Construction’s innovators versus the dragons

The CIOB and BRE recently brought together four industry innovators to pitch their ideas to a panel of industry experts and advisers. But which idea gained their support? Elaine Knutt reports from the event.

The scene is a seminar room at the BRE’s Watford campus, the atmosphere expectant and hopeful, the participants smiling through their pre-presentation nerves. At the CIOB and BRE’s “Innovators Meet Dragons” event, there is no money on the table or offer of a distribution deal. Instead, four fledgling businesses have the chance to pitch their ideas to a panel of construction experts whose combined wisdom – on intellectual property, conditions in the construction market and general business – could make the difference between taking the path to profit or a wrong commercial turn.

The four teams have arrived from across the country, from a broad spectrum of the industry, and are at different points on their journey as innovators and entrepreneurs. One highly promising innovation is still seeking its breakthrough moment after 12 years in development; another was only hatched in a university lab last summer. But all four have seen the possibilities their ideas represent – the carbon saved, the accidents avoided, the project efficiencies delivered – and desperately want to take them further.

The four contenders are also in competition – not for hard cash, but for the backing of the panel members. And there is also the potential value in PR, networking and brand building. Being on the cover of Construction Manager puts them in front of an audience of 32,000 decision makers in the industry. In the future, that awareness raising could open doors and mean calls are returned.

The dragons, too, have something to prove. For CIOB and BRE, it’s a chance to support promising ideas that could improve efficiencies or outcomes, and also to demonstrate an “open door” policy to the grassroots innovators the industry badly needs.

The location is also a reminder of the industry’s track record in supporting innovation: next door is the BRE’s Innovation Park, where manufacturers, researchers and designers have turned bright ideas into commercial products. It is overseen by Deborah Pullen, director of research at BRE and also a panellist. 

“Don’t tell the sector it’s not innovative, because it’s not true!” says the next dragon. University of Reading professor Stuart Green, chair of the CIOB’s Innovation and Research Panel, explains that the event also builds on the CIOB’s International Innovation and Research Awards: three of the four contenders were 2014 finalists.

Green says that the event is central to the panel’s mission: “We’re about making connections with other partners, building networks to support the cause of innovation for the benefit of the CIOB membership and the industry at large.”

The remaining panellists questions introduce themselves one by one. Chris Blythe, chief executive of the CIOB, explains that he has a track record in identifying and supporting promising businesses. In a former role as chief executive of the Training and Enterprise Council in Cheshire, he reviewed projects in a business angels programme called Tech Invest.

“Every month I used to sit down in a panel such as this and review proposals for angel funding,” he says. “So it’ll be interesting to listen to pitches again.”

Jim Asher, chief operating officer and head of valuation for Collier Intellectual Property, specialises in IP. “I’m not a specialist in the built environment,” he says, “but I live and work in it, and we have done quite a number of projects looking at building technologies.” As evidence, he mentions that he has been working with a cement company in South East Asia that wants to “move up the IP scale”.

But he also issues a warning: “If you think the management of IP is what we do well in the UK and that gives us an edge over overseas competitors, think again: South East Asia is moving ahead rapidly.”

Gill Kelleher, sustainable construction manager at BASF, says her company is “very focused on innovation and the journey that new products have to take in the construction industry that’s very slow to move and change”.

She cites the contrast between two current examples of construction technology: “We’re still putting washing up liquid in mortar to make it stick together with cement. And at BASF we’re actually working on a project to turn buildings into power stations, taking the traditional coatings for glass and steel and making them functional.”

Rennie Chadwick, head of design and innovation at contractor Osborne, says his perspective on the sector takes in civil engineering to new build to repair and maintenance. His 30-year career started in research and moved into practical implementation. “Most of my career has been spent on your side of the table: trying to convince my bosses that my good idea is the one they should back,” he says.

The final member of the panel is the BRE’s commercial director Steven Fox, who has more than 30 years’ experience in sales, marketing and business development roles for companies such as Marley and SIG. His LinkedIn profile reveals he “believes in setting stretching targets and then [applying] coaching/performance management as appropriate” – a “tough love” strategy that was evident in some of his comments and questions.

The four innovators pitched their ideas in turn, before fielding the dragons’ questions. First up was the Oxypod team.

Oxypod: product seeks oxygen of publicity

Regular readers may remember Oxypod, winner of the CIOB’s 2014 International Innovation and Research Award. The hairdryer-shaped device can be fitted to any hot-water heating system to extract air from pipes and radiators – and hundreds of pounds from energy bills. The panel passes the Oxypod around, weighing up the device and its chances of commercial success.  

