Amongst this year’s winners is the developer of a prosthetic hand addressing the needs of children, women and other with small hands. There’s an innovative test system, licensed by many semiconductor manufacturers and IP developers, that makes sure the video you see on your screen is what you should see. The winning design team created the world’s first radar controlled traffic management system, while the Small Company of the Year is developing motion control systems and taking on multinationals.
Grand Prix winner
The space industry is quickly becoming attractive to product developers and investors alike. And it is big business, even though it might not seem like it.
One company pursuing this market is Oxford Space Systems (OSS), winner of this year’s Grand Prix. Just two years old, the company has already raised more than £1million in investment and will see one of its products launched into space in 2016.
Every satellite requires some form of deployable structure and designers need to improve the stowage efficiency of these structures. OSS’ solution is AstroTube, a proprietary rolled composite material that unfurls like a tape measure. This allows structures such as antennas, panels and booms to not only be lighter and smaller, but also less complex. To achieve this, OSS is working with a world leading expert in origami techniques.
OSS was also recognised as Start Up of the Year. In the opinion of the Judges, OSS has demonstrated everything you could plan and hope for from a start up; a viable range of innovative products and demand for its technology from the global space industry.
OSS has already signed five ‘significant’ development contracts and
says it is succeeding because it has ‘genuinely innovative and disruptive technology, strong backing from investors and demand from companies in the US, the UK and Japan.
The OSS team is encouraged to ‘think big’ and to not be scared of proposing apparently ‘wacky’ ideas. In founder Mike Lawton’s opinion, there is no such thing as a ‘daft idea’. “History,” he says, “is littered with so called experts saying that the technology we take for granted was impossible.”
| What the Judges said: “It’s a huge success story for UK manufacturing plc and an example to other companies of how to identify and exploit a market opportunity.” |
Electronic Product of the Year
As higher display resolutions become more popular, data needs to be compressed so that it can be transmitted at lower bit rates or stored in smaller memory areas.
Looking to meet these requirements, the MPEG video standards body has defined the HEVC codec, while Google and YouTube, looking to stream 4K video over the internet, have defined the VP9 high compression codec.
Because both codecs provide much higher rates of compression than previous codecs, the encoding process is far more complex and the bitstreams generated by the codecs are equally complex. These bitstreams have to be decoded without error in order to display the video as intended.
Argon Streams is a set of encoded video bitstreams that can be used by decoder developers to verify that their products can handle the latest video standards. The product is targeted at semiconductor companies who are designing and manufacturing decoders, but is also of use to IP developers. In both cases, the end products will be used in devices such as smartphones, tablets and internet streaming systems.
Argon Design has now signed 22 licenses for Argon Streams – 14 more than its ‘optimistic’ forecast.
| What the Judges said: “While there might only be a small number of customers for Argon Stream’s product, it is of critical importance, helping them to ensure their chips get to market in a timely fashion, on budget and that they work.” |
Consultancy of the Year
Selecting the Consultancy of the Year is one of the more difficult tasks for the Judging Panel, simply because of the mix of specialists and generalists and small and large companies.
Standing out amongst shortlisted companies was Kinneir Dufort. Headquartered in Bristol, it works across markets ranging from consumer goods to defence, with a number of multinational companies as customers.
Over the past five years, headcount has grown to 75 engineers, designers, researchers and software experts – a 26% increase on 2011. During the same period, revenue has grown to £7million, driven by growth across all sectors, with the medical and fast moving consumer goods markets showing particular growth.
The company says it has established a strong competitive advantage and maintains this through the implementation of carefully considered strategies designed to produce long term commercial growth.
Design led innovation programmes – including Optimisation, Discovery and Momentum – can be tailored to specific needs. Optimisation identifies business efficiency opportunities, including product improvement in quality, cost and manufacture, while Discovery helps to explore potential business opportunities. Momentum, meanwhile, is an innovation camp integrating user insight, co-creation workshops and concept testing in order to generate and develop new ideas.
