Tech-Trends

Digital Rights Management

2010-10-11T09:54:00.000+01:00

I have always been a keen reader and have long awaited the the arrival of the e-Book reader as an alternative to the paperback book. Holidays abroad have always presented a challenge since I have often read for or five books, as well as listened to an audio book or two in the late evening. The idea of reducing the bulk of this reading matter has always seemed a desirable goal.

Not surprisingly I was an early adopter of spoken word on mp3 players, and bought a Sony eBook as soon as I felt that there were sufficient choices of suppliers. I have to say that in all but one respect the eBook has surpassed my expectations. Reading the screen is a delight since I can set the font size to what suits me for easy reading.

My only gripe is the DRM (Digital Rights Management) associated with some purchases. If I buy the book, I want to read it. Like many people I have no interest in breaking copyright or license arrangements. I'd like to pay, download and read. A couple of weeks ago I bought five eBooks and tried to download them. After struggling for a good half hour I realised that to complete the download I needed to click a license agreement button in a pop-up window. Like all web savvy users, pop-ups are blocked on my computers.

The experience leaves me wondering if adoption of this excellent technology will be hampered by excessive and poorly thought out interfaces to the end user?

A systems approach to website design

2010-10-01T16:00:00.001+01:00

Web application site design has come a long way since I made my first attempt in 1995. As with many new techniques or products, there was a certain amount of technical skill required, but anyone with basic programming experience could manage to create a simple interactive site. Plunging in at the deep end I quickly ended up playing around with ways of linking websites to databases.

With such an obvious application it was not long before the creation of complex websites with loads of interactivity became a major business. However, I personally think that the wind is changing again and I wonder how soon before a new wave of companies exploits the new opportunities.

In a systems approach to design, one generally starts from the top and then work down to details. Good principles are to use the biggest building blocks possible and then re-use them if you can. This principle applies to websites too. It is now generally better to work with a content management system such as Joomla or Drupal, rather than work from first principles and write HTML. On top of this we are now we are starting to see the building blocks get even bigger with on-line services such as Google, offering really sophisticated systems as starting points which you can then customise to meet your exact needs.

This is good news to website owners as complex requirements can now be more easily incorporated, but perhaps not so good news to businesses that would rather charge for building things from scratch.

Using the cloud

2010-09-24T10:16:00.001+01:00

Continuing my thoughts on the cloud I have moved on to thinking about applications. I have often been asked to write small pieces of software to automate processes that would otherwise have been carried out by hand. My first commercial program was written in basic and translated a word processor document into a format compatible for typesetting. For a while I was something of an expert in this process and fulfilled a useful role between authors and publishers.

Such small scale automation has been a recurring theme and often used in a data collection format. However, I have become increasingly unhappy about embedding code in documents and spreadsheets because of security reasons, and also the effort of keeping versions of code up to date.

Now enter the cloud. We are seeing a trend towards using small applications on phones, web pages and anywhere else that is connected to the web. These little apps are managed in a variety of ways, but the basic principle is that you can write an app and use it many times. The inevitable modifications can be managed simply by updating the source code.

As they say, here is one I prepared earlier. It is a little google gadget to help collect time related information about MCRL's (Manufacturing Capability Readiness Levels) for technology roadmapping. I use this gadget to enhance forms I use to collect data both on and off line.

Living in the cloud

2010-09-21T08:20:00.000+01:00

There is much talk these days of "cloud computing" not all of it by people who have really tried it. One criticism is about privacy - if you don't know where your data resides, how can you be sure that it is safe from prying eyes. If you are storing personal data about yourself and others, then clearly you have a responsibility of care with that data.

This got me to thinking about the idea of living with no data stored on any PC, but being able to access it anywhere. I would be proof against hardware theft, failure and upgrade. As a real digital squirrel where data is concerned, this sounded a great idea, but how to deal with the data security? Encryption sounded like an answer, but what a pain having to unlock every file before using it and ensuring it is encrypted afterwards. What I really wanted is to be able to unlock a secure file space at the start of a session and lock it afterwards. I haven't taken the plunge and gone fully cloud, yet, but I have realised my goal of living with no data on any computer. This is how it works.....