The presentation by its inventor, Stanley Whetstone, and his business partner, Bob Harris MCIOB, is confident and backed by some impressive statistics. Since winning the award in October, further tests by Capita have shown a 29% drop in fuel consumption for a hard-to-heat brick-terraced house, and 28% from a one-bedroom flat.  

“To get the same fuel bill savings, to put the equivalent PV on the roof and insulation, you’d be spending thousands,” says Harris. In contrast, installing an Oxypod costs £250-£300.

So how does it work? Water containing a typical 2.5% volume of dissolved air enters the top of the device. Inside, the water forms a vortex, forcing air bubbles out of solution. The pressure differential causes air to rise up the dip tube before it leaves the Oxypod’s top valve. With less air in pipes and radiators, the water conducts heat better and is less likely to corrode pipes, resulting in increased efficiency and fuel savings.

At the end of the pitch, IP specialist Jim Asher is concerned about reverse-engineering: how much legal protection does Oxypod have?

“The first thing we did was file a patent application in Europe and the US,” Whetstone says, although he admits that costs have prohibited a worldwide application. Asher is mollified, but urges them to seek further protection.

Stuart Green asks a key question: “I’m getting mixed messages here. There’s the support from the Goodwin Trust [the Hull-based charity that shares the patent and backs the scheme], links with universities and the patent is protected. So what is it that you need? Stronger verification of the proof of use and savings?”

This is indeed the case. “We are actually still testing with Leeds Beckett University to get an energy reduction linked to an SAP score, then we can get it accredited and onto the Green Deal,” says Whetstone. Harris adds that the duo have all the right connections, up to and including “MPs and ministers”. But he says: “We’ve been told it needs more data to make it into a national scheme. It’s taken 12 years for Stan, and seven years for me. We don’t want to wait any longer.”

Gill Kelleher sympathises: “I know that to get products recognised within energy efficiency schemes, there’s an awful lot of hoops to jump through.”

Asher suggests a commercial deal with a boiler manufacturer to help upscale. But although the duo say they have been in talks, other comments suggest they are uneasy with commercialising Oxypod. As Harris says: “We come from a socialist background… the Goodwin Trust is a not-for-profit business so our dynamic is also along those lines.”

So how to launch the product to a mass market but not cash in? Harris’s preferred option is crowd-funding: “If 20,000 people put in £100, we’d get the investment to let us apply for more patents, manufacture in cheaper materials, or perhaps make a larger version for hospitals.”

There have been some interesting answers, but are the dragons convinced?

3D Move: coming soon to a screen near you

As the industry gradually adopts BIM, clients and contractors are increasingly making use of so-called BIM caves. Typically, this is a room in a university or specialist facility fitted with angled screens on which images from the BIM model can be projected at 1:1 scale: they are useful for walk throughs, clash detection and design consultations.

But what if BIM caves were lightweight mobile facilities, available to hire in any location and ready to deploy after a 30-minute set-up? That is the promise of 3D Move, from University of Reading research fellow Maxwell Mallia-Parfitt and lecturer Dragana Nikolic.

It’s a 78kg combination of three linked screens, three projectors and a computer running the Unity games engine software that takes data from a Revit BIM model and turns it into a game-like navigation experience.

To link and tension the supporting posts to create a crips corner that won’t deflect the projected images, there’s also a 3D-printed tensioner. And to navigate the images, there’s a gaming-style controller. When the panel road test a simulation of a Crossrail station, one dragon accidentally plunges the group over a bannister to a sheer drop to the platform below.

But university campuses are full of bright ideas sparking in a commercial vacuum: do Mallia-Parfitt and Nikolic have what it takes to commercialise their idea?

The 3D Move duo plan a rental model, arguing that construction companies are used to leasing equipment, but combined with a service to convert the BIM model into a visualisation. Their presentation includes a glimpse of their business plan, which forecasts profitability in 15 months.

Rennie Chadwick endorses their rental model approach: “I think the most attractive opportunity is rental. It opens up the technology to companies that otherwise could not afford the capital outlay. I can see how you might subscribe to the service.”

BRE’s Deborah Pullen points to another market the pair might have missed: schools and colleges. “There’s a big market for raising awareness of BIM and digital construction for young professionals,” the dragon notes.

