The Centre for Process Innovation

ABOUT US

The Centre for Process Innovation (CPI), is the organisation driving market led innovation within the UK process industry, stimulating a more innovative, sustainable and competitive sector by bringing together market ‘pull’ from industry with technology ‘push’ from academia to translate scientific research into commercial reality. Focusing on the commercialisation of new products and making new technologies ready for the marketplace, CPI champions four key technology areas which offer the most sustainable growth and commercial potential for the UK. They are, Advanced Processes, Low Carbon Energy, Printable Electronics and Functional Materials.

 Across these specialist technology areas, we deliver a unique portfolio of activities; Providing Services to The Global Business Community in Process Innovation, Consultancy and Research, The Formation and Management of Development Partnerships, Establishing and Managing Publically Funded Agencies and Projects in Emerging Technologies, Forming New Companies Through Spin-puts and Joint Ventures.

 Our role is to make innovation happen, to turn a bright idea into a real product; to recognise a gap in a process and direct research towards finding meaningful ways to fill that gap. By using our expertise in process design and development, materials technology, systems engineering, and business start-up and management, we are a leading international partner for companies and universities.

Our core strength is in the development and commercialisation of new products and techniques in the process sector. Key elements of our approach include: A focus on innovation, not research Industry based, market led International scale and influence Outstanding people IP generation The Centre manages a number of national facilities to allow companies to scale-up new processes, drastically reducing the risk associated with. One of CPI’s key assets is NIBF an open access facility enabling customers to develop proof of concept ideas in the emerging field of industrial biotechnology. Providing a single centre to trial and develop manufacturing processes, NIBF helps firms in a number of sectors, including the chemical and pharmaceutical sectors, take advantage of developments in industrial biotechnology by replacing traditional chemical processing techniques with new cleaner and less wasteful enzyme routes. The open access facility features a unique gene-to-kilo service and an integrated ‘plug and play’ design, allowing customers to produce trial quantities of products; scale-up processes and provides detailed real time information on fermentation.

CPI is one of only a few organisations in the world that brings together companies, universities, technology expertise and scale-up assets to develop new products and new processes for the process industry. CPI’s science and technology service team draws on hundreds of years of collective knowledge and experience to give us a world-class, cross-platform knowledge base harnessed to the needs of industrial innovation. It would be difficult to find a greater concentration of specialist intellectual capital anywhere in the world.