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Welcome to In-Orbit, the fortnightly podcast exploring how technology from space is empowering a better world.
[00:00:07] Dallas Campbell: Hello and welcome to Outer Orbit. In these short little bonus episodes, we're going to be continuing the conversation from our main episode, focusing in on a particular topic or a particular point of view and today we are back with Amy Peace. She's the Innovation Lead for Circular Economy at Innovate UK to explore the importance of building a strong, innovation ecosystem in the UK and supporting the development of UK businesses to create a thriving future for our economy. Maybe you could start with telling our listeners what Innovate UK is.
[00:00:48] Amy Peace: Yeah, so Innovate UK, people often know us for being the government innovation agency. So essentially a lot of people get grants from Innovate UK for doing innovation activities, but hopefully by the end of this, you'll realise there's probably quite a bit more to innovate than just, please, can we have some money? We'd like to do something innovative.so we are part of the broader UKRI, UK Research and Innovation. So along with all the research councils, which do primarily academic focused funding, we do the bit which has always got to have a business lead to it. Some of the things we do are all about, as I say, getting government money to businesses, but also sometimes it's about leveraging other people's money. So we have kind of this mantra of inspire, involve, invest is kind of the Innovate way.
[00:01:38] Dallas Campbell: So, okay. So inspire, involve, invest. So inspire to make the opportunity visible and compelling. So who are you making the opportunity visible and compelling to?
[00:01:48] Amy Peace: Yeah so obviously we get some businesses who are absolutely innovation focused. So you can imagine quite a lot of spin outs from university who have literally just come out, we've got a great idea, we think it's going to change the world, please can you help us grow? And actually sort of take an idea into actually becoming something tangible. But also you get, you know, you've got to acknowledge what's the starting point here? We've got a lot of businesses that have been here around here for a long time, we've got an ecosystem of places, people, society, organisations and actually inspiring the right people to think of where are the innovative things we need to do? How can we improve our businesses, the place and other organisations? And sometimes it's then how do we get the people who've got the ideas matched up to the people who've got the opportunities or the problems that need solving?
[00:02:39] Dallas Campbell: So it's a bit of matchmaking as well.
[00:02:40] Amy Peace: Yeah, there's definitely a bit of that in there. In fact, we've got a bit of Innovate called Innovate UK Business Connect. It used to be called the Knowledge Transfer Network for...
[00:02:48] Dallas Campbell: I remember.
[00:02:49] Amy Peace: ...for a while. So yeah their prime aim is connecting innovators, academia and others in that space.
[00:02:55] Dallas Campbell: Give us a couple of, you talked about, you know, dynamic people just left college and they're all excited about changing the world. Give us some examples of projects.
[00:03:04] Amy Peace: Oh, we've had so many exciting ones. I mean, in the space where I operate, so circular economy, it covers so many different sectors. So, some of those are really interesting things. I've been just looking, I'm trying to think, what are some of the things in just this last week or so? So we've got one project, which is looking at eye safe lasers and you think, okay, lasers, eye safe, well, we were going there, but, if you think about all this stuff and machinery we've got in the world, and normally when things get sort of end of life and things, it's quite a bit of an onerous procedure to sort of clean things up or try and sort of recycle them. So in circularity, we always want to try and get to what we call the higher levels of circularity. So keeping things in operation for as long as possible, sort of remanufacturing, repair. Now lasers have been around for ages. Everyone loves a good laser, for cleaning and getting rid of dirt and grime off things.But if you accidentally shine it in your eyes, they have a small problem of actually altering our eyesight and being quite dangerous.
[00:04:01] Dallas Campbell: Don't want to do that.
[00:04:02] Amy Peace: So yeah, some of the lasers that are used for cleaning at the moment, like if you're within, I think it's like a kilometer and a half of them, they're considered to be a danger. So they have to be done in very controlled environments. Whereas we've got this project with Woodrow Scientific who are a fascinating little SME there who first sort of developed this laser just in sort of a standalone device to say, well, actually if we operate a different wavelength and some other bits of safety technology in there, we can have something that's handheld and you can take to places where Actually, you can do things in situ, like, so you can take bits of machinery and clean it there in the plant, you could sort of get a building or a bridge and actually take it out there and clean things and it's fascinating to see this thing work, but our project we're doing at the moment, that they've just sort of finished, I've been looking, well, how do we combine it with robotics and visualisation techniques to go, that's all very well if a human's operating it, but how do we put a random object that needs cleaning almost down a conveyor belt and it to know what it is and what path the laser should take around it for cleaning and make it a bit more automated.
[00:05:08] Dallas Campbell: And so, is it a bit of everything? I mean, it's just
[00:05:12] Amy Peace: Lasers, robots, crazy cameras.
[00:05:15] Dallas Campbell: Just anything that's going to make the world better.
[00:05:17] Amy Peace: Yeah, and one of my colleagues likes to talk about kind of this stacked technology and I think that's where some of the more interesting things we get here are, where we just say, we're not just trying to fix one problem or tick one box. It's what if you combine the need for sustainability with digitalisation, with the latest materials technology, with the latest things in visualisation? And that's where you get some of the really interesting innovations, but you often then need to get people who've not worked together before, getting to know each other and that's, yeah.
