Graphene

The Route to Commercialisation

James Baker, James Tallentire

• Publisher: Jenny Stanford Publishing
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9789814877879
• eBook ISBN: 9781000429688
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Negocios y empresa
• Subtopic: Gestión

The isolation of graphene in 2004 by two scientists at the University of Manchester—a breakthrough later recognised by the Nobel Prize for physics—revealed to the world a brand new 'wonder material' which had been 'completely hidden from science'. Graphene, the world's first two-dimensional material, promises huge opportunities for a range of sectors, from aerospace to energy to biomedical. But how can the UK be known for 'Made in Britain' as well as discovered in Britain? As an answer, this book explores how the Manchester model of innovation has evolved to not only support great science but also accelerate the adoption of graphene into real-world products and anchoring an innovation ecosystem in the place of UK discovery. This book features first-hand experience, case studies and interviews with key strategic players in the graphene story to illustrate how Manchester has built a unique model of collaboration with industry to create an ecosystem that features a supply chain of companies not only producing graphene material but also starting to disrupt the marketplace with new products and application as we approach the tipping point of commercialisation.

Chapter 1 The Innovation Revolution: From Closed to Open Innovation

By James Baker

Scientific research into graphene—the world’s first 2D material-has become a global phenomenon, following its isolation in 2004 and then Nobel Prize recognition in 2010. If commercialisation of this breakthrough material was to be delivered in a way and at a pace that would meet the ever-growing economic and societal expectations being placed on this so-called ‘wonder material’, then the innovation model required would have to be special. In 2014, I found myself at the heart of an amazing team of people based at The University of Manchester who were determined to make graphene a commercialisation success story. I was able to draw deep on my own experience from industry and decided to advocate a very collaborative approach and to adopt “open innovation” as Manchester’s own model for taking graphene from lab to market.

From early in my career, I came across the principle of “open innovation,” which was first coined by Professor Henry Chesbrough of the University of California at Berkeley. In his seminal 2003 book Open Innovation: The New Imperative for Creating and Profiting from Technology [1], Chesbrough argued that there had been a paradigm shift from what he called Closed Innovation, which is a system that believes successful innovation requires control. So an organisation must generate their own ideas, develop them, make them, market them, and so on. The new paradigm was the adoption of Open Innovation, which assumes businesses make the best use of both internal and external ideas it will be ultimately be a commercial winner.

When I worked for a defence organisation, this traditionally had operated in a very “closed innovation” environment (due to, for example, defence security concerns of openly describing problems or technologies), I was immediately taken by the principles of “open innovation” and how this might have an impact in the defence market and in the development and pull-through of new materials and technologies.

This epiphany came while I was leading the operation for the Advanced Technology Centre (ATC) at BAE Systems plc, the UK multinational defence, security and aerospace company. The ATC was a traditional research centre with a huge legacy of great people, inventions and capabilities inherited from the old Marconi and British Aerospace organisations, which had been absorbed by BAE Systems. We had a significant number of very clever, capable and knowledgeable scientists and engineers within the parent organisation—but it became clear that there was also great technology and innovation not only in-house but also within our partner universities and from across the wider supply chain. The question I kept asking “if only we were able to access capability in a better way?” So, from 2004, one of the first principles I introduced was to adopt methods on how we might find better ways of engaging with our knowledge partners and how we might bring some of these great ideas together in a more integrated way—using open innovation principles (see Table 1.1).

Any resistance to change was soon mitigated by the realpolitik that our research community then faced. Investment from the defence sector had dropped off and so we had limited R&D budgets flowing down from the parent organisation. As my then colleague Dr John Bagshaw, the ATC’s technology executive, told Eureka magazine in June 2012 [2]: “Figures have radically changed. If you go back 15 years and look at the defence R&D budget was about £660m, which was worth about £1.2bn by modern standards. Now the defence R&D budget is about £350m. So you’re trying to cover the same sort of degree of technology with less than a third of the funding.”

