How co-operation can stop babies crying

Dec 23 2010 by John Hill, The Journal

NORTHUMBRIA University’s Nurture Programme aims to help companies get over the early hurdles associated with R&D. John Hill finds out more about how it works.

UNIVERSITY academic Dr Vincent Reid had a product idea kicking around in his head for several years, but it took a little support to make it happen.

The developmental psychology lecturer at Durham University had first come up with the idea of creating a sling to reduce the symptoms of infant colic while he was handling its effects on his own children, and through his work at the university he’d run into a number of parents with similar issues.

“I kept seeing mothers coming into my laboratory with problems, and I thought there was a way to overcome this”, he said. “I got the venture capital for it, and started work on a sling to see if putting infants in a certain position would help them get to sleep quicker.

“The type of design used has been shown to be very effective. It’s taken me three years to do this, but I’m employed as a full-time academic, and this is basically my additional part-time job. I’ve employed one person full-time for that period who’s been going out and doing research. However, without the Nurture programme, this wouldn’t have happened.”

The Nurture programme is a collaborative research and development scheme set up by Northumbria University. It is co-funded by the university, One North East and the European Regional Development Fund, and handled by the university’s Centre for Design Research. Nurture offers small and medium-sized business the chance to realise their ideas for products in the health and wellbeing market by dealing with the product research and helping with prototyping.

Typically, a client who successfully applies for the programme will explain the concept to the programme team, who will go away and conduct a feasibility study for the project including tasks such as observational research and market evaluation. While this stage is fully funded by the programme, the client will provide an increasing proportion of the funding as the product passes through phases such as concept generation, concept development, prototype specification, prototyping and production specification. While the Sleep Sling prototypes were mocked up in-house in the Centre for Design Research, Nurture often employs the services of companies such as e3d, Newcastle’s RCID, Amtech, Paragon and the Business and Innovation Centre for specialist design services and prototyping.

Bruce Watson, who is enterprise business manager for the centre, said: “The risk with all this talk about the state of the economy is that the natural reaction among small businesses is to batten down the hatches and get every penny from their existing products. You forget about innovation, so all the time you’re slipping backwards and companies who are bringing products to market are stepping ahead.

“The first thing that suffers is the R&D budget, so the argument is that we need to put something in place to maintain and promote innovation. Essentially, we look at situations where a company might be interested in creating something but doesn’t have the resources or skills to do it. We can work with them on a collaborative project, give them access to expertise they might not have and help nudge something along that they’ve thought about but never got around to doing because they’re focused on the day-to-day.”