I have a 300 GB USB external drive that has been encrypted using Truecrypt. As versions of Truecrypt are available for Linux, Mac and Windows (yes I use all three) I am not tied to any particular computer. All my data resides on this encrypted drive which is unlocked using a password I generated at random. Once unlocked an unencrypted drive is mounted and I use it happily for my entire session. At the end of the session I unmount it and my data is secure. It is backed up to a similar encrypted disk very, very regularly.

I now feel much more comfortable travelling. Most of the time I just carry the backed up 300GB drive. If it is lost or stolen it will probably end up being used as a music store. I can rest assured that I have done everything possible to protect the data. When I carry a laptop, it is just a bare system with no data. Its loss or failure would be irritating, not a disaster. Upgrading it is really easy.

Of course the next step is to have my primary data store in the cloud. I'm not quite ready to do this yet, but I find I like the idea. I suspect it is only a matter of time before the tools to do this become routinely accepted and my encrypted hard drive will be obsolete.

This car runs on code

2009-02-04T13:50:00.005Z

I was interested to read the article in the IEEE Spectrum "This car runs on code" that suggests that a premium car now uses over 100 million lines of code when running, while the F-22 Raptor, the current U.S. Air Force front line jet fighter, requires a mere 1.7 million lines.

The hidden story here is that no-one sat down and produced a 100 million lines of unique code to run the car. The code was built up from blocks of code that had already been proven to work and cleverly woven together and installed in the multiplicity devices to produce the finished product.

This now leave me wondering how to manage software in products with long lifetimes? A car may run for 15 years and subsystems replaced several times. With such software complexity will it even be possible to replace parts after six or seven years? Maybe be the end users will have a view on this?

Mobiles take a great leap forward (a matter for UK pride)

2009-01-06T14:56:00.005Z

Mobiles take a great leap forward is the title of an interesting little article on the BBC News website. The main focus of the article is about the increasing capability of mobile phones thanks to the inexorable increase in power of microprocessors predicted by Moore's Law . As someone who has studied technology trends I have a huge respect to the man who had the insight and courage to make the assertion that the number of transistors that can be built on a chip would grow exponentially. To make that assertion in 1965 when most of us in the UK were watching valve based televisions and listening to transistor radios was truly visionary.

However, nestled inside the article is a statement that ought to be headlined as a matter of UK national pride, especially given the current economic gloom where the news is dominated by the loss of companies which are house hold names. To me it is proof that the UK still has engineering capability that should make us all proud. Perhaps the most iconic product of the new millennium is mobile phone and, I quote: "...More than 80% of the chips inside mobile phones are designed by UK firm Advanced Risc Machines (Arm)...".

Looking to the Future

2008-12-22T10:47:00.005Z

Almost ten years ago to the day I was part of a small team that help a company to transfer an solid state gyroscope design from the military to automotive domain. The idea behind the work was that accelerometers and gyroscopes could be used as sensors in active suspension systems to improve driving characteristics. Over the years I have watched this technology pop up in all sorts of applications that we never even dreamed of at the time, which leaves me wondering how one can ever really define a "route to market" for a new invention.

I was not surprised to see solid state gyros turn up in high end model helicopters and the like, but their appearance in the last year or so in small indoor helicopters was something of a surprise. Some years ago I was shown a game in a University computing department where the interface was a controller fitted with solid state gyros and accelerometers. Now such controllers are commonplace with game controllers such as the Nintendo Wii.

It is this last application that has really brought home to me the sensitivity of these devices. When ten pin bowling (and I am not very good) I find that I get a spin that causes the bowling ball to veer left at the end of the run. I compensate for this by rotating slightly clockwise. Trying out the ten pin bowling game on the Wii over the holiday period I found that the virtual ball behaved just like the real ball and veered to the left at the end of the run. My on screen avatar (complete with virtual beard) also has to turn slightly clockwise to compensate. Ten years ago I never even dreamed that solid state gyroscope would be a component in a toy. In fact, I am sure I would have been laughed at for even making such a suggestion, but today no-one doubts the size of the market and its potential for growth.

What will the next type of sensor to make the journey from areospace into the games market?

