Business and innovation
Business Awards winners 2020
The IOP Business Awards recognise the significant contribution that physics and physicists make in industry across all sectors and at all stages, celebrating entrepreneurship, excellence in innovation and the successful implementation of physics into a product or service.
Our Business Awards winners this year highlight the successful application of physics in industries including medical, energy, rail, defence, quantum, magnetics, aerospace and environmental.
Download our IOP Business Awards 2020 brochure (PDF, 7.15MB)
Business Innovation Award winners
Advanced Hall Sensors
Advanced Hall Sensors specialises in the design and manufacture of semiconductor Quantum Well Hall Effect (QWHE) magnetic sensors. It supplies to a global customer base in industrial, medical, and oil and gas industries, servicing demanding environments ranging from extremes of temperatures to very high sensitivity applications.
Visit the Advanced Hall Sensors website
Hirst Magnetic Instruments
Hirst Magnetic Instruments is an innovative magnetics technology company, which has taken scientific processes into industrial production areas involving magnetising and the accurate characterisation of magnetic components. Its recent advance in the latter sector promises significant increases in product yield in the manufacture of EV motors, making an important contribution to this green energy sector.
Visit the Hirst Magnetic Instruments website
Promethean Particles
Promethean Particles designs, develops and manufactures nanoparticle dispersions to meet product specifications. The company covers many industry needs such as inks and pigments, functional nanoceramics, biocompatible materials, printed electronics and metal organic frameworks. It offers a feasibility service to tailor a custom-made solution for specific customer requirements.
Visit the Promethean Particles website
Thornton Tomasetti Defence
Thornton Tomasetti Defence is a multidisciplinary firm of consulting engineers who provide expert advice on structural survivability, blast, ballistics and weapons effects to the UK Ministry of Defence, other UK government departments, and the US, Netherlands, German, French and Canadian Navies as well as global defence companies and suppliers.
Visit the Thornton Tomasetti Defence website
Business Start-up Award winners
FeTu
Established in 2016, FeTu is an innovation-driven enterprise based in West Yorkshire that has created a revolutionary ‘green’ energy device targeting carbon reduction across a broad range of systems and industries. FeTu offers a disruptive enabling technology; a versatile ‘positive displacement turbine’ suitable for various applications.
Geoptic Infrastructure Investigations
Founded in 2019, Geoptic Infrastructure Investigations is a spin-out company from the universities of Durham, Sheffield and St Mary's. Using patented technology which detects cosmic-ray muons, the company specialises in non-invasive imaging of critical infrastructure, such as railway tunnels, to identify areas of concern such as hidden voids.
Visit the Geoptic Infrastructure Investigations website
ORCA Computing
ORCA Computing is a UK company developing a completely new approach towards quantum computing. Its quantum memory allows storage and synchronisation of single and entangled photons, enabling the prospects for future high-performance, highly connected and scalable quantum computing.
Visit the ORCA Computing website
Oxford HighQ
Oxford HighQ is a spin-out company building on more than a decade of quantum technology research from the University of Oxford. The company is developing unique nanoparticle sensing instruments using micro-scale optical microcavities. The first product addresses a crucial application in nanomedicine to provide single particle measurement of drug loading.
Visit the Oxford HighQ website
OxMet Technologies
Founded in 2017 by Oxford University researchers, OxMet Technologies develops proprietary alloys, powders and components for the aerospace, automotive, industrial and biomedical markets. OxMet’s ABD® alloys have a wide range of applications, making rockets, planes, and cars more fuel efficient, and reducing medical implant problems.
Visit the OxMet Technologies website
Photon Force
Photon Force designs and manufactures time-resolved single-photon-sensitive scientific cameras for application in areas spanning quantum physics, bio-medical imaging and communications. The business span out of Robert Henderson’s CMOS Sensors and Systems Group at the University of Edinburgh in 2015, and now employs a skilled team at its Edinburgh base.
Visit the Photon Force website
QLM Technology
Founded at the Quantum Technology Enterprise Centre at the University of Bristol, QLM is developing innovative low-power tuneable diode LIDAR gas imaging systems based on infrared single-photon detection. QLM aims to produce a low-cost platform of gas imagers that enable continuous and fully automatic greenhouse gas emission monitoring to help natural gas producers, distributors, service providers and environmental agencies limit climate change.
Visit the QLM Technology website
Lee Lucas Business Award winners
Nebu-Flow
Nebu-Flow’s acoustic aerosol formation technology enables delivery of hard-to-nebulise respiratory drugs to the lungs, including both existing formulations and emerging novel high-value therapeutics such as biologics, nanomedicines and vaccines.
Cellular Highways
Cellular Highways develops and commercialises cell-sorting instrumentation based on a novel technology, VACS (vortex-actuated cell sorting), which exploits new physical principles in inertial microfluidics. The technology will vastly increase the speed and scalability of sterile cell sorting, opening up new applications in cell therapy and other areas of biotechnology.
Visit the Cellular Highway website
Further information about our Business Awards
- Find out more about our Business Awards and how to make a nomination.