Peter Denyer: Innovation junkie who tackled image problems

Peter Denyer: not prepared to leave it to the big companies.

Denyer had to learn the hard way that some investors are often more interested in money than in science and technology. And yet, despite nail-biting encounters with bank managers and other “near death” experiences for his ventures, Denyer not only thrived on the experience but went on to start more than one business.

He even had to break it to his staff that he had been persuaded, reluctantly, to sell Vision Group, the business he had created and brought to the London Stock Exchange, to a major electronics company. That was just one of a string of misfortunes that began when the first “product champion” for Vision’s electronic camera chips, and the first production samples, came to grief in a helicopter crash on the way to the trade show that would have launched Vision’s “seeing chips” on to the world.

Why would anyone want to set themselves up for that sort of aggravation? For Denyer it wasn’t the chance to make money. Denyer wanted to replace the prevailing electronic imaging technology – he believed his research could change things but not if he left it to the slowly grinding wheels of ponderous big companies.

New ways of image capture

Denyer’s group at Edinburgh University worked on new ways of capturing images electronically. Electronic cameras were beginning to appear at the beginning of the 1990s, with camcorders becoming increasingly popular. “They used a technology called charge-coupled devices, CCDs, as the element that actually sensed and captured images,” explains Denyer. He had other ideas based on less exotic semiconductor technology, using the CMOS chips that dominate modern electronics.

No one took him seriously. “Time and again I would meet investors and industrialists and try to persuade them of how I thought this could be different, and what the advantages were to these CMOS sensors.” The high point of this round of rejection, as Denyer puts it, was when the head of engineering from a major Japanese company dismissed the idea. “He looked me straight in the eye and said that what we were doing would never work. How was he to know that by then that sort of statement was heroin to me?”

Thanks to a grant of £120,000 from the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, the Edinburgh team persevered and built the scientific foundations of what was to become Vision. The first idea was to use the technology for security systems. That was the sample that went down with the product champion in the helicopter crash.

Then came a failed attempt to create a camera for “a certain large consumer electronics company,” an episode that brought home to Denyer another important fact of business life, the need to fire people so that the company doesn't go under and take everyone else with it.

Eventually, Vision got it right. “At first we couldn't match those CCDs for quality but we did beat the pants off them on the level of integration we could achieve, and in particular the power consumption of CMOS camera chips.”

By 1995 Vision was the first Scottish spin out to list on the London Stock Exchange. “In 1997 we shipped a million cameras. We hit £10 million in revenue. Goodness me, seven years after spinning out the company we were starting to make profits.”

Denyer loved it. “These were the glory years for me as well as for the company. One day I would be deep inside the circuit that was going to reduce noise levels by two electrons, the next I was schmoozing City fund managers. And a million people on the street were using my products.”

Along came a loss

Then came trouble. The company actually lost money and that is not on if you are a quoted company. “We were crucified for this.” Takeovers are made of this sort of thing as investors get twitchy. That is what happened to Vision. “One of the hardest days of my professional life was the day I stood in front of my company and told them I had sold the business.”

The business is still a standalone part of STMicroelectronics, a large European semiconductor company. Many of the mobile phones sold today have cameras using the company’s chips. “By 2005, more CMOS cameras than CCDs were being shipped,” says Denyer. “All that cranky prophesy that I had indulged in as an academic had finally come true.”

Did the cruel world of capitalism dent Denyer’s enthusiasm? Far from it. The university called him a few years ago. “Very kindly they kept open my academic position.” Did he want to come back? No thanks. By then he was a spin-out junky. “I had already founded another two companies, both of them university spin outs from Edinburgh.” One ended up with a public listing, the other as part of a company listed on NASDAQ, the US “high tech” stock exchange.

“Now I am on my third wave of these companies,” says Denyer, “six of them. Most of them university spin-outs.”