Innovating our way out of the Climate Emergency .....
In this fifth episode in our Grantham series of podcasts looking at the challenges of getting to Net Zero, Professors Richard Templer and Peter Childs talk to Amanda about the role of innovation in helping us to deliver things to the market that have an impact in a timescale which is 10 times shorter and involving 10 times as many people than the Industrial Revolution – and doing this without making too many boo boos along the way! We discuss who has been thinking about what that takes and how we innovate the way we innovate.
Our guests:
Professor Richard Templer holds a joint appointment with the Department of Chemistry and the Grantham Institute. He is the Director of Development for Chemistry and the Director of Innovation at the Grantham Institute. He is the current Hofmann Chair in Chemistry and is a member of the London Sustainable Development Commission and advisory body to the Mayor of London.
Professor Templer joined the Grantham Institute in 2015 to work on creating the Centre for Cleantech Innovation at Imperial. The Centre is now seeking to establish a co-location centre at the College’s White City Campus as a collaboration with the Energy Futures Lab and the Centre for Environmental Policy. It is hoped that the centre will open by 2021. It’s activities will support the education and training of cleantech innovators and entrepreneurs and enhance their R&D by enabling access to the College’s science and engineering ecosystem. The Mayor of London and the UN are seeking to support the centre’s establishment.
In his position on the London Sustainable Development Commission has led its work on Cleantech Innovation. This has resulted in Mayoral environmental, economic and spatial planning policy measures to support the creation of a Cleantech Innovation Cluster in London, a heightened profile for this within the Greater London Authority and an initiative to increase female participation in cleantech innovation.
Professor Peter Childs FREng is the Professorial Lead in Engineering Design and was the founding Head of the Dyson School of Design Engineering at Imperial College London. His general interests include: creativity; the application of creativity tools; mechanical and product design; robotics; rotating flow, temperature and its measurement, sustainable energy component, concept and system design.
He was formerly the director of InQbate, the HEFCE funded Centre of Excellence in Teaching and Learning in Creativity, director of the Rolls-Royce supported University Technology Centre for Aero-Thermal Systems and a professor at the University of Sussex.
His roles at Imperial include: Professor at Large for the Innovation Design Engineering double masters degree at the Royal College of Art and Imperial; as well as active roles with a number of companies including Q-Bot Ltd (Founder Director), and Strategy Foresight.