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Innovating for Defence

Innovation in defence is vital to UK national security

 

NCC has worked in partnership with defence customers since its inception. A Centre of Excellence for Defence Innovation, we have an established national role in delivering cutting-edge products and technologies that address mission-critical challenges. This includes accelerating the development of advanced materials, digital engineering, process innovation and systems integration. 

Located in the UK’s largest defence cluster, we are an innovation and development partner to industry and government. We are investing in building new (open and secure) innovation capabilities across our focus areas to deliver a truly unique capability. 

In partnership with other centres in the HVMC, we collaborate with the Ministry of Defence, defence industry primes and SMEs to create an integrated UK solution to future defence innovation. 

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Connect with our Defence Specialists at NCC to find out more about our world-leading innovation capabilities and how we can support your business.  

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Defence Focus Areas

Main focus areas for Defence across the technology and product life cycle 

Major Programmes
Technology Themes

We connect technology strategy to real-world delivery through our end-to-end engineering services

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Services portfolio

Applied Research & Technology Forum for UK Defence

Technology leaders showcase innovative materials & manufacturing technologies, focused on pulling fundamental innovative technology through the mid Technology Readiness Levels (TRL 4-7) as a means of showing greater application of novel research.

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Our Impact

Digital engineering

MOD innovation pilot 2-year pilot delivering improvements to time, costs, and quality in submarine design & manufacture.

Our Impact

Emerging technology

Continuous tow shearing (CTS) Technology pull through project which produced iCOMAT spinout winning European Space Agency contract.

Our Impact

Insights and Impact

SAMPE Europe 25 Conference Amsterdam

NCC experts Peter Giddings, Phil Druiff & Michael Elkington will be participating in the event taking place in Amsterdam from 6-7 October 2025, sharing how we're innovating for industry.

Mapping the challenge of wind turbine blade production waste

Driving change towards more sustainable pathways for processing end-of-life wind turbine blades is a key enabler to UK’s net zero ambitions. NCC’s Tom Andrews and Jessica Harrison share how SusWIND is delivering impact to achieve this. 

NAFEMS World Congress 2025

Tim Newman, Principal Research Engineer for Data Science at NCC is presenting 'Graph Neural Networks for semantic feature identification' at NAFEMS World Congress 2025, 19th - 22nd May 2025.

TPT Healable Interfaces

NCC explores a proof-of-concept offering a multi-repair solution that could significantly extend product lifespan and reduce environmental impacts.

ASCEND successfully completed

NCC shares the successful completion of the ASCEND programme, positioning the UK industry at the forefront of advanced, sustainable technologies for next-generation aircraft and future mobility solutions.

Decarbonising Aerospace Article

By channelling investment into the most promising approaches, the UK can advance an aerospace supply chain that promotes circularity and achieves net zero ambitions.