The little light goes out: End of an Era

2008-08-12T08:08:00.004+01:00

When Asus announced the launch of their new PC I was interested to read that the specification included a 64GB solid-state disk (SSD). Clearly Asus are convinced that SSD technology has matured enough to be a reliable alternative to the magnetic hard drive that has been a part of our lives for so long. The problem with SSDs is that there is a limited "write endurance" beyond which the drive becomes unreliable.

So why are Asus so confident? Slowly the penny dropped. The little disk activity light on my Asus notebook only flickers when I boot up or save a file. A quick check of my modestly specified desktop PC running Linux showed the same, and then the silence hit me.

For years I have been aware of the chunter of the hard drive coupled with the flicker of the disk activity light. The distinctive sound told me my (excessively large) spreadsheets were recalculating and all was well with my PC. While running one particular research project, I kept the server in my office as I could tell by the disk drive chatter that all was well. On two occasions it was hacked. The changed sounds of disk activity were the first warning that all was not well.

But my Linux desktop computer sits there almost silent, with only a quiet whirr of the fan. Clearly write endurance is not going to be the problem it was, at least with Linux. Now the disk activity light has gone out, at least on some PCs, it is the end of an era. For me the hard drive has been one of the iconic images illustrating integration between, mechanical design, material properties, and electronic control. That is why we chose an image of a hard drive as our banner on the home page of the Integrated Products KTN. But it now looks like it is the beginning of the end of the hard drive, and soon the SSD will reign supreme.

New ways of Business On-line

2008-07-29T18:00:00.004+01:00

Social websites remain big news and it is interesting look at ways that businesses are starting to exploit new ways of working on-line. A trend that I have been following is the short video clip, hosted through YouTube or similar service.

An example that caught my eye recently was the UK Trade and Investment channel on YouTube. To see a government department leading the way with this innovation is particularly welcome as it sends a clear sign about the acceptability of the medium for business use. Too often it is associated with news about illegal file sharing.

Firms 'miss' social site success

2008-07-14T09:19:00.007+01:00

See BBC Article http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7501073.stm

Social networking sites are now big news. Part of their appeal is the way in which they meet a fundamental human need to communicate. While sites such as Facebook and YouTube have captured the public imagination in a variety of positive (keep in contact with family and friends worldwide etc.) and negative (bad people from all over the world will steal your identity etc.), it is worth remembering that less flashy Bulletin Board Systems and news groups have been used to keep communities of enthusiasts in contact since the 1990's.

That the principle of on-line networking works is not in dispute, but accusing the business community of not seeing the potential is rather harsh. It is easy to say "set up an on-line community" but not so easy to actually achieve that goal. I say this from the perspective of personal experience. Part of the original vision of the UK Knowledge Transfer Networks (KTNs) was to set up and mobilise UK businesses and Universities (the research base) in an organised on-line community. As Director of the IPM KTN I know how hard that challenge is to achieve. Cyberspace is littered with the remnants of on-line one stop shops, portals and other little used shells of would be communities; the KTNs have at least had the advantage of funding and and an attempt at large scale co-ordination through a unified on-line offering, but I will be first to admit that we still have much more work to do before we have truly established an on-line community.

Even though I buy into the vision of on-line business communities I know that for them to become a reality, it will take more than that vision to bring them into being. The successful on-line communities to which I belong are united by common interests, rather than personal gain, and the desire to share knowledge and experience rather than just to use it. Effective use of social networking sites for business use is going to require much greater openness amongst commercial organisations than is usual at the moment. I believe that many businesses can see the benefits of everyone jumping into the open exchange of information offered by social networking, but are afraid that the first to jump will be disadvantaged by unequal information exchanges.

Intellectual-property scepticism

2008-06-27T13:46:00.004+01:00

Bewailing the shortcomings of small businesses is a popular sport. Everyone’s at it – from government ministers and other politicians to providers of business services (including IP services), and from management scientists to journalists. Every imaginable failing attracts their opprobrium. But there's one kind that gets more than its fair share. I call it the lack-of-awareness-of-X. In each case, of course, X stands for some supposedly critical ingredient of business success. It might be information technology, marketing, the market for their products, finance, law, their carbon footprint… In fact, you name it; lots of SMEs don't get it. Apparently.

