the spectator the spectator || 29 february 2020 29 february 2020 || http://www.spectator.co.uk http://www.spectator.co.uk 1919reduce 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 monitor-
ing 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 big-
gest 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 pro-
tein. Coastlines are threatened by climate
change. The ability to measure and moni-
tor 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.’The entry form and terms and conditions for
the 2020 Economic Disruptor of the Year
Awards will be available from 5 March at
http://www.spectator.co.uk/disruptor. The closing
date for entries is 5 June 2020.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.W
e could hardly have found a bet-
ter Disruptor champion for Scot-
land and Northern Ireland than
Brendan Hyland, a native of Belfast (and
engineering graduate of Queen’s Univer-
sity there) who’s now a veteran Scottish
entrepreneur, having built two major tech-
nology businesses at Livingston in Midlo-
thian. The first, Kymata, made optoelec-
tronic 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, inge-
nuity and occasional luck to kick off this
series of profiles.
Founded in 2003, WFS is a world lead-
er in subsea technologies that reduce costand risk for the offshore energy industry
and have other applications related to cli-
mate 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 ‘auton-
omous underwater vehicles’.
His team began with ‘a profound degree
of ignorance’ about the possibilities of sub-
sea communication and a belief that it was
impossible to transmit radio signals through
water, until they made a surprise break-
through — ‘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 expen-
sive — and Brendan’s next challenge was ‘toRunning a bank’s tough. That’s no reason to start handing capital backhttp://www.spectator.co.uk/disruptor
Ventures that can change the world
Martin Vander WeyerADVERTORIAL JULIUS BAR_29 Feb 2020_The Spectator 19 26/02/2020 11: