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Reducing business carbon footprint through process improvement

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Evolving to reduce your carbon footprint

This strand offers SMEs in the HIE region a business development and/or engineering support package worth up to £15K to help them use IoT specifically to reduce business carbon footprint. We expect this will focus on changes that lead to business operational gains, e.g., reducing operating costs, or improving productivity or quality.

We can support companies working in any market sector, but are very interested in hearing from companies involved in manufacturing, food and drink, renewable energy, health and wellness, and tourism.

Using our connections and expertise, we can explore lots of potential solutions to your challenge, including different low-cost, tried-and-tested solutions that could work in your organisation to give you the result you want and quantify the impact you’ll be making to reach net zero targets.

What does support look like?

The support offered could include a combination of:

  • Technical and business advice: we can help you fully understanding your challenge, your desired outcomes, how you’d put the change into use, and look at your overall business case based on use case/s and ROI.
  • System design and prototyping: from the sensor to the display dashboard, let us guide you through what you’ll need in terms of hardware and systems design, from verification and validation, to supportability and through-life costs
  • Proof of concept: building and testing your solution, to ensure it will work as expected, and it can scale too. Deployment: we can help get your product to work ‘in the wild’, including service, troubleshooting and the future development of the new system

It’s possible that your idea might possible overlap or combine with our Workstream 1 activities [link]. If that’s the case, talk to us before you apply so that can work out what’s best for you.

Where more than one company approaches us with a similar carbon reduction challenge, we may want to host an initial workshop to explore possible solutions before we go on to work with you 1-2-1.

What we’re looking for

In assessing your application, we’ll be looking to see if your idea:

  • Has the potential to scale across you whole business
  • Is achievable and cost effective for your company
  • Has the potential to share the solution with other SMEs/similar markets
  • Might benefit from an introduction to an expert from the University of the Highlands and Islands
  • Could lead to a reduction in your company’s carbon footprint.

How to apply

Simply complete the IoT Evolve application form to get started.

If you have any questions beforehand, please feel free to contact CENSIS Business Development Managers Jim Cockram or Ally Longmuir  for an informal discussion.

The small print

To be eligible, companies must have their main operational base in the HIE region (Shetland, Orkney, Outer Hebrides, Caithness and Sutherland, Inner Moray Firth, Inverness, Moray, Lochaber, Skye and Wester Ross and Argyll and the Islands).

You must be an SME. The UK government’s definition of SMEs:

  • micro (<10 employees/annual turnover <€2 million)
  • small (<50 employees/annual turnover <€10 million)
  • medium-sized (<250 employees/an annual turnover <€50 million)

Applications are critically assessed, but this is not a competition. Project funding is available on a ‘first-come, first-served’ basis while funding exists.

You will need to contribute in some way to the project – either in cash or in-kind. We’ll discuss that with when you apply.

When the support package ends, we’ll produce a case study for our website that will be shared with Highlands and Islands Enterprise.

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