What We Do

Sometimes that means helping them with small, specific parts of their developments – providing new ideas or fresh thinking – and sometimes it means taking full turnkey product developments from initial concept to volume manufacture.

We do a lot more than you might think.

We can add value by facilitating creative workshops, by helping our clients to get around competitors’ patents, ensuring that medical devices meet regulatory standards, developing demonstrators to impress investors or by helping clients to win funding for future development work.

We help our clients to address a wide range of far-reaching and valuable challenges and opportunities. For example:

Cost reduction
Energy efficiency
Sustainability and circular economy
Growth and scale-up
Emissions and climate change
Digital manufacturing and Industry 4.0
Reacting to competitors
Science and technology informed strategy
Regulation and compliance
Productivity and quality
Servitisation / XaaS

We typically take on projects that are technically challenging, highly collaborative, require innovative solutions and multidisciplinary. They are also ambitious and aspirational, of high value but constrained by commercial realities.

No matter the stage of your product development process, 42T can work with your team to provide immediate benefits.

Our strengths

We are particularly strong in these technical areas, all underpinned by core science and engineering capabilities:

Embedded electronics and software
Sustainability and circular economy
Regulatory compliance
Design for manufacture
Interaction design
Digital deposition and precision coating
Manufacturing and production processes
Thermal and fluidic management
Active mechanisms and automation
Sensors & interconnectivity

"I love being involved in such a wide variety of fascinating projects, and working alongside highly talented and motivated colleagues. Every day I’m impressed by the energy, knowledge and creativity that I am surrounded by, and it makes working here a lot of fun."

Sarah Knight, Head of Healthcare Technology

Our insights

Insights from 42T’s teams in key areas of expertise:

Sustainability

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

Net Zero

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

Connectedness

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.

Innovation

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.

Manufacturing and Automation

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

Healthcare and Life Sciences

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