Four research centres in innovative manufacturing are to be established in electronics, lasers, medical devices and food production under a £21 million programme funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council.
The centres will be based at the universities of Cambridge, Leeds and Nottingham, and Heriot-Watt University.
The EPSRC has also announced grants totalling £12m for six projects in manufacturing competitiveness. The projects cover cloud computing, crowdsourcing, gaming technology, information and communication technology dashboards and new manufacturing platforms.