Ventures that can change the world

The Spectator’s Economic Disruptor of the Year Awards 2020, sponsored by Julius Baer, opens for entries on Thursday 5 March. We’re excited to hear from entrepreneurs in every sector and region of the UK whose products are changing their markets in terms of price, choice or technology, and have potential for international growth. And in this third year of these high-profile Awards, we’re also looking for outstanding examples of social impact.

Meanwhile, we’ll present a series of inspirational stories behind 2019’s Disruptor finalists. First, Martin Vander Weyer meets Brendan Hyland, of WFS Technologies, the subsea wireless communications venture that was the winning entry for Scotland and Northern Ireland.

We could hardly have found a better Disruptor champion for Scotland and Northern Ireland than Brendan Hyland, a native of Belfast (and engineering graduate of Queen’s University there) who’s now a veteran Scottish entrepreneur, having built two major technology businesses at Livingston in Midlothian. The first, Kymata, made optoelectronic components for telecoms networks and was sold to Alcatel of France in 2001. The second is WFS Technologies — which offers an heroic tale of persistence, ingenuity and occasional luck to kick off this series of profiles.

Founded in 2003, WFS is a world leader in subsea technologies that reduce cost and risk for the offshore energy industry and have other applications related to climate change and aquaculture. It started in a very different field, looking for wireless solutions to the ‘kerb-to-house’ problem at the ends of onshore optical-fibre networks. But ‘it was tough to make money in BT’s backyard’, Brendan says, and WFS moved on, via contracts for the UK Ministry of Defence, to work on video links for ‘autonomous underwater vehicles’.

His team began with ‘a profound degree of ignorance’ about the possibilities of subsea communication and a belief that it was impossible to transmit radio signals through water, until they made a surprise breakthrough — ‘a penicillin moment’ — which won them an innovation award from the MoD in 2006. They had proved that subsea wireless was possible, with applications for submariners, environmental monitoring and the energy industry. But it was very expensive — and Brendan’s next challenge was ‘to reduce the price point to a level that made commercial sense’. First progress came from an unlikely direction: a collaboration with Wavejet, a Florida-based venture making motorised surfboards.

The real target was to sell monitoring devices for offshore oil, gas and wind installations, but energy companies were themselves in a downturn in 2015-16 that restrained their spending. ‘It was a matter of give up or dig in, so we dug in.’ The biggest obstacle was limited battery life and the huge cost of replacing batteries in deep water. ‘We had to change the rules of that game and by smart engineering we’ve done so’, reducing power consumption in WFS’s patented data transmission devices ‘by a factor of 1,000’.

Why is WFS a true disruptor — and what is it that keeps Brendan, at 56, fired up to drive the business forward? ‘Our future is in the ocean,’ he replies. ‘Offshore wind is a huge source of energy. Acquaculture is going to be a huge source of food protein. Coastlines are threatened by climate change. The ability to measure and monitor through low-cost wireless devices is key to making the right investments in all these areas. By extending the Internet of Things into the ocean, we’re changing the world.’