DIATOMIC delivers results for innovators in Birmingham

Thirty new collaborations with external organisations have been secured by nine companies in the West Midlands as a direct result of the DIATOMIC UK Accelerator, new impact figures show. 

Analysis by Connected Places Catapult reveals that year one of the accelerator, which focussed on challenges set with Birmingham City Council’s housing and waste management team, led to £368,000 in trial funding being secured by SMEs, and boosted research and development investment among participants by £266,000. 

In addition, six new full-time jobs have been created by companies in the cohort as a direct result of participating in the accelerator; with £71,000 of private funding and £47,000 of public funding secured. Six out of the nine companies reported the programme improved their understanding of local authorities, how to engage with them, and procurement processes. 

One company to have benefitted from the programme is software specialist NolijWork, which has produced a service diagnostic tool to analyse social housing performance, and identify areas for improvement. It has trialled its system for Birmingham City Council to analyse maintenance activities on 60,000 social houses, and has entered discussions with potential clients in Scotland and along the south coast of England. 

A second company taking part in the accelerator was Osmium, which developed a remote energy monitoring and control system for buildings managed by Birmingham City Council. The initial aim was to evaluate the cost effectiveness of energy retrofits. But while participating in the programme the company began to track humidity levels within specific properties to identify the risk of mould. It also used energy consumption data to identify residents who may be struggling to afford to keep the heating on.

“The beautiful thing about DIATOMIC is how it connects large organisations with specialist companies who have new solutions that haven’t been tried before. It really gave us an opportunity with Birmingham City Council, with whom we couldn’t have hoped to get an audience with otherwise. As a small organisation, it can be difficult to get anyone’s attention.”

NolijWork’s founder Paul O’Neill

The company’s software is used to input data from property repairs into a dashboard to provide a visual representation of what is being delivered, by whom and how long it takes – from electrical to plumbing to gas services. This allows clients to identify patterns of activity that may highlight a wider issue, where multiple visits to sites could be streamlined, and areas for improvement. 

Since beginning on the programme, Nolijwork has also offered its software to the council to monitor the efficiency of – and spot any delays in – adult social care service delivery, and track how anti-social behaviour is managed. 

Osmium director Graham Hygate says the DIATOMIC programme helped his company to pivot from one sector to another. “We started out monitoring wind turbines, but the programme allowed us to understand the refurbishment market, and forced us to get serious about it; something we had only toyed with before,” he says. 

“Since then, we have extended our service offering to include indoor environment monitoring; measuring temperature and humidity in individual properties, and to identify those which may be unoccupied for a long time.” 

WATCH: Osmium director Graham Hygate explains how DIATOMIC is helping.

Osmium manufactures Internet of Things enabled circuit boards that collect data and send it to the Cloud. Through the accelerator programme, it discovered connectivity issues associated with placing too many boards close to one other.  

“DIATOMIC gave us the chance to try our technology in a real setting, and the programme had a couple of really good coaches which offered valuable advice to help us develop our capabilities,” he adds.

Providing a deep dive into the data 

Paul O’Neill describes NolijWork as providing an “MRI scan for your services; showing the bits that you cannot see on the outside”. It uses operational data to create visual models that help to “diagnose if there is a problem with how services are performing”. 

The company started out in social housing to better manage the “thousands of repair request every day” in order to “spot problem areas in the midst of all the data” and to help avoid the scenario of some complaints going unresolved for months, or even years. 

“We focused on empty properties initially, to see if repairs can be carried out more quickly in order to turn them around, and help new tenants move in more swiftly,” he explains. 

Paul estimates that the average turnover of social housing is 5% a year, or around 225,000 homes in the UK. “The faster that homes can be turned around, the more accommodation will be available for people.” Bringing an empty property back up to an acceptable standard for the next tenant could involve between 50 and 100 different tasks, and if an authority has 100 empty properties “that represents a lot of spinning plates”. 

By focusing in on the worst-case examples, the hope is to avoid problems getting passed around and not getting resolved, or identify contractors who deliver a poor service. 

In terms of adult social care and anti-social behaviour, the company hopes to help prevent the same people from going around and around a system and being offered the same services multiple times in a short space of time.  

“Being able to move the needle on some of those problems and be recognised for that by several local authorities are the aims,” says Paul. 

Keeping an eye on energy usage 

Osmium has been trading for just over a year, but started operating as a division of another company back in 2018. “There has been a lot of demand for energy monitoring technology recently due to the energy crisis, especially in housing, but we have also broadened our offer into several other sectors such as food and beverage,” says Graham.

“There is no doubt that the UK housing stock needs to be made more energy efficient, and property refurbishment is big business. There are numerous methods available, but the question is which is the most effective. Our aim is to help evaluate them and filter out those that don’t actually save on carbon emissions; thereby reducing the amount of money wasted.”

Graham adds the energy crisis caused a shock which led housing providers to look into energy monitoring for their estates, and many are only getting into this now for the first time. 

He also says there is very little shared knowledge as to which refurbishment methods work, therefore “people are going to be wasting their time doing something that doesn’t work; not because they’re particularly misguided, but because nobody really knows what works”. 

Future prospects for the company include targeting the private sector and “seeking out other opportunities” wherever they may appear. “If we could be associated with having made a significant dent on in the UK’s greenhouse gas emissions, that would be fantastic,” Graham adds. 

Connected Places Catapult’s Executive Director for SME Development & Academic Engagement, Alex Weedon said: “It is tremendous to see the DIATOMIC programme make a real impact for companies operating in the West Midlands. The accelerator aims to demonstrate how new technology can make a real different to people’s lives and to the operations of local authority clients.” 

Find out more about Innovation in the West Midlands. 

The DIATOMIC Accelerator is being led by Connected Places Catapult in collaboration with Birmingham City Council, STEAMhouse and the Greater Birmingham Chambers of Commerce. It is part of the wider West Midlands Innovation Accelerator, funded by UK Government and delivered by Innovate UK, which is designed to bolster the region’s innovation and R&D capability and spark commercial growth and investment. The West Midlands Innovation Accelerator is delivered in partnership with the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, Innovate UK and the West Midlands Combined Authority.