But what exactly is the “price point” envisaged? Nikolic says they have consulted with the university’s business development team, and calculated, based on the cost and depreciation of the equipment, and staff day rates, a price of £1,500 plus VAT a day.

Chadwick does a quick intake of breath and then a U-turn: “If I’m going to be hiring for four weeks, I might as well buy one!” he says. And BRE’s Simon Fox believes their emphasis on the speed of deployment is misplaced: “If you rent it for a week, the speed it goes up isn’t as important as how good it is.”

Furthermore, 3D Move is operating in an environment where the technology could advance rapidly in 15 months: if BIM design software becomes compatible with multiple screen displays, then the service element of 3D Move’s proposition becomes less critical.

So have the dragons heard enough to convince them to back 3D Move?

Creating a built-in safety advantage

“Hello dragons, my name is Stanley Kerr, and my concept is a permanent anchor point for ladders,” says Kerr, a veteran of the doors and windows trade from Northern Ireland. Kerr has spent years surveying and estimating works on properties, many of them at the top of less-than-totally secure ladders. So it’s not surprising that his presentation majors on health and safety.

“The HSE strongly recommends to secure ladders if at all possible, and this is where my concept may help to improve safety figures,” he says. “It’s also consistent with CDM 2015, which put the emphasis on safety through design, to design out foreseeable risks.”

The product, explained in simple and effective presentation slides, is a two-part anchoring system for new build properties. A plastic sleeve is fitted into a gap between the bricks, then held in place by a steel abutment that fits into the cavity behind. The ladder user then inserts an attachment member or key, creating a reusable anchor point. While the core product is for ladders, Kerr says a modified version could work for scaffolding.

It’s appealing and easy-to-grasp, but the dragons’ scepticism shows through. As Stuart Green says, developers or housebuilders would have to make the decision up front to install the device, but occupiers would draw the benefit. “I can see the logic of why it would be useful, but what I’m struggling with is the motivation for people to install it,” he says.

Kerr agrees this is a challenge. “I spoke to Ancon, a manufacturer of anchor systems who has a lot of customers, and to be honest they did say it would be a hard sell.”

The BRE’s Pullen feels that the discussion – which has centred on new homes and blocks of flats – has missed areas of opportunity. “If you are the estate owner, say on an industrial estate, where there’s a long vested interest and you have control over the build and the spec, then you can make sure that you get them specified, and in the right place.”

Jim Asher is reassured to learn that Kerr has made a patent application. But when asked about production costs, Kerr explains calculations by Queen’s University Belfast indicated a relatively low cost and corresponding retail price of just over a pound. He also says that he sees the most likely way forward as “licensing this to someone who’s in the building trade already”.

But Asher is concerned about whether there is a viable business here: “Would you be content to receive a pound per house? That’s what you’d get as the originator of the technology. It limits the ultimate scale of the commercial benefit from this. So even it achieves the hard sell, maybe it’s a niche business.”

Gill Kelleher suggests contact with trade associations in the roofing and scaffolding sectors, to see if the anchor point could be aligned with wider initiatives. “There’s a number of different trade associations that are good sounding boards.”

And Pullen suggests that the prices put forward are simply wrong. “If you could calculate
the annual costs of the things that go wrong – the cost of managing the risks associated with ladders and falls – people might pay a hundred or so pounds. It depends on a proper costing of the value.”

“And have you thought about branding?” asks Asher. “When you think about this kind of device, being able to call it something simple and appealing makes it easier for an architect to put it on a drawing, You need a name for this, so everyone knows what it is.”

Good advice, but Kerr would like more.

New bio-material squares up to the circular economy

If the first three pitches were made on familiar territory for the dragons, the fourth takes them to a brave new world of biotech. For three students from London Metropolitan University, an idea that began as a student project has the potential to offer the industry a sustainable, renewable, insulative new construction material. 

Conor Scully, Ana Laura Mohirta and Sebastien Gey call their discovery “Mico”, and it’s formed by combining pasteurised agricultural waste with mycelium, the branched, tubular filaments within a fungus. The result is a lightweight, fireproof material that could become an alternative to foam insulation products, or even be used for internal partitioning. “It’s cheaper than polystyrene, it’s more structural, and it has a far better cradle-to-cradle analysis,” summarises Mohirta.

The project originated as part of their entry for the “Solar Decathlon”, an international student challenge to design low-energy homes. The trio heard about experiments with mycelium in the US (from a company called Ecovative) and set up their own production line on the roof of the Sir John Cass School of Art, Architecture and Design.

