Ged Barlow and Paul Radage of C-Tech Innovation discuss the importance of innovation to the UK and how C-Tech is helping customers take their products from concept to commercial reality
Have you ever noticed how noisy kettles are these days? Today, time is money, and both time and money are precious.
We all want everything done immediately, and that includes having our water boiled in half the time.
To meet this requirement, kettle manufacturers changed their heater element designs and increased power ratings to make their products boil faster - unfortunately, at the same time increasing noise levels.
On another domestic issue, have you noticed how, when we use microwave ovens to defrost foods, it always seems to take too long to defrost something.
And then, when we have, the outside is partly cooked while the inside is still frozen? But despite this, most of us still own a microwave in order to make things happen faster.
Most of us put up with inconveniences such as these because there seems to be no alternative, and we think, "Oh well, at least it's better than it was".
However, solving life's irritating challenges like these has become commonplace for Chester-based research and technology development company C-Tech Innovation.
The company works in partnership with its clients to help them develop new products and processes, to meet their own customers' or consumers' needs.
"The silent kettle and RF oven are both typical examples of problems whose solutions were found by applying classical, innovative thinking techniques and a healthy dose of well-managed accident," says C-Tech's managing director Ged Barlow.
"We have found that applying multi-disciplinary teams, with diverse thinking styles, can lead to some surprising and very innovative results to a client's problems".
The 'silent kettle' arose after some bright spark thought about putting a piece of energy efficient industrial heating technology into a kettle, with the objective of reducing the potential for the kettle to 'scale'.
This was successful, and by happy coincidence, it was also noticed that the kettle boiled silently - something which many people had identified as a positive and sought after selling point.
In a similar vein, the issue of defrosted product quality had vexed suppliers of microwave ovens for some time.
C-Tech's heating specialists again applied their knowledge of industrial-scale food cooking and defrosting techniques, to come up with a design of domestic oven which uses the more penetrating radio frequency (RF) energy and therefore the RF oven was born.
This has none of the defrosting problems experienced with microwaves.
These are just two examples where ideas have been taken through and developed into saleable products.
Unfortunately, this is often not the case and many innovations lie locked away, never to be implemented.
Lack of time and resources.
Paul Radage, C-Tech's business development manager believes this is a huge lost opportunity and cites time and resource constraints as a key barrier to innovation for many SMEs.
"There are all sorts of barriers thrown up against taking the innovative steps needed to meet challenges facing us, for example, staving off competition from lower cost economies.
"However, many organisations fail to grasp how vitally important the role of innovation is today.
"Worse still, they realise how important it is, but for whatever reason, their inventions often fail to be implemented.
"The UK is falling behind its counterparts in Europe, America and Asia in terms of spend on research and development.
"Spend on R+D in the UK by major firms stands at just 2% of sales, behind many of our competitors.
"For example, in France the spend is 2.6%, Germany 4.1%, USA 4.5%, Japan 4.0%, and in China, spend on R+D is now growing by 10% annually," Radage continues.
"Despite this apparent resistance to invest in R+D, there exists a plethora of innovation assistance packages available, at both national and local level", states Radage.
In addition, "there are generous tax credits and allowances available for organisations of all sizes performing research and development".
The Inland Revenue's Research and Development (R+D) tax credits are a company tax relief scheme which can either reduce a company's tax bill or, for some, provide a cash sum.
The aim of the tax credits is to encourage greater R+D spending in order to promote investment in innovation.
Between April 2000 and April 2005, around 17,000 claims for R+D tax credits were made with around £1.3bn of support claimed.
It is clear that, as much of the UK's traditional manufacturing base continues to migrate overseas, our remaining manufacturers are faced with a stark choice: innovate, or die.
However, many companies, particularly small businesses, are still put off by the thought and sheer scale of taking an idea from first principles, through research and development to prototyping, value engineering and full scale production.
Add to this, the complication of filing patents to protect their intellectual property and it is easy to see why many SMEs simply do not know where to start, even with all the financial help and incentives that exist.
Ged Barlow continues: "We find that increasingly our clients are asking us to assist them with the whole spectrum of the new product development process.
"This includes training on how to actually manage the creative process and generation of new ideas, right through to advice on patent protection and best routes to market".
But being an SME doesn't have to always mean thinking small.
C-Tech Innovation itself is an SME, and so fully understands the issues facing owner-managers of small companies and the importance of innovation.
C-Tech's latest venture combines the generation of hydrogen from food waste, using this in fuel cells.
This could provide a future, cost-effective method of reducing our dependence on fossil fuels, for example, in vehicles - which could have the added benefit that they could all be driven around silently too.