With two sites in Bristol, Kinneir Dufort recently opened a Medical Device Design Centre of Excellence in Cambridge.
| What the Judges said: “Kinneir Dufort has demonstrated a real sense of purpose and has delivered fantastic results by following a clear five year plan: it has created excellent design work across hundreds of innovative project solutions.” |
This year's BEEAs winners celebrate their success |
Design Team of the Year
Without teamwork, Navtech’s innovative ClearWay product – the first radar based traffic monitoring system – would not have been delivered on schedule. In fact, the company says the project would not have been possible.
It cites as one of the reasons the many different areas of expertise required; ranging from code writing to mechanics and radar engineering to circuitry creation.
The six members of the hardware team were required to develop a prototype that not only met the size specifications of a roadside sensor, but was also commercially viable. This meant designing a radar half the size and half the cost of Navtech’s existing radars.
Key project milestones were: development of a 77GHz microwave beam splitter; a radar sensor prototype; testing the detection abilities of the prototype; a trial system; and product qualification and introduction to production.
For the three person software team, the milestones were: reliable tracking of vehicles on a highway; development of rules that would generate alarms if anything out of the ordinary is detected; and providing a complex system that can cover a large site to customers in a simple and usable way.
Working under the agile methodology approach, the two teams focused on ‘micro-milestones’ in two week sprints, working towards the larger targets. All significant milestones were met and team work was fundamental in this success.
The result is ClearWay, a system that can count and classify traffic on roads, whilst providing alerts of vehicles that may be slowing, stopped or reversing, as well as whether pedestrians or debris are on the road. ClearWay has a response time of less than 10s and each unit scans up to 1km of road surface, detects vehicles at 500m and people at 350m.
| What the Judges said: “In a fiercely contested category, the Navtech team provided clear evidence that its multidisciplinary team was fast and efficient and delivering new technology to new areas across multiple markets” |
Design Engineer of the Year
Richard Poulton joined Navtech in 2008 as the company’s sole hardware engineer. Since then, he has helped to expand the hardware engineering team to eight people, providing their induction and internal training, as well as making a significant contribution to their professional development. In fact, the company says his skills and experience are ‘pivotal’ to its success.
An electronic engineer by training, Poulton has become well practised in all aspects of radar engineering – from design and creation of PCBs to making significant input into software development and mechanical engineering efforts.
Poulton’s role in Navtech is described as ‘all encompassing’; handling product lifecycles from concept to product maintenance. He is also responsible for legacy designs and dealing with obsolescence issues, as well as consulting on non standard repairs.
Poulton has worked with the Knowledge Transfer Partnership and the University of Bath, sponsoring two young engineers’ programmes. Acting as industrial supervisor to both, he has taken an active interest in furthering their skills and knowledge. He also takes a personal interest in encouraging young people into engineering and regularly attends events at local schools.
| What the Judges said: “A driving force in the development of complex, multidisciplinary projects, he is not only developing his engineering staff, but also encouraging the next generation of engineers.” |
Young Design Engineer of the Year
The Young Engineer of the Year Award was of great interest to the Judges, who wanted to find someone who has ‘hit the ground running’; someone who has applied knowledge and innovation to projects, who is motivated and who is acting as an ambassador for their chosen profession.
Dan Stamp joined Kliklok as an assistant engineer in August 2011, having graduated from Bournemouth University with a Masters in Engineering. During his four years with the company, he has established himself as a trusted and key member of the engineering team, acting as project engineer for smaller designs and taking on elements of larger projects, in association with senior engineers.
In the past year, Dan has worked on a number of machine design projects with international companies. One of these projects – a complete packaging line for a leading toy manufacturer – incorporated a solution in a machine that can handle more than 100 different carton sizes in a variety of styles.
Dan is involved with a number of patent applications, including one for technology used in the toy manufacturer’s system.
According to Kliklok, Dan is an efficient young engineer who is intuitive and learns quickly.
| What the Judges said: “Dan Stamp has demonstrated his technical excellence and proven his engineering skills by making innovative contributions to product design, patent applications and through his work inspiring young engineers.” |
