Matthew Gilbert joined the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Sheffield as a researcher in 1993, becoming a Lecturer in 1996 and Professor in 2013. His longstanding interest in optimisation and its applications in engineering analysis and design saw him co-found LimitState with two academic colleagues, a PhD student, and is its Managing Director.
The company has a portfolio of five engineering software products and now has over 150 industry organisations using its software, located in 30 countries worldwide. The LimitState:FORM software, launched publicly in 2016, uses discrete optimisation methods to rapidly identify efficient designs for AM components, providing these as high-level solid models.
Here Matthew talks us through his experience of commercialising a research project.
After ten years as an academic at the University of Sheffield, I took the plunge and entered the unfamiliar world of commercialisation. I realised that a spinout company could provide a means of dispersing new methods developed in the University into industry - rather than languishing in the pages of academic journals. The journey to doing so has brought great personal satisfaction - though I underestimated the time investment involved in setting up and running the company, LimitState Ltd.
In the beginning, I was involved in everything, from assembling the furniture for our first company office, writing chunks of the software source code, and phoning around potential customers. Currently, my involvement is primarily as a technical consultant and steering the general direction of the company. We were fortunate that when the company formed in the mid-2000s, the University was happy to support spinouts with relatively modest early stage income projections, whereas recently they are setting the bar higher.
LimitState’s first products targeted the construction sector, using mathematical optimisation techniques to provide capabilities not present in existing products in the marketplace. Some of the early products were - and I think still are - quite revolutionary in their target sectors, though we greatly underestimated the challenge of getting the message out to potential users.
At the University of Sheffield, we undertake a range of additive manufacturing (AM) related research, brought under the banner of the ADAM (Advanced Additive Manufacturing) Research Centre in 2012, led initially by Neil Hopkinson and now by Iain Todd. Iain alerted me to the pressing need for more efficient AM design tools six or seven years ago - the issue is that traditional topology optimisation-based design workflows are cumbersome, involving a double whammy of long run times and the need for labour intensive manual remodelling of low-level mesh output.
Given that the outcome of this lengthy process is often a truss-like form, the question arose: why not instead use methods which can identify such forms directly? Layout optimisation techniques could generate designs quicker, and the resulting designs would also be much easier to manipulate, if required.
The company then secured funding from the UK government (via TSB/Innovate UK), firstly to prove that layout optimisation methods could usefully be used to design lightweight AM components, and later to develop a prototype software application as part of a collaborative R&D project involving the Manufacturing Technology Centre and a number of industry partners (as part of the ‘ANVIL’ project, initiated by David Wimpenny). Working with industry partners from an early stage was new to me but helped us stay focused on meeting the end users' needs. These projects led to release of the LimitState:FORM design optimisation software in 2016.
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With backing for AM-related R&D activities from the UK Government, the involvement of a vibrant community of AM researchers, industry players and LimitState projects, my experience has been positive. I’ve also recently witnessed my former ADAM colleague Neil Hopkinson move from academia to industry, to focus on further developing the high-speed sintering technique he invented. I think this is a healthy development - though he is obviously a significant loss to the University.
Although colleagues in the U.S. generally seem more alive to commercial opportunities, I don’t see the situation as being radically different in the UK. The amount of support available can vary markedly by institution, irrespective of geographic location. The main difference seems to occur a bit further down the line - I’ve lost count of the number of dynamic UK spinout or startup companies acquired by large U.S. corporations in the last few years. It’s a shame that there are so few UK companies with the scale and ambition of their U.S. counterparts, and, given the acquisitions, this looks set to continue.
