The Royal Academy of Engineering’s Leaders in Innovation Fellowships (LIF) programme brings together dozens of researchers from around the world every year to train in capacity building and entrepreneurship. The idea is to equip them with the skills and networks to become technology entrepreneurs. This year’s final LIF cohort contains fellows from China, India, Colombia, and the Philippines.
These fellows are working on commercializing a wide variety of technologies. For example, efficiency boosting turbines for everything from aircraft engines to wind farms. Several LIF fellows are examining ways to use technologies like lasers to etch nano-patterns into turbines to improve their performance.
Other emergent technologies being developed by LIF fellows focus on ways to improve the lives of millions of everyday people by, for example, making rice more nutritious, or making it more economical to raise goats. Yet more are targeting some of the greatest threats humans face today as a species, antibiotic-resistant bacteria, by developing a unique drug cocktail with the potential to save millions of lives in the future.
These technologies are aimed at everyone from rural farmers to defense contractors, surgeons to city governments. Some have raised hundred of thousands of dollars in funding while others are still proving concepts and conducting early tests.
Find more on the RAENG website.