Table 1.1 Contrasting principles of closed and open innovation

Closed innovation principles	Open innovation principles
The smart people in our field work for us.	Not all of the smart people work for us—we need to work with smart people inside and outside the organisation.
To profit from R&D we must discover it, develop it and ship it ourselves.	External R&D can create significant value; internal R&D is needed to claim some portion of that value.
If we discover it ourselves, we will get it to the market first.	You do not have to originate the research to benefit from it.
The company that gets innovation to market fist will win.	Building a better business model is better than getting to market first.
If you create the most and best ideas in the industry, we will win.	If you can make the best use of internal and external ideas, we will win.
We should control our IP, so that our competitors do not profit from our ideas,	We should profit from others’ use of our IP, and we should buy others’ IP whenever its advance our own business model.
Source: H. W. Chesbrough. Open Innovation: The New Imperative for Creating and Profiting from Technology, Harvard Business School Press, 2003 [1].

As a result of this funding crisis colleagues quickly realised we could squeeze significantly more from our R&D funding if we adopted a more open innovation approach with our partners and their supply chain. It also became clear that often it was not just the technology alone that makes the key difference for a product or application but more on how we integrate that technology for use in a systems context. This “systems thinking” has been a key factor throughout my career and into my current role at The University of Manchester and with the commercialisation of graphene. It is critical to understand how the technology might be used in a particular area or environment, i.e., from a “market pull” perspective as opposed to a “technology push” type of scenario.

The ability to build better business models by engaging with a broader supply chain and to create value through the commercialisation of technology has been a key principle that drove me throughout my career in industry and more recently being based in academia. This is also a factor in what I believe will be critical for the success in the commercialisation of graphene and other 2D materials.

Later in this book, we will talk about the various research and commercialisation facilities within Manchester’s graphene innovation ecosystem. While these centres of excellence are indeed impressive, it is important however that we think about the market perspective when talking about what the facilities do. Rather than thinking “inside out”, i.e. what the buildings do, we actually start to think more like “outside in”, i.e. what are the market needs and requirements and how do we bring together the right materials manufacturing and product to meet those market demands and what is the role of the facilities in achieving this. With the advancement of the Internet of Things, social media and the ability to share information much more rapidly for new developments and ideas, it is important to establish a model that can bring together the great science not just within The University of Manchester but also all that was taking place in the supply chain both in the UK and broadly on the international stage.

1.1 Early Experience in Open Innovation

Some of my early experiences and examples of open innovation included pioneering research on autonomous systems. When I first started this work in BAE Systems’ Advanced Technology Centre (ATC), we initially faced a large number of challenges, both from within the company but also from the customer community. These challenges included the fact, at the times, there were no market requirements for an autonomous system, despite some of the technology futures and foresight activity taking place was pointing to self-driving vehicles.

But then a number of factors were starting to take place in the world of defence, most significantly the move towards “asymmetric warfare” and the fact that in the modern defence climate it became less acceptable for the loss of life or indeed potential capture of personnel by the enemy. For example, a pilot or soldier might be taken prisoner and used for propaganda purposes. So, while there were still a number of stakeholders who could not see the need for autonomous systems, there clearly was a trend emerging towards more autonomy on the battlefield. Therefore, BAE Systems gave the green light for the Advanced Technology Centre to begin a small autonomous vehicle programme which included the development of new software and sensors. What was originally devised as a research platform into autonomous resupply “mules” for carrying equipment in combat zones such as Afghanistan was to prove a seminal project, in terms of both technological advances and innovation delivery.

1.2 The Wildcat Is Let Loose

One of the first capital expenses I authorised in the ATC was the purchase of a Bowler Wildcat, an off-road vehicle derived from the Land Rover Defender platform and built in collaboration with the Bowler specialist racing company based in Derbyshire. Normally these robust machines were used for competing in rallies and off-road racing but for us the Wildcat would literally provide the vehicle for our integration of technologies and for testing.

To develop our autonomous technology we had already decided on an open approach and to create an “open systems” architecture that would host our experimental work. This model would be based around a generic platform that would also allow us to “plug and play” components and software systems that were sourced from the open marketplace, many from commercial applications. For example, we used a readily available collision avoidance system because that technology had matured in the mid-2000s for the automotive “driving-aids” market and we did not want to waste time and resources by reinventing any pre-existing technologies. We just wanted to quickly see how these components would work when put together to achieve autonomous navigation. The Wildcat therefore gave us the platform we needed and within weeks it was adorned with an array of components, sensors and software, all plugged into a single system so we could easily test the arrangement in real-world environments.

