Pre-tender

SDA Capability Map 2026 update

Details

Topic
Research and development services and related consultancy services
Published
3 September 2026

Tender description

**Update 22/10/2026 - There's just over a week remaining to contribute information about potential systems, sensors, products and data solutions that could potentially help address the UK cross-government SDA requirements. Please do consider providing information.** Note, this activity is not directly related to a specific procurement and any information provided are without commitment and prejudice for all parties. Therefore, there will not be a contract issued following this exercise. The purpose of this spreadsheet is to understand how different systems, sensors, products and data solutions provided by industry could address the UK Cross-Government SDA requirements. This may help to inform the potential contributions to a UK SDA Systems of Systems that will address these requirements operationally. UK government will use the data provided in the creation of a Capability Map, allowing analysis of current UK capabilities against the requirement set, including consideration of how commercial offerings could close gaps. Furthermore, gap analysis on the full Capability Map will allow UK government to identify areas where further research and development activity may be required, when no sovereign or commercial offerings are available to meet a requirement. With the 2026 update to the SDA Requirements, and in order to keep the Capability Map current, this RFI activity is a continuation of the previous call and will likely be repeated in the future. This RFI provides the standardised format for commercial to demonstrate current capabilities and reflect growth, and UK government to track the health of the sector and available capabilities. We ask that respondees complete the spreadsheet for the systems etc they offer. This may require multiple returns, depending on the commercial capability. If you have responded to a previous call please do so again with your current capabilities. Note, this activity is not directly related to a specific procurement and any information provided are without commitment and prejudice for all parties. All information provided in this data collection exercise will remain confidential, in-line with the Civil Service Code, with access granted only to UK Government departments and agencies. Where specific handling is required please do note this in the spreadsheet in the "Comments on Data Handling" section. Please keep all data entry at no higher than UK OFFICIAL. All returns will be treated as UK OFFICIAL-SENSITIVE COMMERCIAL. Please do let us know if you have information you would like to share at a higher classification and we can facilitate this. Please submit your responses to ssa@dstl.gov.uk

Timeline

  1. Completed: Pre-tender published3 September 2026
    Current notice

About the buyer

Defence Science & Technology Laboratory is the Ministry of Defence's in-house science and technology organisation, and buys as a central government agency with no preferred supplier list. R-Cloud is now the main place suppliers bid for work, including PhD funding. Framework agreements such as ASTRID and the Weapons Sector Research Framework serve government departments beyond this laboratory too.

Over the past 5 years, most of Defence Science & Technology Laboratory's contract awards have been in laboratory and precision equipment, education and training and architectural and engineering services.

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Decision makers

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