This project will aim to advance the state of art in investment casting processes for medical devices by intersectoral cooperation between DePuy Ireland and University of Birmingham to develop the concept of the automated “Foundry of the Future”. Research would be carried out into the constituent process technologies, the workflow between them and the impact on the constituent materials. The objectives would be to achieve significant breakthroughs in the understanding of the processes to improve adaptability to new design requirements, reduce cycle time, increase quality yield, minimise human intervention and waste. Results should yield methods to improve new product design processes and hence to significantly reduce unit costs but most importantly allow for more complex medical products to be developed and produced in Europe. Technologies so developed would greatly enhance the effectiveness of European high level casting and promote further intersectoral research collaboration in this field. The partners have complementary skills and facilities. University of Birmingham (UoB) Mechanical Engineering Department is a leading Centre of Expertise in casting processes. DePuy Ireland is part of DePuy Corporation, a $4.5 billion global entity in medical orthopaedic implants. DePuy employ 6000 people worldwide of which some 600 are employed in DePuy Ireland. It is part of Johnson and Johnson Corporation. New innovative concepts developed in UoB’s laboratories can be tested under scaled up and automated conditions in DePuy Ireland’s medical device foundry. The project is estimated to take 48 months to complete and is based exclusively on secondments with 16 researches being seconded from UoB to DePuy and 11 researches from DePuy to UoB.