The experimental Wildcat was developed in a workshop at our ATC facility in Bristol and became BAE Systems’ first full scale autonomous ground vehicle experiment. For several years, we developed software and sensors in the pursuit of autonomous navigation. I described the Wildcat project in some some detail in a blog for the Huffington Post [3]:

“Wildcat started life as a 4×4 off-road production car from Bowler, but was modified by BAE Systems to sense the world around it, plan its own route, navigate and avoid obstacles. This requires the integration and systems engineering of advanced technology including computer controlled steering servos, a secondary braking system, a hotline into the vehicle’s engine management system, wireless data links, GPS and laser ranging sensors all coupled to the vehicle’s brain where advanced algorithms make intelligent decisions about how to act in the light of the information provided. As a result it cannot just be controlled remotely, but also follow a pre-set path or make fully autonomous decisions about the road ahead and how to navigate obstacles it encounters so that it can complete its journey without any further human involvement.”

One of the most memorable experiences for me included following the Wildcat around the MIRA vehicle testing park in the Midlands and watching in horror as a circular component went spinning from the roof of our test car, past our window and landing on the track. To my relief, I was later informed that this rogue disc was in fact a Frisbee that had been carelessly abandoned on the car by a group of student researchers. So, once we had successfully ironed out the various glitches and technical challenges we began to safely demonstrate at various events and conferences where the Wildcat performed live in front of an audience and showcased the capabilities of what autonomy might do for future defence applications.

The car achieved autonomous navigation at 70 km/h and featured autonomous collision avoidance capabilities at 20 to 25 km/h. Not surprisingly, this prototype vehicle was a great way to excite and introduce new students and engineers to the brave new world of autonomous vehicles—indeed, many of these young engineers were inspired to go on to become key members of the R&D community that would work on the various autonomous systems we are starting to see being developed in various markets today

1.3 The Oxford Connection

Even though the development of the autonomous platform was going at a pace, we eventually reached the stage when we realised that we would benefit from a much broader engagement beyond the initial team and the budgets that we had within the ATC. We therefore decided to partner with academia and we donated one of our two experimental vehicles to the University of Oxford as part of a new academic-led programme of work. The university was able to bring, not only new research but also they were able to leverage what was taking place across the commercial sector with the start of a national autonomous vehicle programme that was starting to take shape in the UK. The academic leader was Professor Paul Newman who now heads the Oxford Robotics Institute, which has a global reputation in mobile autonomy and developing machines and robots that can map, navigate and understand their environments. The Oxford group has a focus on transport, including robot autonomy, navigation, mapping, scene understanding and perception. A flagship project is RobotCar UK.

At the time we teamed up with Oxford, we were already starting to see applied developments in the automotive sector, from lane departure systems through to braking systems—all of these being good examples of the first and early stages of an autonomous system. By working in collaboration with Oxford we were able to see significant advances and we were not being held back by the lack of budget and all the cautiousness of the defence sector. Today you can see the significant trends and developments taking place at pace around the whole area of autonomy. Most cars on the road today have some form of an autonomous system within them and ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1. The Innovation Revolution: From Closed to Open Innovation
• 2. Graphene: The New Kid on the Block
• 3. Graphene’s Great Expectations
• 4. Overcoming the Challenge: A New Model Approach
• 5. Building the First Home for Graphene: the NGI
• 6. Steal with Pride: Creating the GEIC
• 7. Graphene City and Beyond: Building an Innovation Ecosystem
• 8. Making It Happen: Industry Engagement
• 9. Getting Graphene Ready: Adopting the Manchester Model of Innovation
• 10. Creating an Icon: The Making of a Global Brand
• 11. The New “Gold Rush”: Graphene’s Research Renaissance
• 11.7 Once Lost, Now Found: Magnetic 2D Materials
• 12. Future Histories: Graphene Innovation after Covid-19
• Index