Fund promotes early-stage product design
Innovate UK have launched a new funding stream called Design Foundations which focuses on helping companies with early-stage design work through collaborating with experienced design teams like Maddison Product Design. The call opened on 16th January for up to 70% funding for projects up to £100k.
The fund has a strong emphasis on building new relationships and collaborations to create user-centred, rather than technology-led products.
At Maddison we are frequently helping innovators to design completely new kinds of products which often changes the way people work. In the early stages of the project we are trying to understand user needs and our clients are often trying to engage with investors and other stakeholders. However, it can be difficult for people to imagine a product which doesn’t yet exist. So we create concept visualisations, – an ‘artist’s impression’ of the future product, often shown in context. Having developed so many products, our designers can quickly put together a convincing portrayal of how a product might appear, illustrating details which showcase particular features.
Our ability to visualize products in the early stage of design helps to explain new technologies

Here we helped George Rice at Nottingham University to disseminate a novel capillary refill sensing technology by creating in-context images. Our CAD rendering was superimposed on a stock image.
Our clients get to tell a better story about how their technology will add value
Maddison have considerable experience and success in applying for government funding, including winning grants with i4i, SBRI and Innovate UK. We are happy to collaborate with Universities, start ups and SMEs in putting together and writing the grant application, so please contact us to start a collaboration by calling Patrick Hall on 01798 865711.
Maddison Limited is a product design consultancy with a passion for creating products for the medical, scientific, industrial and consumer goods markets that truly meet and exceed user expectations. We have been in the business of satisfying our clients and their target users for over 30 years with many design awards and ‘world’s firsts’ to our name.