Intellectual property is no exception. It’s natural enough, I suppose. Accepted wisdom says high-labour-cost economies will depend more and more on intellectual property. So businesses need to get their heads around it. It stands to reason, doesn't it?

I don't doubt that many are the SMEs that could benefit from understanding IP better. I do wonder, though, if there wouldn’t be merit in turning the tables as well. In other words, wouldn't things be even better if those who urge SMEs to get to grips with IP themselves got to grips with the reasons why SMEs don't behave towards IP as they, the critics of SMEs, suppose they should?

The problem with continually charging SMEs with a lack of awareness of IP is that it sweeps these reasons under the carpet and makes a single reason stand in place of them all – namely plain ignorance. SMEs don't play the IP game as they should, it suggests, because they know nothing – or virtually nothing – about intellectual property.

Cut to a presentation at a recent seminar put on by a trade association we work with. The owner of a start-up was talking us through the history of the innovation he'd set up his company to develop. This was a man who'd worked for years as a sales person in the marketplace where he's soon going to be selling this, his first product. This guy knew his onions.

Following the usual advice, he'd patented his invention and the IP had helped him finance product development. But going through the process gave him pause for thought. Now he's decided he probably won't patent the next inventions he has in the pipeline. Why? Well, the price of obtaining a patent was high on his list of reasons. His business is also protected by requirements that medical inventions like his have to meet before they can be legally placed on the market. Approval takes time – time an imitator probably can't afford.

Top of the list, though, was one reason that doesn't often feature in those introductory IP-for-dummies lectures you come across at business events. This inventor reckons a patent isn't very valuable to him unless he has the capacity to sue an infringer. Finance for start-ups being as hard to come by as it is, he knows he wouldn't be able to raise the funds to pay for court action against a large corporation that chose to infringe.

But the specific reasons are not important to what I'm suggesting here. The important thing is that ignorance had nothing to do with this company's decision to think twice before applying for patents in future.

Many other companies are in a similar position; they have some knowledge of IP but are not entirely sold on its merits, and with good reason. Who knows how widespread those in the middle ground are, between the completely ignorant and the well-informed but healthily sceptical? The answer, I suspect, is the vast majority. I suggest we won't find out – and so may not be able to raise industry's IP game by much – until we break free of the lack-of-awareness fixation. Improving IP exploitation by SMEs needs to be a two-way thing. Yes, many SMEs stand to gain from a richer understanding of IP. But getting IP experts to understand how IP is regarded and can practically be exploited by sceptical SMEs is no less urgent a task.

Open Innovation and Disruptive Technology: two sides of one coin?

2008-06-18T09:55:00.003+01:00

When I first heard the term "open innovation" I searched around for for some good definitions and read a few white papers on the topic. As ever, these days, the article on wikipedia is an excellent introduction and got me thinking about open innovation and its potential links to disruptive technologies within specific applications and markets.

One of the principle tenets of open innovation is recognising that great ideas may come from outside of an organisation. This is an important shift in thinking, and a real response to the threat posed to any company by disruptive technologies, as documented in Christensen's "The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies cause great firms to fail". This is one of those thought provoking books that has brought the words "disruptive technology" into every day usage, but sadly the term has lost some impact as it often used out of its original context to describe any incremental innovation.

The essence of Christensen's observations were that new technologies that were less capable than existing technologies in a particular market or application, could erode the established market if they were capable of supplying the needs of the the low end commodity user. So, when the only feature a user bases a purchase decision on is cost, the cheapest always wins the order. The established players with more expensive and more capable solutions congratulate themselves for having higher margins serve the needs of high end users. However, over time they see their market eroded away to nothing as the disruptive technology improves incrementally to dominate the established market from the low end upwards.

The only strategy for an organisation to fight this threat is to adopt the potentially disruptive technology for themselves and develop it, even though that may mean a fundamental change in business approach. So the question is: How does one spot a disruptive technology soon enough to be able to respond to the business threat and turn that threat into an opportunity by adopting it under the open innovation paradigm?

