Perils, Pitfalls and Pleasures: Turning Research into a Real Product
The aim of research is usually to demonstrate something that no-one has been able to do before, after which you publish the results and move on to the next great thing. In a company, the need is generally to take that one-off result and turn it into a product by making it reproducible, repeatable, and reliable such that is can be manufactured by staff without needing a PhD, used by non-experts and will perform to specification for years without needing any attention. The presentation will be illustrated by examples from the speaker’s experience, focussing on the development of Fibre Bragg Gratings from initial research through to products suitable for under-sea applications, where product lifetimes are measured not in months, or even years, but in millions of years!