Share manufacturing risks and co-own solutions to make an innovative switch as big as cleaning up diesel generators, says Toby Gill at IPG 

As an experimental physicist, Toby Gill was used to operating at the limits of uncertainty. Now as chief executive of IPG, he is taking a shot at cleaning up one of the most awkward challenges in the transition to net zero: off-grid diesel generators. Site operators and event organisers are sympathetic to making the switch. However, it’s hard for them to justify investing millions in generators on which they’re not sure they can rely. Bio gas or fuel cells might look right today, but conditions could easily change in future. So they are continuing to rely on diesel generators as the standard for their off-grid power. As a market it is expected to keep growing to $30bn by the late 2020s, despite widespread pledges to cut carbon. So what if a lasting replacement could be found for powering construction sites, keeping festivals at full volume and charging fleets of electrical vehicles? Since 2016, a team of former waste-to-energy engineers has been looking for a solution. Four patents and £6 million later, their company, IPG, now has a ceramic generator that can burn any fuel at close to 1000⁰ C without a flame, so sidestepping the objections of off-grid operators. They can burn whatever suits them best and meet their commitments to net zero. In principle, the flameless generator is ready to clean up the market for off-grid diesel. However, without a warranty from a Tier 1 manufacturer, IPG would struggle to raise the investment to scale itself up beyond a promising pilot if it stuck to what is normally expected. Since becoming IPG’s chief executive in 2020, Toby Gill has been pursuing an innovative model for offsetting risks, taking a cue from the principles for digital manufacturing developed by the Institute for Advanced Manufacturing and Engineering at Coventry University. ‘We are far more capital intensive than a digital start-up. Investors want to be sure that our projected price for a Tier 1 supplier will hold. “Trust me” doesn’t really work for them. Equally, a Tier 1 won’t put their reputation on the line for what they see as a half design. So you can end up between a rock and a hard place.’ ‘We are adopting a different blueprint where we break up and distribute the risks to smaller manufacturers, who each stand by their own parts. The prospect of replacing off-grid diesel and opening up a significant new market makes them happy to co-operate with us.’ ‘Or, if we design a solution together or make a refinement, we co-own it and share the rewards. It’s a more collaborative form of coalition building that allows innovation to filter further down the supply chain than it has before.’ ‘We’re now in a much better place to move conversations forward with investors. We might not have the guarantee of a big balance sheet behind us, but we have a bill of materials in which we know the prices will stand and are securing a series of warranties on which we can rely if anything goes wrong. It’s a more agile model for managing all the early-stage fire risks, which will open up a path to Series A and Tier 1 for us.’ • Toby Gill was discussing ‘Profiting from Industry 4.0: The road to future value in manufacturing’, a book by Marcos Kauffman, professor at the Institute for Advanced Manufacturing and Engineering at Coventry University. Further details here.