Innovation has never been more important, and in the current climate it is great to see six more startups join the latest CRL (Central Research Laboratory) accelerator programme, which, for the first time has attracted a major sponsor, Mouser Electronics.

Having recently visited the CRL workspace in Hayes to meet this year’s cohort, sponsored by Mouser, I was overwhelmed with some incredible startup founders and the ideas that had inspired them. One of which was a pair of friends Pete Barr and Eli Heath, who together have created a social enterprise startup to enable people with disabilities to draw, through adding tools to a wheelchair.

A lot of people say they couldn’t work with their significant other, but imagine founding a whole company together! Well that is exactly what Lottie Whyte and husband, Joe Gray, a professional rugby player currently plying his trade at the Harlequins, did. And after speaking to the pair a few times, the business and co-founding seems to be working perfectly!

With heat-based illnesses such as heat stroke, current medical care often consists of an immediate emergency ice bath. However, an ice bath is anything but portable, and so Matt Anderson, Founder of Cryogenx, came up with a solution to help aid heat stroke or similar illnesses by essentially transporting the ice bath to you, which turns out can be lifesaving.

We are in the year 2020, which means a lot of things. However, one major transition more people are turning to is sustainability and a meat-free world. Not just giving up meat as a food, but all animal based products, however, this can prove difficult when it comes to clothing and the fashion industry.

Arguably one of the most difficult industries for a startup to break into is health tech, but often it is new ideas and solutions in the medical sector that end up being the most revolutionary.

Father and son duo, Liam and John Murphy have created mindfulness products for children with ADHD, after Liam’s family member developed it, and as a family they didn’t want to put him on the standard medication doctors usually prescribe to treat the problem.

For any startup founder one of the hardest stages of the whole journey is developing a product to the testing phase, and then finding out if what you created can achieve what you had envisaged, and if not what changes need to be made.

The testing and development phase, can either be one of the most enjoyable experiences when it comes to creating a hardware product, or one of the most difficult that makes you question and change everything you have worked on so far.

After a very unusual year indeed, the CRL and Mouser cohort is coming to an end, and with the National lockdown and pandemic it caused some interruptions and delays, however, speaking to the startups involved it seems everyone is feeling the same, and is a little bit of sadness that the end is in sight.

The 2020 CRL Demo Day with the year we had obviously had to be taken virtually, which meant it could have gone two ways, but having attended the event and speaking with a number of people who also did, to say the day was a success would be an understatement.