Our insights
Insights from 42T’s teams in key areas of expertise:
Designing products and processes for a green future without sacrificing the needs of users, stakeholders or assets, by reducing the use of materials, driving reuse and recycling, or completely reimagining products. This includes:
- Investigating whether, when and how new sustainable materials can be used in mainstream products
- Manufacturing innovation to enable the use of sustainable materials
- Design for reuse and recycling
- Stakeholder mapping and product design for circular business models
- Water, material, weight and resource reduction
The global imperative for net zero carbon emissions brings challenges and opportunities in product manufacture, industrial processes and power generation. We know that implementing this scale of upgrade isn’t straightforward, often involving significant investment and carrying high risk of cost and quality degradation. Our clients leverage our experience and cross sector insight to help them identify and implement technology developments which enable significant ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) advances. We support clients with challenges such as:
- Process assessment and integration to reduce water consumption
- Enabling fuel switching through characterisation of thermal processes and legacy assets
- Assessment of low carbon options based on cost projections, supply chain development rate and external considerations to pick least risk, most pragmatic solutions
- Reducing the levelised cost of renewable energy through innovation and advanced engineering, enabling widespread and rapid deployment of cost effective zero carbon energy
- Supporting green hydrogen through advanced engineering and design for manufacture, assembly and maintenance
- Digitalisation of energy supply and consumption to enable system balancing and efficiency
- Modernisation of metering equipment to increase accuracy, enable connectivity and prevent obsolescence
- Low cost, high resolution power metering for prognostic condition monitoring and increased availability of assets
We develop internet-connected devices that collect and transmit data through innovative sensing systems. Connectedness has become a critical enabler, enhancing the capabilities of equipment, plant and devices, and unlocking essential approaches like Just In Time, servitisation, automation, and Industry 4.0. We typically support our clients by:
- Developing low-power IoT devices designed for remote operation, with associated hardware, firmware, software, and analytics systems
- Modifying, repurposing and reinventing connected sensors to achieve new levels of price, performance or connectivity
- Collecting and analysing data from distributed sensors and controlling processes based on the resulting insights
- Providing strategic advice on the connectivity of future product lines.
Whether the challenge is blue sky product innovation or a more targeted technical problem, we bring a first-rate toolkit of innovation processes to the table. We tackle these creative challenges with a structured approach that allows us to generate ideas that elude others. But we’re not just about clever ideas: clients depend on our exceptional proof of principle skills to make strong technical concepts work both in the lab and commercially.
We’ve proved again and again that we can invent on demand and create valuable intellectual property, whether we’re developing a new product, defending an existing one, or ingeniously working around competitor IP.
Whilst the majority of focus is often given to the design of new innovative products, we maintain the view that new products can only be viable if they are supported by effective and sustainable manufacturing processes. This is why process innovation and improvement is a major part of our work. We spend significant time considering topics such as:
- How to support our clients in maximising the value they obtain from their existing capital assets, either through increasing performance or unlocking latent capabilities
- How to help improve the environmental impact of our clients’ manufacturing processes: reducing energy consumption, reducing water usage, or achieving more efficient use of raw ingredients
- Supporting the automation of labour intensive processes, focusing on the parts of a process where automation can deliver maximum impact for minimum investment
- Helping our clients migrate to more flexible and distributed manufacturing solutions, including areas such as in-line printing and late customisation
The global healthcare market is undergoing a period of rapid innovation, the speed of which is unmatched in any other sector. Preventative care through early diagnosis and lifestyle devices are improving patient wellbeing, keeping people outside of clinics. Secondary care is now taking place remotely, allowing conditions to be managed within the patient’s own home. Healthcare inequality is finally being actioned with underrepresented patient groups being provided with better treatment pathways. We are at the forefront of healthcare innovation and support our clients with:
- Smart Health – Intelligent, networked systems that enable healthcare providers to be more effective and more efficient, whilst improving patient outcomes
- Secondary Care – Safety critical devices for use in clinic and in the home, to improve the livelihood of patients, whilst bringing affordable, quality healthcare to everyone
- Women’s Health – Diagnostics, medical devices and lifestyle devices tailored towards conditions unique to and biologically different in women
- Surgical Tools – Improving clinical and patient outcome measures through surgical innovation and new technologies
- Digital Health – Digital care programs and technologies to enhance the efficiency of healthcare diagnosis and delivery to make medicine more personalised and precise
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