Counterfeit Goods

2008-06-06T11:00:00.002+01:00

The issue of counterfeit manufactured goods first started to interest me in the mid 1980's when I watched the launch of a small sailing cruiser in Portsmouth Harbour. The craft was manoeuvred into the water using a large crane and heavy lifting straps. A few moments after the cruiser floated free, the inboard engine was engaged. Those of us standing close to the harbour wall had an excellent view of the propeller flying off the shaft like a Frisbee, leaving the proud boat owner owner floating helplessly in the water in front of an amused audience.

At low tide I helped recover the propeller and found the remains of the nut that was supposed to have held in in place - it had split neatly in two. A colleague at the University where I worked at the time examined the nut and after testing and declared it to have failed because it was manufactured from a non marine grade steel. The nut is still probably in use as an examination item in vivas today, as an example to new engineers of how you cannot always trust the label.

Since that time I have come across many counterfeit items hidden in batches of genuine products: brass plated screws amongst solid brass screws; mild steel hacksaw blades instead of tool grade steel; mild steel jemmy bars so soft I could do an impressive strong man act in the store where I purchased them; and computer memory without the chips inside. Moving up the value chain, while attending an information gathering mission on end of life recycling of electronic goods, it became clear that some goods were not made of the materials specified, and that some electronic housings contained hazardous fire retardant chemicals that necessitated very special handling, even when manufacturers markings identified the materials used as benign. In each case I believe the company selling the goods almost certainly to be innocent and duped by a substitution that occurred much earlier in the supply chain. The problem is not confined to consumer goods, as there are also a growing number of examples of counterfeit personal health care goods too.

When we think of counterfeit goods the usual definition is: not genuine; imitating something superior. But this is now not always the case. The counterfeit goods may have all the properties of the genuine article, plus a few more. Perhaps we should call them Trojan counterfeits. The US Pentagon certainly seems to acknowledge the possibility of "kill switches" embedded in microprocessors as a real example of the threat presented by such counterfeits.

At a more domestic level, this got me wondering about the routers many of us use to connect to the Internet. I recently threw the router provided free by my ISP away. Sorry, I mean responsibly disposed of it at my local WEEE recycling point. The reason being that I was inconvenience by recent changes to the software inside that had been automatically downloaded. I have no reason to suppose that the changes made were anything other than to make the routers easier to remotely maintain, but what if the "bad guys" out there installed programs into my router. Could they monitor my Internet activity and get the keys to my on-line bank account?

Perhaps this raises a new very practical question: It is not possible to construct a test for the presence of Trojan features that have unknown properties, so how do I verify that a product is free from such features? The engineers who are responsible for cyber security have been addressing this type of issue for since the birth of the computer virus in the 1970's. Perhaps the product manufacturers and consumers are going to have to learn some new lessons when it comes to validating products. Maybe the "please register your product on our website" card is about to take on new a new value?

Manufacturing for the new millenium

2008-05-19T09:03:00.005+01:00

A short while ago my wife and I were considering what to do with our fairly extensive collection of movie DVDs and music CDs. Now, ours is a rather technically informed household, and my interest in technology roadmapping is sometimes called upon help to ensure future proofing of high technology gadgets. To this end I have created a roadmap for home entertainment systems which as doubled as a device to use in presentations on roadmapping methodologies. Using this roadmap, it became clear in 2004 that within a few years that the internet was likely to be the primary medium for home entertainment, and that WiFi networks were likely to be used extensively in the domestic environment for accessing collections of music and videos. I'm not talking about illegal usage here, just the technical mechanisms to access material we have already bought.

As time has passed it has become clear that the technical aspects of home entertainment have been easier to anticipate than the product design aspects, and the degree of integration possible has been a real surprise. For example, tinkering together a media server is an easy task with PC components, just add a home wireless network and for a £100 or so one can build a server that can hide in a cupboard, and allow access to media files from anywhere around the house.

However, the real surprise is how some manufacturers have succeeded in integrating this and even more functionality into a stylish packages that slip into the pocket and runs on batteries! If you've tried out products like the Apple i-touch or HTC Touch, you will know what I mean.

