Irish Design Company Chosen to Work on Two Multi-Million Euro EU Projects
Dolmen, an award-winning Irish product design and innovation consultancy, has been chosen to work on an €8million project to help the future of personalised biomaterials; and to work on a €3.5 million green project on solar cells which reduce CO2 in the atmosphere.
The personalised biomaterials project will, for the first time, predict the patient specific response to a given biomaterial before its implantation – which will be a major development in the healthcare sector. It will allow for the selection of the most suitable material, minimising health risks and side effects, and improving health outcomes.
The ‘Personalised And/or Generalised Integrated Biomaterial Risk Assessment’ (PANBioRA) project is funded by Horizon 2020 – the biggest EU Research and Innovation programme ever, with nearly €80 billion of funding available over 7 years.
The project, to be delivered over 4 years, involves 17 partners from 11 countries across Europe and has an overall budget of €7,992,471. “These Horizon2020 projects come at a time when Dolmen is growing rapidly as a company and expanding its reach into new export markets,” said Chris Murphy, Dolmen’s CEO and Design Director. “Dolmen will be working closely with Dublin City University to design the diagnostic device itself, integrating new diagnostic technologies delivered by the other partners. The device itself will be designed using Dolmen’s unique Discovery Process, where it will focus on usability, manufacturability, materials selection and aesthetic design to ensure that the prototype developed will be market ready by the end of the project.”
The second project Dolmen has been chosen to work on is in the area of artificial photosynthesis for new energy sources. The eSCALED project creates the European School of the Artificial Leaf, an early stage research group designed to investigate the development of an ‘artificial leaf’ with the aim of mimicking photosynthesis to develop new forms of ‘solar storage cells and fuels’ whilst simultaneously reducing CO2 in the atmosphere.
The project, to be delivered over 4 years, involves 11 partners from 10 countries across Europe and has an overall budget of €3,599,025.
Dolmen is on the steering committee of the project and will support the implementation of a customer-led innovation management system, building on their knowledge and role in the design and development of the ISO for Innovation Management Systems, where their founder Sean McNulty is a working group chairman. McNulty said: “Dolmen will be delivering a series of customer-centric design thinking workshops for the researchers across Europe for the duration of the project. The aim of the workshops is to ensure that researchers always have a focus on delivering value; either through a product, a core component, technology platform or service; that can be quickly and easily integrated into existing systems and ultimately be faster to market.”
Dolmen has long partnered R&D teams in the development of new and innovative technologies and devices. Dolmen brings a practical framework and approach to the successful execution of innovative projects, specifically around the front end Customer Value Discovery process, to ensure the ‘right’ problems are solved that lead to successful commercialisation.
