Business Weekly - Cambridge, UK

The main obstacle encountered by Stone during his endeavour to add value to the low-margin, high volume industry of traditional printing by incorporating electronic circuits has been identifying and sourcing the correct ink formulation.

Novalia, Stone’s company based in Cambridge, is exploring ways to make printed articles more interactive by combining printed electronics with conventional circuits on everyday packaging.

“If you can get people involved with and intrigued by something, they will spend longer thinking about why they want it,” said Stone.

“I hope to be able to provide people with the paints and brushes and help them to use them in a creative manner.”

Stone feels that too often, in the drive to advance technology, the end product becomes the all-consuming focus, and the potential of existing technologies is overlooked.

With that ethos, Novalia, which  consists of Stone and one other employee along with a handful of PhD students, creates prototype ways to expand the impact of printed packaging by embedding electronics within it and making it interactive.

“By being creative with existing technologies, we can get make more information available from everyday printed images.”

Stone is tight-lipped about new applications for Novalia’s technology but said the company had  seven patent applications at varying stages of completion.

He hinted at the possible use of printed electronics to imbed bar codes into images, making much more information available from the picture on the box, but avoided expanding on the concept during its early stage of development.