But it is the broader impacts on business that I have been pondering on. We buy CDs and DVDs as entertainment, not as collectables, so the technical solution suits our household and no doubt many others. Clearly there are new opportunities opening to supply entertainment as the "Digital Superhighway" talked about in the 1990s comes of age in the new millennium. The effects of these changes ripple out beyond the obvious direct impacts, and must surely alter the broader manufacturing community: Who could have forecast manufacturing models that make it possible to buy a high specification mobile media player that can hold our entire collection of audio CDs plus a high quality audio player for less than the cost of the shelving to hold the CDs?

What is a KTN

2008-05-02T10:34:00.004+01:00

What is a KTN and what does it do? It's a good question and one that came into sharp relief when the team were attending a "Talking to the media" course several weeks ago. You can imagine the scenario: The recorder is capturing every moment of silence with painful accuracy and your tongue is tied in a knot. So what do you say?

Our own website states: "The Integrated Products Manufacturing Knowledge Transfer Network's mission is to assist UK industry with research and technology-transfer activities in the design, development and manufacture of complex products with integrated electronic and mechanical function. With the goal of bringing cutting-edge technology into today's market place, the Integrated Products Manufacturing KTN utilises existing UK and European funding initiatives to the benefit of the UK economy."

Which is true, but does not exactly roll off the tongue. I also find that Knowledge transfer as a topic has its own entry in wikipedia but as there is no entry on Knowledge Transfer Networks, that doesn't help.

A recent government report "Innovation Nation" states: Knowledge Transfer Networks promote the benefits to organisations of communicating their own ideas and learning from others. Which is a statement of aspiration, but it is not a definition.

So back to the media training day. It is a mock telephone interview with live local radio. One of the team members is "volunteered" to go first. The pressure mounts. The phone rings and introductions are made.

So what is a KTN and what you do?

Inspiration strikes more or less as follows........

A KTN is a Knowledge Transfer Network, funded by the UK government through the Technology Strategy Board. Our main role is to put companies and innovators in contact with the knowledge and funding that they need to bring new products and processes to market. Membership to our KTN is free, and gives access to technology watch reports on current developments, on-line meetings, information on funding, opportunity to take part in government industrial consultations, and more. The website also lists a growing number of successful case studies.

Tell me about one of your successes.....

And the interview proceeds, while I frantically make notes on one of the best definitions of a KTN I have heard to date.

Holy grail in technical clothing

2008-04-29T20:26:00.004+01:00

Are you doing R&D into an enabling technology? If you know the answer to this question is yes, I’m impressed. And I’m not the only one. There are any number of policy-making bodies, not to mention corporations, enamoured of enabling technologies just now and recommending the country, region, industrial sector or R&D department get into enabling technologies PDQ.

I’m not sure what an ‘enabling technology’ is. (Don’t all technologies enable something?) The phrase is one of those that insinuates itself into your conscious mind so gradually that the first time you notice it, you realize first that you’ve heard it a thousand times before and secondly that you have only the vaguest idea what it means.

I first noticed it, in exactly this way, at a workshop put on by an RDA consulting on its forthcoming regional technology strategy. It was the workshop coordinator who used it first, and in a way that suggested 'enabling technologies' are rather important. I asked what it meant. A few fellow delegates volunteered answers. All but one were unconvincing. My fellows – from universities, local companies, trade associations, business-support organizations and so on – were as in the dark as I was.

It turns out that one of the commoner usages is in longer phrases of the kind ‘enabling technology for X’, where X is some technical goal. Hence you can find references to enabling technologies for drug discovery, for example, for law enforcement, for e-business, for petascale electromagnetic accelerator simulation and many more things besides. It's a straightforward turn of phrase. You may question whether technology B will be instrumental in realizing goal A. You may argue that the word ‘enabling’ is not strictly necessary here. But at least you can see what the speaker is proposing to enable and how.

At the RDA's strategy workshop, though, the talk was of ‘enabling technologies’ tout court. No explicit technical goals here, just plain, unqualified 'enabling technologies'. So what was the one plausible answer I got from a fellow delegate? It was more or less this: an enabling technology is one that underpins a broad range of products or services.

