Turning ideas into products that sell

May 11 2009 by Karen Dent, The Journal

He's survived a coma and a brain tumour, broken more bones than you can count and reckons that less than four hours' sleep a night is ample. Karen Dent meets Gary Thompson, the man helping to transform some of the region's best ideas into products people want to buy.

TAKING life as it comes and making the most if every day are themes that pepper Gary Thompsons speech. Enthusiastic and bubbly after his usual three-and-a-half hours sleep everyone says I am like Mrs Thatcher I am not! this miners son from Ferryhill probably has more motivation than most to get the best out of each day.

A motorbike accident put him in a coma when he was 12; then 13 years ago, he was diagnosed with a brain tumour just after splitting up with his wife.

He says: I found that out [the diagnosis] basically two days after I came home to find my bags packed. So I lost my wife, my marriage, my house and two days later I was told I had three months left to live.

So, it was a bit of a kick in the teeth to say the least.

After chemotherapy he spent four years working abroad before returning to his native North East in 2000.

Thompson was helping clients get their product ideas to market as business development manager for Northumbria University when he came up with a cracking idea of his own. C2M UK which stands for Concept to Manufacture is now five years old.

The company was born from frustration in a way, he said. I worked in the one stop enterprise solution as it was back then, and we took all these products down to the British Invention Show and we won eight medals.

We came back and the university said: Look how good we are! and no, its not, its the people who actually came up with this.

Then the universities are wanting to get greedy. They have this thing about holding all of their clients intellectual property. So if you get a client come into the university, youll be charged s600 a day or something and then the university wants to hold the IP the idea.

Now hold on, the guy who came with the idea in the first place, shouldnt it be his? And thats one thing that we have written into every one of our contracts at no time will C2M hold the IP on your idea.

Some of C2Ms clients have their own funding in place and others arrive at the Gateshead firms doors via Business Link. C2M can also help find the finance to get good ideas off the ground.

If its a bigger project, for example, were helping a man whose coming from Holland. He has a great idea for a Parkinsons Disease project, which is identifying it a lot earlier through new systems and controls. Weve secured funding from One North East and NStar and thats allowed him now to take that project on further forward, he said.

We did that development work because we see the potential there for the region, not only for him.

But Thompson refuses to give people false hope if he believes their idea is going nowhere. To be brutally frank, Im straight to the point. Im a time-served engineer who knows if its not going to work. Ive got the experience to look at things and say, well, somebodys already done that, he says.

Its hard to them turn round to someone and say, save your money, its not going to go anywhere. Some people take your advice and some persist.

And the ones who persist often go down the route and find theyre in litigation, they cant afford to proceed, then their house becomes threatened because they havent taken that simple piece of advice at the very beginning.

I wont have people spending money for spendings sake. If its going to be spent, it has to be spent wisely. Its an old engineering trait if youre going to do it, do it right.