Materials innovation plays a critical role in economic development, explains David Knowles, and digitalisation is vital to speeding up the process from lab to manufacture.
Materials innovation touches almost every strategically important sector in the UK, driving advancements urgently required for the modern world. From decarbonising energy systems and enhancing national resilience to boosting our circular economy, materials innovation and technology translation is capable of powering economic growth and resilience for the UK and unlocking sustainable solutions across almost every sector.
Materials innovation currently contributes £45 billion to the UK economy, supporting over 635,000 jobs nationwide. This represents 2% of the UK’s total Gross Value Added (GVA) and enables six times that value in wider production activities. Currently, it is estimated that 52,000 materials-specific roles exist in the 2,700 companies engaged in materials innovation. Moreover, the demand for materials skills is increasing, with the number of materials-specific job roles expected to at least double by 2035.
However, the sector must address some longstanding barriers – including the bottleneck between research and commercialisation – to unlock its full potential and extend its global materials leadership. Transitioning to digital tools and methods – modelling of large data, machine learning, digital passports, online process optimisation – will help break down these barriers by drastically reducing lead times to commercialisation, accelerating the speed and volume of materials innovation, ensuring that high-quality cutting-edge materials reach the market and make an impact sooner.
How the digital revolution can accelerate sector growth
The digital revolution has the potential to propel materials innovation into a new era of discovery and impact. Capabilities include advanced modelling, big data, AI/machine learning, digital twinning, in silico modelling, manufacturing informatics and life-cycle simulation. These advances, now referred to as Materials 4.0, encompass the transition to a digitally enabled research and innovation environment. Materials 4.0 is expected to disrupt the sector, unlocking unprecedented opportunities to design, model and optimise material solutions in ways that were unthinkable just a decade ago.
But for digitalisation to succeed in the materials sector, a collaborative approach is essential to effectively validate, use and share data across the innovation supply chain. Currently, there is no unified framework or common language for integrating data, digital tools or processes to optimise materials design, manufacture and performance. While the practicalities of Materials 4.0 will be similar across sectors, from energy to transport to construction to healthcare, data fragmentation currently limits collaboration.
However, without cooperation between research groups and industry stakeholders, the economic and societal benefits of a digitalised materials innovation ecosystem cannot be realised. Establishing a shared data language will ultimately enable collaboration across different sectors, bringing significant cost/time reductions for the materials industry, creating new application opportunities with an accelerated path to market, enhancing flexibility in the supply chain and facilitating the adoption of best practices.
Alternative materials leading the change
This digital-first approach will help organisations at the cutting edge of materials to discover and develop alternative materials. London-based SME Materials Nexus (MatNex) is already leveraging next-generation Al and machine learning models to predict an alloy composition with hard magnetic properties as an alternative to rareearth magnets.
Working with the Henry Royce Institute at the University of Sheffield, MatNexus successfully produced and validated a sample of the alloy. This new material could reduce the UK’s reliance on scarce, critical rare-earth materials which are essential to many electronic and energy applications, including renewable energy generation. Following the success of this project, a one-year £700,000 Innovate UK-funded project was launched to refine the modelling process and explore and evaluate additional rare-earth-free magnetic alloys.
Beyond alternative materials discovery, harnessing Materials 4.0 could enhance our ability to predict material degradation, improve surface interactions and accelerate the development of materials for extreme environments. To fully realise the transformative potential of Materials 4.0 across materials innovation, a cohesive cross-sectoral strategy is required.
Shaping the UK’s materials future
The new National Materials Innovation Strategy was developed to address this need. Facilitated by the Henry Royce Institute, the UK’s Institute for Advanced Materials, and developed through extensive collaboration with over 2,000 experts, it seeks to accelerate the journey from discovery to deployment. The strategy sets a 10-year framework to leverage the UK’s worldclass expertise in materials and accelerate innovation, future-proofing sectors such as sustainability, energy efficiency and healthcare in an increasingly complex global environment.
Three key priority areas have been identified to accelerate materials innovation across all sectors. The first priority is ensuring access to trusted materials data based on national standard protocols for data acquisition, curation and access. This will position the UK as a global leader in interoperable materials data, enhance cross-industry competitiveness and create high-skill jobs in data management.
The second priority focuses on advancing next-generation materials modelling by integrating machine learning with high-fidelity experimental and process data. This will drive industry investment in materials innovation, extend the lifespan of products and infrastructure and provide transferable high-skill employment opportunities in modelling.
Beyond alternative materials discovery, harnessing Materials 4.0 could enhance our ability to predict material degradation, improve surface interactions and accelerate the development of materials for extreme environments. To fully realise the transformative potential of Materials 4.0 across materials innovation, a cohesive cross-sectoral strategy is required
Lastly, the development of materials passports – digital records with information about the components and products in a materials’ structure – will support a circular economy: material information can enable the reuse of materials, helping achieve sustainability goals, and ensuring compliance with international trade regulations.
The success of these priorities will strengthen the UK’s manufacturing sector and drive longterm innovation and sustainability. Realising the National Materials Innovation Strategy will help overcome existing barriers and unlock the transformative potential of Materials 4.0. This shift will not only acceler ate technological advancements but also provide substantial economic benefits, from further job creation to increased industrial investment. But for Materials 4.0 to reach its full potential, industry stakeholders, policymakers and researchers must work together to establish a unified framework for digital integration, ensuring that innovations reach the market efficiently.
If these challenges are addressed, the UK will reach a new era of sustainable, data-driven materials science, securing longterm competitiveness in the global economy.
Professor David Knowles is CEO of the Henry Royce Institute