[00:05:48] Dallas Campbell: Give us a little view of what the sort of priorities are coming up for over the next decade or so for you guys, what's the...
[00:05:55] Amy Peace: Yeah. So those who want to go into the real depths of it, we do have a plan for action, which sort of gave the outlook sort of going forward a bit into where we're going to be. We also, within our, I sit within a materials and manufacturing team, we did a vision document going out to 2050, which is not an industrial strategy. It's a very much a where could we, should we be in that space? And then looking at those sort of pathways of how do you get there? Because obviously some of the priorities are things we've been talking about in the podcast around net zero, our favorite buzzword, but equally, you can't just get to net zero in isolation. A lot of the things where we're looking in circularity might not be for carbon purposes, you might be doing it for resilience purposes. We want to save resources because it's really hard to get them, because we saw in the pandemic, a lot of our supply chains sort of fell down, not even when shipping tankers were getting stuck in canals, you know, there was also sort of just, if a particular country suddenly closes all its borders, you It has this sort of knock on effect around the world of where you realise how connected our manufacturing is. So if you can try and sort of say that, well, we still want to be a global manufacturing nation, but we want to be able to be sure that actually, we've got a bit more security on that. We're not sending valuable stuff away just because we can't be bothered to do something with it, you know, we're keeping valuable things there. So resilience is one of the topics, and being advanced and technology,sort of in things like digitalisation is still in there as well, because some of these sort of benchmarks of technologies, lots of sort of inspiring ideas come off them, but they're kind of the cross cutting things that need to be sort of implemented.
[00:07:36] Dallas Campbell: If I have a brilliant idea, can I send it to you?
[00:07:38] Amy Peace: I mean, some people do, but we have a very open and transparent operation for getting funding. So yeah, most of our sort of funding people come out are these open competitions that we have open. So a lot of people will be aware of our smart program and that's literally any innovation idea within these sort of various terms and conditions in small print can be applied for on a rolling basis. But then we have more thematic programs and we've, for the last few years been running these industrial strategy challenge funds and that's where we take a much more thematic view of what are some of the really big problems that we want to get tangible outputs for and tackled within a set amount of time. So an example there was smart, sustainable plastic packaging, which was, you know, obviously trying to tackle the issue of sort of ocean and pollution associated with, plastics and have a look at, not just how do we recycle that plastic better, but again, those hierarchies of a circular economy and saying, how do we get much more reuse, communities and society?
[00:08:40] Dallas Campbell: The best innovation I always find, I work sometimes with a group called Teen Tech and we're going to schools and that we do competitions and they come up with brilliant, innovative ideas. A lot of plastic bottles and oceans comes up, but they always have like amazing ideas for things, the 10 year old brain is that's where you want to.
[00:08:56] Amy Peace: It's absolutely fascinating things you kind of get from that although I suppose one of the issues we sometimes get is when sort of people see the things that are headlines and kind of sometimes just jump to the sort of first idea of, Oh, ocean plastics is a problem. Oh, if only we made everything out of bottles, then we could be sustainable. So, you know, there's a lot of industries like in textiles and clothing and furniture and other places, you'll see them making big sustainability claims because we're made out of a hundred plastic bottles or similar. The problem with that is, in order to make the bottle industry sustainable, they want the bottles back and actually, the best thing you can do with a PET bottle is make it into another one and in some ways, it can be a bit of a get out of jail card in sort of saying, Oh, we'll just use that waste in order to make our product from. So we do need to be a little bit careful and again, thinking are we actually being more sustainable or are we just using something that sounds more sustainable.
[00:09:55] Dallas Campbell: Yeah, got it. Hey, listen, Amy, thank you so much for coming on and for illuminating us. It's inspiring stuff. Your, whoever came up with your Inspire, Involve, Invest little catchphrase, they got it pretty bang on, I think.
[00:10:08] Amy Peace: Yeah, there's an awful lot of stuff going there. So I'd say if anyone hasn't engaged with Innovate before, if you just sort of Google Innovate UK Business Connect, as I say, the bit that used to be KTN, they have a newsletter, which you can sign up to. So you can say which sort of topics you're interested in, because say even if you're not specifically looking for a grant, we also have like loans programmes, we do things like knowledge transfer partnerships where you get people from academia, being able to work in your business and then there's a load of sort of things matching with private investors or just helping you get your idea out. So do sign up for that because, I'm sure there's plenty of other ways that Innovate can help you that, as I say, it's not just about, please, can we have some money?
[00:10:50] Dallas Campbell: Thank you very much. Thank you.
[00:10:52] Amy Peace: Pleasure.
[00:10:52] Dallas Campbell: To hear future episodes of In Orbit, don't forget, subscribe on your favourite podcast app, and to find out more about how space is empowering industries in between episodes, you can visit the Catapult website, or you can join them on social media.