The Bennett Innovation Lab (BIL) was born from a strategic imperative: to own the industries of the future, the UK must build hardware-intensive technologies at unprecedented speed.

Throughout history, maverick disruptors like Bell Labs, Power Jets, Bletchley Park, Skunk Works, Xerox PARC, and Google X have shown that talent, freedom, and accelerated iteration can devise world-changing breakthroughs — and build them.

BIL extends this tradition into the machine-learning era, fusing Frontier AI with rapid build-test loops to accelerate hardware breakthroughs across energy, defence, and aviation.

Each year, BIL will launch 2–3 bold missions, led by small teams of world-leading experts. From cryogenic jet engines to high-temperature heat pumps, the goal is to build breakthrough technologies that can transform, or create, next-generation industries.

Whittle × Bennett

The Bennett Innovation Lab sits at the heart of the New Whittle Laboratory — a £58 million investment completed this October at the University of Cambridge.

The New Whittle is itself the latest evolution of the Whittle Lab, which opened in 1973 to place the UK at the forefront of the jet age. Today, the Whittle Lab is the world’s leading research centre for jet engines and power generation, developing hundreds of technologies for such companies as Rolls-Royce, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, and Siemens Energy.

Embedding BIL within the New Whittle ensures that this critical UK capability is not just preserved but actively positioned to lead the global race for disruptive technological advantage.

BIL’s Three Capabilities

The Bennett Innovation Lab empowers small teams to tackle what once required entire organisations by integrating three core capabilities:

1. Systems Engineering: Asking the Right Questions

Bell Labs treated “asking the right questions” as an article of faith — using systems engineers to match emerging knowledge against the most intractable and valuable real-world challenges. BIL uses the same approach, setting a dedicated systems engineering and modelling team to target exceptional missions that are suitably big, buildable in UK supply chains, and capable of transforming or creating entire industries.

2. Rapid Testing: Moving Fast to Hardware

Formula 1 teams dominate the grid by fusing design, manufacture, and testing into a single loop — iterating hardware at the speed of human creativity. BIL applies this transformative model, using the Whittle Lab’s rapid design and test capability, and the National Centre for Propulsion and Power’s new 4 MW rapid test facility, to transition from concept to physical testing in weeks, not years.

3. Frontier AI: Turbocharging Innovation with Machine Intelligence

Instead of simply “scraping the internet", Frontier AI acquires new knowledge from the physical world — closing the loop between conjecture and reality. At BIL, this Frontier capability runs end-to-end: Agentic AI accelerates design; Multiphysics AI links data across fluids, heat, structures, and materials; and Embodied AI learns from and operates experiments inside the Whittle Lab’s rapid-test facilities.

Action This Day

In July 1941 — as a fresh wave of Blitzkrieg approached — Winston Churchill was informed that Frank Whittle’s new jet engine could be developed and scaled at immense speed. The Prime Minister sent an “Action This Day” memo to the Ministry of Aircraft Production:

“Report to me whether in the circumstances we ought not to proceed forthwith in the production of the Whittle aircraft without waiting … production of, say, 1000 WHITTLES”

However, because the Ministry neither told Whittle of the order, nor provided the necessary funding, the UK’s first jet fighter didn't enter the war until 1944 — too late to have an impact. The challenges we now face are similarly immense and existential.

The Bennett Innovation Lab is a new kind of disruptive innovation capability, designed to take “action this day” — because the next-generation industries require next generation institutions.

Stay tuned for further updates …