Leonardo UK's enabling capability is made up of the brightest minds, innovative partnerships and cutting-edge infrastructure, providing new and challenging insights, and inspiring the delivery-focussed business, technology and engineering boundaries of the company.

Staff and partners create and exploit trends in science, technology and engineering across the defence and security sector using synthetic environments, digital twins, real life experimentation and prototyping – at scale. This is facilitated by collaborators from across industry, academia and the more innovative parts of our customer community working within a collaborative innovation ecosystem.

UK Innovation Hubs

Leonardo's Innovation Hubs are set up across the UK, merging the best elements of lab environments with a more social undercurrent to encourage creativity. This provides wider boundaries for design freedom to encourage rapid prototyping underpinned by a supporting infrastructure to create a pipeline into our wide portfolio of innovative products and technology.

Innovation Hubs at each of our main sites strengthen UK-wide networking and collaboration with open access to capabilities, including 3D printing, distributed High Performance Computing, dedicated development environments and advanced processing solutions.

Synthetic Environments

In the UK, our synthetic environments work at levels of scale and fidelity across the lifecycle, with a range of outputs that include demonstrations and trials. We are unique in the UK in our ability to host high-value mission-system developments for our products, from our UK engineering teams, for customer evaluation and shaping.

Partnership is central to our approach, working across UK industry to integrate a range of systems from whole platform models through to weapon systems and wider combat management systems. Our architecture enables us to work closely with academic and industrial partners. We provide our synthetic environment as a total capability service offering, through close involvement with customers, aircrew, a range of engineering functions and support to our training specialists.

Synthetic environments are always evolving and we see major trends in the advanced use of prototype software, the evaluation of effectors and autonomy in representative missions, joint customer evaluation of future concepts of operations, and a shift to minimal physical environments for the complete immersive experience.