Key details
Date
- 16 November 2022
Author
- RCA
Read time
- 1 minute
InnovationRCA is the Royal College of Art’s centre for entrepreneurship and commercialisation, helping staff, students and alumni transform new design ideas into successful businesses. Its start-up ideas range from portable auto-injectors for allergy emergencies to inflatable concrete water tanks.
Alongside their start-up incubator, their Creative Brands Accelerator offers business mentoring, commercial training and advice to creative small businesses founded by RCA alumni.
Meet the new InnovationRCA Start-Ups below.
Key details
Date
- 16 November 2022
Author
- RCA
Read time
- 1 minute
Dotplot
Dotplot – founded by Shefali Bohra and Debra Babalola (MA/MSc Innovation Design Engineering, 2022) – are developing a handheld breast health monitoring tool that uses sensing technology to build a map of the user's chest and and detect abnormalities in their breast tissue.
The device can be used at home to provide month-by-month comparisons of breast tissue via an app – helping to flag changes as soon as possible. Dotplot's long-term goal is to help more people detect potential breast cancer earlier. Earlier this year the start-up team won the UK James Dyson Award for design innovation.
Phare Labs
Phare Labs – a company founded by Arnau Donate (MA/MSc Global Innovation Design, 2022) and Daniel McBride – are reinventing the smoke alarm. Phare™ is a simple to install air quality sensor designed to provide early warnings of fires and other harmful pollutants. Today’s smoke alarms miss 43% of fires, have a 75% false alarm rate and overlook all pollutants other than smoke.
Phare detects fires earlier and more accurately by analysing both smoke and the air quality data – one device that keeps your home safe and healthy.
Bluenose
Bluenose – from Léon Grillet (MA/MSc Innovation Design Engineering, 2022) and Joseph Sangar – are developing retrofittable, aerodynamic structures to reduce resistance to shipping containers and drastically reduce fuel consumption. BlueNose offers a solution that is able to reduce the fuel consumption of container ships by 3-5% – targeting losses caused by the air drag of container ships.
Founded by Léon Grillet and Joseph Sangar, Bluenose’s novel design was protected with a patent application supported by InnovationRCA before the RCA2022 graduate exhibition, in order to protect the invention.
