Overcoming the obstacles to innovation

"The key to business growth, profitability and sustainability, is to continually bring new products and services to existing and new markets. Whilst many SMEs clearly have the capability to innovate and exploit, they often lack the capacity to carry out research and product development." So says Dr Ian Baird, new business development manager at Pera Technology. Pera, based in Melton Mowbray, provides R&D expertise to enable conceptual ideas to become reality in the form of new products. The company provides technical expertise to companies across a range of disciplines to enable the development of new commercially viable products that will be technically superior in performance and reliability to anything that is currently available. But what's really different about Pera is that it understands how designers view intellectual property (IP). It therefore has a policy of not holding IP from the work it undertakes and believes this should reside with the company or inventor of the original idea. "A close working relationship can therefore be established," said Baird, "where Pera provides the technical expertise to develop new products, allowing the innovative company to exploit the new technology and to generate new streams of revenue. "It is increasingly clear that there is only one way for European manufacturers to grow their business. They have to use innovation as an essential element of their strategy. Pera's approach helps firms think beyond their existing product offering and differentiate themselves from their competitors. We help firms capture the outputs of creativity, put them into context, prioritise those to be taken forward, and ensure that they are adequately financed, resourced and exploited." Baird added that over half of UK firms cite the "inaccessibility of finance" and "the lack of visibility of potential technology solutions" as the main obstacles to innovation. Pera's approach is designed to overcome these obstacles and help companies identify next-generation products with strong market demand and increased value. "When companies put customers at the heart of their thinking, it can transform business, help build new, profitable relationships and put them beyond their competitors' reach. Innovation therefore starts with its focus on the customer but it also relies on knowledge and practical 'how to' experience," Baird argued. Pera has also recognised that the investment required in terms of both time and money is sometimes beyond the reach of single companies. So it has developed an approach which helps to win both EU and national funding to allow for the development of new improved products through technology exploitation. In the last European Framework Programme, for example, Pera helped more SMEs to acquire grants for innovation than any other organisation in Europe. It assisted more than 1,000 firms, providing them with €170M of funding. In one case, Pera assisted a company by developing a new novel tyre pressure monitor (TPM) that could be manufactured and sold for a fraction of the price of currently available products. Not only was the novel TPM more cost effective, it was also capable of continuous operation, something that existing products could not achieve as they only sampled tyre pressure once every minute in order to conserve battery life. The innovation removed the need for the battery and instead used the properties of the same peizoelectric actuator that is found in mobile phone speakers. The technological breakthrough was to use the natural deformation of the tyre wall that occurs during rotation to stress the peizoelectric material and generate a small electric current to continuously power the pressure monitoring device. The firm has protected the development through patents and is currently negotiating with VW-Audi and Renault to license the technology for several hundred million euros. In another example, a company needed to move up the value chain from offering plastic, injection-moulded components and manufacturing services, to selling its own products on a global basis. Baird explained: "We helped them develop the world's first intrinsically sharp-safe injection syringe. The innovative product is 50% lower cost than the current types of syringe and offers greater comfort in use to the user, due to a novel surfacing technology applied to the needle, which reduces the pain of initial insertion into the skin. The technology has been successfully patented and the SME is now negotiating with one of Europe's largest drug manufacturers for world-wide supply and distribution of the product. A start-up company approached us to help them develop the product and manufacturing technology for a groundbreaking new mobile phone antenna that could operate without transmitting microwave radiation into the user's body. The developed product has a 95% reduction of radiation into the body, measured as 'SAR', specific absorption rate. This also increases the effective strength and reliability of the phone signal. Both the product and manufacturing technologies are patented and a special factory has been built with venture capital funding to produce the novel antenna.