How Design Foundations funding helped Immaterial market their gas storage technology

Immaterial used early stage design to uncover new ways of scaling their product for their alternative technique for storing and separating gas.

Through the Innovate UK Design Foundations programme in 2017, £4 million of funding was awarded to 93 businesses of varying sizes. The objective was helping businesses work with designers to identify innovation opportunities and find viable routes to market.

This insight series selects several of those projects to highlight a variety of design approaches. Immaterial had found an alternative technique for storing and separating gas which is much more effective than previous methods.

Immaterial teamed up with Rapid Innovation Group (RIG) to find new ways of scaling their product.

 

Ben Swan, COO, Immaterial

“We thought we had a watertight business case. We thought we were much closer to market than we were, but an investor would have torn us apart. You don‚Äôt know which questions to be asking if you don‚Äôt have the experience. It is very easy to be myopic as a researcher. I don‚Äôt think we would have been able to communicate the value of the company if we hadn‚Äôt gone through the process with RIG. They helped us demonstrate the market is there and show there are people queuing up to buy what we have.”

Find out how Immaterial used different design techniques to uncover new ways to scale their product in their case study here.

If your business is facing customer experience challenges and want to talk to someone about using design thinking to tackle that challenge, talk to Jake from the Design in Innovation team at KTN.