One of the most difficult aspects of running a medium sized business is choosing and creating a new product range to build into a significant business area. Always there are tweaks possible to existing products, to enhance the specification or application areas, and the customers will tell you what they need to make your current product range fit their requirements. But not many customers are able to, or will think to tell a supplier, about a new product that is needed that might fit their expertise.
University research can lead to payback
So how do you find a significant new product range that will have a market? Often something will come out of University research: maybe not developed as a product, but as a by-product of adapting some technology. As an electronics graduate back in the 1970s, I was lucky enough to have a job in a forward looking company, who wanted to tap into university research ideas, so they told me to find all the relevant UK research departments and then visit and report on those where the work looked interesting – in fluid handling instrumentation. The plan would then be to license or co-operate to develop a product. The company was Bestobell Mobrey, and they were level switch and boiler control specialists: they needed to branch out and expand into a new business area.
Nowadays the scene has changed, and universities have developed their systems for promoting ideas and financing promising developments, in co-operation with venture capitalist investors. Recently the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim, which has an associated contract R&D company called SINTEF, with 2100 staff, sold GasSecure, a business created in 2008 to build and market a wireless flammable gas detector. This had been developed because of the known market for this type of product offshore in the Norwegian oil and gas platforms, and demonstrates the sensible planning and policies applied in Norway to take advantage of their skills in this area. The gas detector has taken many years to develop, prove, certify etc., but the USD 61 million paid by the Dräger Group to acquire this business and technology is a positive pay-back. Plus Dräger will keep the business and research activity in Norway.
Flow measurement opportunities emerge
For Bestobell in 1975, flow measurement was one of the obvious product technology areas to look at, and there were plenty of different techniques active in research studies. The in-house expertise in Bestobell suggested seeking out anything applying ultrasonics, so there was almost a product definition. Ultrasonic cross-correlation was being used in Bradford and Middlesborough, but the computing power and speed needed was not available: these days it is not such a problem, and the technique is viable for multi-phase oil/water flows etc.
In Sheffield there was a fluidic oscillator flowmeter, a very clever idea with no moving parts – so it would have a long life in a clean liquid. The technique was well suited to pulse counting by ultrasonic or pressure sensors: it could have made a viable water meter, but does not seem to have been adopted. From the UKAEA laboratories at Harwell came the patents on ultrasonic time of flight flow measurement, with the technology licensed via NRDC, a government body set up to make money out of licensing research. In fact Bestobell missed out, and these patents were licensed to Envirotech of the USA, who developed the first closed pipe time of flight flowmeter.
While researching this business area in the ‘70s, a new sensor was seen at various exhibitions, imported to the UK from the USA by Ryland Pumps (now a part of Sterling SIHI in the Flowserve Corporation). For them it was a factored product, and they did not seem to be that active in promotion. Searching the literature for Doppler flowmeter sources – in those days this was done in a library, on paper – led to significant numbers of medical (blood flow) applications. Some of these quoted a patent application by a Mr. Evans. Tracking him down through the Patent Office, it transpired he was out of work, but had developed these ideas on a university project, and had some sort of agreement with a small company in Southport, who were building a Doppler flowmeter for industrial use.
Things moved fast then, in negotiations and distribution contracts: the Bestobell Doppler flowmeter was launched and created a major new business for the company. A few years later, Bestobell acquired the ultrasonic time of flight flowmeter business of Sparling Envirotech, so that technology came round again. Many companies have now developed multi-path and fiscal measurement versions of this flowmeter: it is a standard industry product. The latest variant, the Titan Atrato, has emerged from work financed and supported industrially over eight years at Cranfield University by Titan Enterprises. The Atrato is aimed at small bore and low flow measurement applications, and can even measure pharmaceutical dosing flows.
So, little is predictable when seeking new products: Mr. Evans received a good series of royalty payments, and after a few years I visited the Southport supply company and was allowed to drive the owner’s new acquisition – a vintage yellow Rolls Royce!
Nick Denbow spent 30 years as a UK-based process instrumentation marketing manager, and then changed sides – becoming a freelance editor and starting Processingtalk.com. Avoiding retirement, he published the INSIDER automation newsletter for five years, www.iainsider.com, and now acts as its EMEA editorial correspondent. His blog is on www.nickdenbow.com
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