The trial’s primary hypothesis was that firms receiving the 4Manufacturing® support would adopt 20% more technologies on average than the control group (this figure includes committed-to/approved adoptions within the 12 months following the end of the trial).
The project recruited 91 businesses to participate in the trial, 51 of which were offered 4Manufacturing® support, the remaining 40 formed the control group, who did not receive support during the trial, but were offered it after 12 months as an incentive to participate. The biggest challenge the project faced was recruitment; it had an initial target of recruiting over 300 businesses, significantly higher than was achieved. As the trial commenced at the end of 2020, low recruitment levels were affected by macro-economic challenges resulting from the Covid-19 pandemic and the UK’s exit from the European Union, however there may be other factors relating to the trial’s recruitment strategy that could potentially have improved uptake.
The low participant numbers made the likelihood of observing a powered, statistically significant result much less likely, and unfortunately this was the case when it came to analysing outcome data. The evidence is therefore inconclusive at this stage as to the effect of the tool on technology adoption.
As well as an impact evaluation, the team delivered a process evaluation of the support to better understand its perceived effectiveness from participant feedback. The evaluation provided useful insight and identified improvements to the tool and wrap around advisory support going forward, which are considerations for a potential scale-up of the 4Manufacturing® scheme in future.