Why anyone would choose ‘enabling’ as the adjective to convey this sense, I’m not sure. (What use would a non-enabling technology be?) But it would fit well with my observation that policy-making bodies think highly of enabling technologies. By commonsense reasoning (and I emphasize nothing stronger than that), you might expect companies supplying enabling technologies, and those in their supply chains, to be less sensitive to the vagaries of the end-user markets for any one of the particular products and services enabled by those technologies. If the market for GPS-equipped digital cameras were to flop tomorrow, for instance, it probably wouldn’t extinguish companies supplying GPS modules or research groups researching GPS technologies, because the demand for GPS functionality is diffuse.

So this extempore definition is plausible. Still, without further elaboration, it doesn’t do enough to explain the popularity of ‘enabling technologies’ in policy- and strategy-making circles. It’s not hard to think of many technologies that underpin a very diverse range of applications but don’t attract the envy of ambitious policy makers. Think of screws, springs, blow-moulding, textiles (excluding ‘technical’ textiles), metal bashing, cardboard packaging, toolmaking (excluding rapid tooling etc.)… I’m yet to find any document offering a definition, or even vaguely hinting at one, that distinguishes what policy makers are really after when they ask for enabling technologies from these well-ensconced ‘traditional’ technologies.

There has to be some substance behind the phrase ‘enabling technology’, else it would be easy to conclude that it’s a way for policy makers to say ‘holy grail’ without bringing to their audience members' minds images of an emperor in new clothes. But what is it?

The Funding Maze

2008-04-28T09:36:00.005+01:00

Working in an environment where mechanisms for public funding are virtually a daily topic of conversation, it is all too easy to slip into jargon almost incomprehensible to the outsider. Quite rightly the government has launched a Business Support Simplification Programme to try to address this issue.

Talking to attendees at a recent academic / business forum, I realised that this type of obscurity extended to cover academic funding as well. For example, businesses are often asked to contribute to Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council EPSRC funded projects. This is fair enough, since the reason for including industrial support is to direct such research down a path that is likely to have industrial benefit. It also presumes that there is a good understanding amongst the industrial partners of how this type of academic co-funding works and what constitutes a reasonable expectation of project deliverables, and ownership of intellectual property. Clearly this is not always the case.

I have had the good fortune to meet some companies that are expert in accessing and applying public funding to the benefit of their companies technical capability. Talking to these companies, it seems to me that there are a few guidelines to help companies to understand what type of funding and projects are right for them:

Research projects between a Company and a University help generate technical capability and allow tight control over ownership of intellectual property. These include Industrial CASE studentships and other EPSRC funded research projects.
Projects involving multiple companies and maybe one or more universities are best suited for developing markets and applications where the background intellectual property is already owned by the partners. This includes Technology Strategy Board funding and European funding.
There also exists a range of national and regional funding often called "interventions" or "products" that serve to help companies bring a product to market. One well known example used to be called the "SMART" award but is now called Grant for Research and Development (GRD). A name that describes it purpose rather well.

This is a great simplification of a complex topic governed by many national and EU regulations, but it is at least a digestible starting point.

Environmentally Friendly Integrated Products

2008-04-14T18:36:00.002+01:00

The heightened awareness of environmental impacts seems to have created a new generation of "green" products. I do wonder about the validity of some of the claims for these products though. I have a couple of LED wind-up torches which seem like a really green idea. Buried in the documentation on both are statements along the lines of: "its is not possible to fully charge this lantern by using the wind-up mechanism alone." Thoughtfully "free" external chargers are provided so I can charge off the 12 volt socket in my car. At this point I'm left to wonder, would my torches would be greener if they did not have a wind up mechanism at all?

Solar power seems like a really good contender for energy efficient products, but once again I'm left wondering about the claims for some of the products. For example, it is now easy to find a range of "solar chargers" for your phone or MP3 player. Working out their capability can be a challenge, but small 0.5 Watt solar panels are not going to be very effective in charging a mobile phone which needs near 3 Watt / hours (excuse the units) or more, for a full charge. Once again built in batteries and an external power source seem to be the "solutions" to make the products work.

