Six young companies from across the UK received an official physics stamp of approval earlier this week after the Institute of Physics (IOP) rejigged its annual business awards to recognize recent start-ups alongside established businesses. Representatives from all six start-ups – including the medical-diagnostics firms Causeway Sensors, Creavo Medical Technologies, Stream Bio and York Instruments, as well as Lynkeos, a muon-imaging company, and super-resolution microscope makers ONI – came to London on 16 October for a ceremony in the House of Commons, where they showed off their business ideas to a crowd of science industry notables and a smattering of MPs. In addition to the six start-ups, six older firms received Business Innovation Awards, which recognize companies that have “delivered significant economic and/or societal impact through the application of physics.”
The IOP, which publishes Physics World, established the Business Innovation Awards in 2012 to recognize UK companies that have developed products based on creative applications of physics. Until this year, however, the award criteria strongly favoured products that had already demonstrated significant commercial success.
“The awards committee would look at early-stage companies and say, ‘Yes, the physics is great, but the sales numbers aren’t there yet,’” Anne Crean, the IOP’s head of science and innovation, told me on the way to the ceremony. “It seemed a bit strange not to be recognizing their potential.” External recognition can be particularly valuable to new companies, Crean added, because it shows potential investors that the science behind their work is sound.
Once I got through the lengthy security queue (among other events, the Palace of Westminster was also hosting a BBC media ethics lecture, a Christian “pray for the nation” evening and a knees-up for the Society of Conservative Lawyers – clearly a busy night), I had the pleasure of speaking to several of the winners.
I was particularly interested to see EndoMag on the list of Business Innovation Award recipients. Although this Cambridge, UK-based medical devices firm was only founded in the late 2000s, this year’s IOP award is already its second: the company’s Sentimag surgical guidance system, which is used primarily in patients with early-stage breast cancer, was also “commended” at the 2016 Business Innovation Awards. In the wake of that award, one of the company’s co-founders, Simon Hattersley, gave me a remarkably candid account of EndoMag’s origins. We published his story earlier this year as part of Physics World’s “start-up stories” series, and I hope that a few of the 2018 Business Start-up Award winners will follow in his footsteps. (Watch this space.)
In contrast to EndoMag, PepsiCo‘s IOP Business Innovation Award is not only its first, but also the first for any company involved in food manufacturing. According to PepsiCo physicist John Bows (who gave Physics World‘s then-features editor a memorable tour of the world’s largest crisp factory a few years ago), an understanding of soft-matter physics proved essential in developing new snacks for customers in the developing world. After conducting studies of cell-wall thickness and air-pore distribution in cooked potato crisps, Bows and his colleagues were able to create snacks that mimic the texture and feel of potato-based products, but use cheaper, locally-available ingredients such as maize or rice.
The remaining winners also showed up some interesting contrasts. Leonardo, a multinational aerospace contractor, won its award for a laser-based system that protects aircraft from heat-seeking surface-to-air missiles. According to project engineering lead John Mclean, a key challenge was to create a device that is small enough to fit on a helicopter (the entire unit has a mass of around 15 kg, compared to 50–60 kg for previous iterations), yet still able to project a laser beam in any direction, from a moving platform, onto a moving target.
Compared to that, Plastipack’s winning product – a swimming-pool cover that admits infrared light for heating, while blocking wavelengths that promote algae growth – sounds relatively low-tech. However, as product designer Tim Fielder explained, Plastipack operates in a low-innovation industry where cost is king. Convincing customers to pay slightly more for a product with a longer lifespan, lower heating costs and reduced chemical use was a significant challenge. To overcome it, the Plastipack team worked closely with physicists at the University of Surrey to develop the covers’ patented mixture of pigments, and then to conduct simulations and tests of the product’s effectiveness.
An acoustic noise-control firm, Sonobex, and a radiation-detection specialist, Innovative Physics, rounded out the group of winners. Like EndoMag, Sonobex was founded relatively recently; like Plastipack, it experienced some early difficulties in persuading customers that innovation could be a good thing. Instead of absorbing or reflecting the sound of industrial machinery, Sonobex uses acoustic metamaterials to cancel out specific low-frequency vibrations, such as the 100 Hz “hum” of transformers in power substations. “We call our product ‘the scientific approach to reducing noise’,” chief technology officer Daniel Elford told me. For some potential customers, though, this scientific approach sounded scary and expensive. Elford and his colleagues quickly learned that instead of emphasizing the science, they needed to tell customers that Sonobex’s product worked just as well as conventional solutions (such as concrete barriers) while taking up much less space.
Innovative Physics (IPL) had no such difficulties. As the company’s name implies, cutting-edge science is part of its brand, and its winning product was developed in response to a decidedly hi-tech challenge: decontaminating the area around Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station. According to CEO Mike Anderson, IPL’s hand-held “hot spot locators” help radiation workers to quickly identify and characterize areas of high contamination, providing information on both the location of the radiation and the specific isotopes producing it.
Towards the end of the awards ceremony, employment minister Alok Sharma MP – an applied physics graduate who has sponsored the awards for several years and previously served on the prize committee – paid tribute to both categories of winners. “The trouble with physicists is that we’re too shy,” he quipped, adding that he hoped the awards will raise the profile of physics within the wider UK business community.
- Learn more about the IOP Business Innovation Award winners by registering for the inaugural IOP Business, Innovation & Growth Group conference on 26 February 2019
