Technology that can improve, change and save lives was on show at Cambridge Consultants? Innovation Day 2012 ? from a more eco-friendly way to vacuum the house to a way to improve the lives of people with a medical implant.
The part innovation can play in improving the current economic situation was a recurring theme at the UK event.?This is the best time for innovation and the worst time for business as usual,? said Cambridge Consultants? CEO Alan Richardson.
It was for this reason that Cambridge Consultants had responded through investment to allow them to respond to the need for innovation in many different areas.
One area was looking at ways of encouraging new use for traditional products, such as an environmentally friendly vacuum cleaner that intelligently recognises what mode the user is in, ie hose or floor head, and also allows the user to monitor usage through a screen.
A big attraction was a system that turns an ordinary bike into an intelligent, connected system. This provides an automatic gear box and analyses data to offer advice on improving performance.
A ?beverage room? showed new innovations from a way to order and pay for drinks through an NFC chip that allowed payments to be made securely, which could also be used for buying tickets, to new ways to produce drinks.
This included a machine for home use that makes tea using coffee style pods that has been developed with Douwe Egberts and Phillip?s and a machine that makes straight coffee from beans straight to the cup.
Also on display was an innovation that started off as a more environmentally friendly and cost effective way of getting shaving foam from a can and was now being developed to produce foamed milk.
On the healthcare front, Cambridge Consultants has applied for patents for piOna, a way of improving the user experience and comfort for women receiving progesterone oil while going through IVF treatment. The device has been designed to make self-injection more like receiving an injection from a nurse through a more ergonomic design and also hides the needle, warms the oil to body temperature and reduces the time the injection takes by 30 per cent.
Cambridge Consultants is hoping to tap into the US market with its ?future of healthcare? system that helps patients self-manage diseases such as diabetes through using Bluetooth low energy and a cellular modem that uploads measurements, such as glucose, blood pressure or pill usage, to a server in the cloud that can be accessed by medical staff and patients via a web portal and alerts medical staff to what the patient is not doing, such as not taking pills.
They can then alert the patient in real time via sms, email or tv screen. ?We?re looking to work with partners in the US, where in some states up to 50 per cent of people suffer from diabetes,? said senior consultant Steve Haigh.
Still at the research stage is a liquid metal antenna, that has been developed to allow medical implants to be tuned and optimised after being implanted. Since its development other potential uses had been identified, including managing the huge range of frequencies available with LTE handsets and for white spaces radio.
Delegates also heard from a number of innovation experts. Mike Short, VP of Telefonica Europe, said there was much innovation still be done in the area of connecting machines in a digital economy despite the fact there would soon be more phones than people in the world.
?Last year there were more phones than toothbrushes,? he said. Development was currently about apps (36 billion are set to be downloaded by the end of the year), but would become systems based.
?This is because they have to. You can?t put education or health records on one app,? said Short.
With every new car from 2015 set to be connected, this would be a growth area for connecting machines ? as would smartphone as supermarket, increased use of QR and NFC systems, such as for ticket payment, smarter cities, healthcare and education. There was also a growth in more innovation from different places. In Kenya, for example, mobile money transfer was worth more than physical banks.
Peter George from pharmaceutical company Clinigen said his company had defied the recession through innovation in many different ways from rewarding staff to managing cash flow.
?It?s about innovation and spreading the risk,? he said. He spread the risk through operating three companies. Since 2010 they had grown four fold and from distributing just in the UK to selling to 53 countries.
His advice was to employ good people ? and get rid of these resistant to change ? to train and reward staff, build a good culture, manage cashflow, offer excellent customer service, live by your values and have a plan and follow it.
? PHOTOGRAPH SHOWS: Alan Richardson
Source: http://www.businessweekly.co.uk/hi-tech/14768-cambridge-innovation-pushes-fresh-frontiers
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