To move onto a more positive note, there are products out there like the original wind up radio invented by Trevor Bayliss which really do deliver what they say on the box without the need for extra power from a socket. Solar panels continue to improve in efficiency, fall in price and so become more accessible as part of the power supply solution for many consumer products.

The question which now spring to mind as I look at the growing array of green products on offer is: Does this product deliver what the strap line implies, or will I find disappointing caveats in the small print?

Perhaps you can help me on this one.

PS You may be interested in our Technology Watch report "Reducing the environmental impact of domestic dwellings"

How accessible is integrated electronics to SMEs?

2008-04-08T08:40:00.005+01:00

A little over 10 years ago I was at the end of a project that had been looking at developments in the electronics in the UK and globally. During the course of the 3 year project we saw big changes in the level of integration and came across the term "system on a chip" for the first time. There seemed to be a huge rift between large enterprise designed products such as the mobile phone in the late 1990's (they now look like small bricks) and the products packaged in chunky boxes with electronics mounted on green, flat printed circuit boards inside manufactured by small companies (which looked like big bricks). A line of enquiry we never followed up in detail was: how could small companies access the highly integrated technology used by the large enterprises?

Secretly I was also saddened by the thought that budding engineers would never have the pleasure of the home electronic projects that inspired me, as electronic technology seemed to be moving out of reach of small companies, let alone the hobbyist. This thought came back to me a couple of years ago. I asked fellow participants at a workshop where the issue of educating the next generation of engineers was being debated, "As a young person, did any of you have home electronics projects on the go?" The result was a sea of raised hands mainly in the 50+ age group and an animated buzz of conversation. A little later it occurred to me to ask who still had electronics projects on the go and the same set of hands went up. It appears that many of us engineers showed our technical aptitude at an early age, and still can't resist using our skills outside of our work environment.

It appears that the concerns that I had back in 1997 about electronics becoming less accessible to small businesses and hobby users was completely unfounded. Anecdotally I have found that the building blocks used have changed though. Transistors and integrated circuits have been replaced by computer mother boards as the components of choice. Open source operating systems and software provide a low cost route to customising the hardware, and commercial operating systems are available too. In fact, rather than less accessible, the converse appears to be true, and I am aware of small enterprises that make very innovative use of large building blocks in their products. I also read of unexpected applications for modified commercial products too. X-boxes modified to perform complex simulations for physicists, and the Apple iTouch used to display medical images.

This now begs the question, if electronics is indeed becoming more accessible, what other unexpected applications are out there? I would be really interested to hear from anyone who can share details on any examples.

Enthusiasm and Success

2008-03-06T14:33:00.002Z

One of the privileges of my job is that I get to meet all sorts of interesting people and talk about their work. We are always on the lookout for impacts coming from projects, so follow-up visits are particularly interesting.

A common factor in the success stories is the presence of enthusiasm. Successful projects seem to be run from busy offices and laboratories where there is a real buzz of activity. I have started to realise that our "first past the post" process for allocating EPSRC Industrial CASE awards strongly favours an enthusiastic "do it now" type of person.

As I have no formal way of measuring enthusiasm or success, this observation is completely anecdotal, but I cannot help but wonder if there is also a link between enthusiasm and innovation?

Name Change

2008-03-05T10:38:00.000Z

Those of you who follow the politics of the KTNs will have noticed that we have changed the name of the KTN.

The name of the KTN has always been a source of debate with those of us who run it, but I have until relatively recently been in the "live with the name we have camp". However, I have become increasingly sensitive to the habits we all have of contracting names, and taking other verbal short cuts, until I found my self wondering: "How Electronics Enabled Products would be written this time?", in the agenda to every meeting and workshop I went to.

At the same time I also realised that "electronics" as a technology is so ubiquitous that it is not a useful name to distinguish a group interest. Given that many of the people we work with would not recognise themselves as working in the electronics industry something had to change.

Integrated products as a name captures a sense that we all could relate to. Manufacturing is where our roots are, so Integrated Products manufacturing KTN seemed to be a natural winner as a new name.

Initial feedback suggests that we have made the right decision, but I'd welcome other views.