testbed to be built up around specific use cases that could adapt to integrate new emerging technologies as required.