If the first three pitches were made on familiar territory for the dragons, the fourth takes them to a brave new world of biotech. For three students from London Metropolitan University, an idea that began as a student project has the potential to offer the industry a sustainable, renewable, insulative new construction material. 

Conor Scully, Ana Laura Mohirta and Sebastien Gey call their discovery “Mico”, and it’s formed by combining pasteurised agricultural waste with mycelium, the branched, tubular filaments within a fungus. The result is a lightweight, fireproof material that could become an alternative to foam insulation products, or even be used for internal partitioning. “It’s cheaper than polystyrene, it’s more structural, and it has a far better cradle-to-cradle analysis,” summarises Mohirta.

The project originated as part of their entry for the “Solar Decathlon”, an international student challenge to design low-energy homes. The trio heard about experiments with mycelium in the US (from a company called Ecovative) and set up their own production line on the roof of the Sir John Cass School of Art, Architecture and Design.

The sample at the event is apparently an early one, and development is ongoing. “We’re working on shrinkage in the drying process to create a more stable product. Because it’s on a small scale, we do have inconsistencies.”

The dragons are clearly intrigued, but worried that Mico would struggle in a highly regulated industry driven by performance specs and warranties.

First, their assertion that Mico is fireproof. “It’s one thing not to burst into flames, but if it doesn’t hold its structure it wouldn’t get a fire rating,” says Osborne’s Rennie Chadwick. The students respond that Mico has been tested up to 180 degrees Celsius, but that’s far lower than might be experienced in a domestic fire.

BRE’s Fox says “perhaps you need to look at applications where consistency isn’t so important, like packaging”. BASF’s Gill Kelleher agrees, offering to put the trio in touch with academics at other universities who are exploring bio-based solutions for packaging products.  

However, Scully is bullish that Mico has a home in construction. “[Ecovative] has produced a consistent insulation panel. I think we can sort out the shrinkage. With two or three years of research, we have the chance to develop it.”

And BRE’s Pullen feels that Mico’s future perhaps lies overseas, in developing economies, where there could be less strignent regulations and the renewable, “circular economy” aspect could appeal in more agrarian economies.  

Working with structural engineer Price & Myers, the trio will develop Mico for the contest. That exeperiment will eventually answer many of the dragons’ questions – but what do they think right now?

The dragons’ verdict: Everyone’s a winner

It’s time for the dragons to lay even-handedness aside, and declare themselves a hypothetical investor in one of the schemes.

“In a challenging world like this, I’m so impressed that good ideas are still coming through,” says BRE’s Deborah Pullen, before declaring that she would invest her money in Stanley Kerr’s permanent anchor point, viewing it as truly original and useful idea. 

Stuart Green says that Mico, as a “circular economy” product, could have a bright future. Nevertheless, it doesn’t quite get his vote. “If I had £20 in my pocket, I’d invest it in Oxypod,” he says.

Oxypod, as a “fit and forget” technology, also gets the backing of the CIOB’s Chris Blythe. However, he is wary of Whetstone and Harris’s leaning towards a not-for-profit, social enterprise model, urging them to think more commercially.

Jim Asher is reassured that all four teams have considered legal protection and IP issues. But in his view, 3D Move needs to concentrate more on its service offering, the permanent anchor points would be hard to market, and there are inherent difficulties in patenting bio-processes.

“So from an investor’s viewpoint, or how will I get my money back in a multiple quickly, I look for something that is market ready and is commercially active already – and that’s Oxypod. Now, the question is, can it get the deal with the right people?”

Gill Kelleher also backs Oxypod, although adds a note of caution that she doesn’t have the full picture of current developments in the heating and boiler sector. Oxypod also gets the vote of Steve Fox, on the grounds that they’re the closest to market.

Rennie Chadwick relates the four ideas to what might potentially be useful to Osborne, apologising that he can’t think of a project where Mico might be of use, and urging 3D Move to market themselves as “taking away the pain of accessing the technology”.

He’s sufficiently interested in the anchor point to say he’ll talk to colleagues on Osborne’s residential side. And as for Oxypod, he says: “It’s not £20, it’s £250 – and I’m buying one!” A deal is duly done.

Whetstone and Harris, beaming, thank the panel for their support. “We know where we need to go and what we need to focus on. But there are so many balls in the air we need to focus on what’s necessary,” says Whetstone, as Harris reiterates that he hopes to look at crowd-funding to generate investment to expand the business.