Plaudits prove value of R & D

IRL offers its congratulations to Auckland-based global crystal maker Rakon, which was judged New Zealand’s leading Hi-Tech Company for the last decade at the 2011 NZ Hi-Tech Awards, as well as Hi-Tech Company of the Year.

Recently, IRL’s microfabrication expertise and facilities helped Rakon gain the knowledge to tailor-make its own development facility and ramp up production of its high-value crystal oscillators for the global GPS, telecommunications and aerospace markets.

The R&D-intensive company is a world leader in the design and manufacture of frequency control solutions, with a presence in New Zealand, Europe, India and now China.

Competition judges described Rakon as “gutsy and innovative with an excellent team and spectacular growth”, and with “truly international appeal”.

IRL partner ENL (Electronic Navigation Ltd) also earned recognition in the NZ Hi-Tech Awards, as a finalist in the Dell Innovative Hi-Tech Hardware Product Award category for their Wide Angle Sonar Seafloor Profiler (WASSP).

WASSP, which enables much faster, cheaper and more accurate seabed profiling than conventional single-beam echo sounders, arose out of a long-term research partnership between IRL and ENL – one that promises to deliver many more successes in the future.

Says IRL account manager Jonathan Miller: “IRL is proud of its history of developing technology in partnership with ENL and is delighted to see them having successfully made the switch from technology importer to a seller of technology designed and manufactured in New Zealand.”

IRL’s important role in New Zealand’s natural products industry was underscored by the success of IRL partner Seperex Nutritionals. The company won the Cawthron Innovation in Science & Technology Award at Natural Products NZ’s annual summit meeting for their two bioactive marine extracts, BioLex® and BioLex-Plus®, which IRL helped develop. IRL worked on the development of extraction processes to obtain the products, and on analysis of the special lipid ingredients that the products contain.

Natural Products New Zealand Executive Director Michelle Palmer said that BioLex was a well researched, planned and developed product, showing outstanding innovation and great use of partnerships to develop a new product line.

The DuPont ANZ Innovation Awards in Melbourne, Australia, attracted over 100 entrants, including IRL, a first-time contender. IRL reached the finals with its SuperEx – a world-first portable supercritical extraction pilot plant that allows the rapid demonstration of supercritical technology to produce extracts from natural feedstocks and by-product streams.

This plant enables organisations to develop new products on their own site, using their own operators, and without investing large capital sums in their own plant.