What if the future starts with a better question?
The biggest shifts in business rarely come from doing more of the same.
They come from asking better questions.
Across the West Midlands, businesses are challenging the obvious answer and turning different thinking into real products, technologies and commercial opportunities.
Faster Horse brings those stories together, from future mobility, and life sciences, to robotic and cyber.
Meet the disrupters
Different sectors. Different challenges. The same instinct to ask a better question.
Maeving
Coventry | Future Mobility
What if an electric motorcycle could charge from any plug socket?
Maeving rethought electric motorcycle charging around everyday life, developing removable batteries that riders can take indoors and charge from a standard plug socket.
Nonacus
Birmingham | Life Sciences
What if detecting bladder cancer didn’t start with a camera?
Nonacus is using molecular testing to look for tumour DNA in urine samples, helping clinicians assess which patients may need further investigation.
What if you could work at height without leaving the ground? Hausbots developed wall-climbing robots to carry out inspection and maintenance on hard-to-reach vertical surfaces, helping organisations complete work at height while allowing operators to remain safely on the ground.
Hausbots
Birmingham | Robotics
What if you could predict a drug’s effect on the heart before you made it? InoCardia has developed a different approach to cardiac safety testing, using engineered heart tissue to help drug developers understand potential effects earlier in the development process.
InoCardia
Coventry | Life sciences
What if you couldn’t trust the screen in front of you? From Wolverhampton, Newmanry Labs is commercialising Silent Glass, technology originally developed by the NCSC that allows video to pass from a computer to a screen while preventing information from travelling back.
Newmanry Labs
Wolverhampton | Cyber security
Why the West Midlands
These businesses may be solving very different problems, but their stories reveal the same thing about the West Midlands: it has the capability to help turn ambitious ideas into something real.
Engineering and manufacturing expertise sits alongside life sciences, cyber, digital and creative technology, backed by university R&D, specialist talent and commercial support.
That combination gives businesses access to the expertise, facilities, partners and industry capability needed to test ideas, develop products and take new technologies towards market.
Maeving is one example, drawing on Coventry’s automotive engineering and manufacturing talent to develop and build its motorcycles. Across the other stories, we see the region’s strengths in life sciences, robotics, and cybersecurity.
Bringing Faster Horse to life
Faster Horse at Frontiers Day
Faster Horse comes to life through Frontiers Day at Birmingham Tech Week, inviting audiences to consider one question:
What happens when we stop looking for a faster version of what already exists and start asking a better question?
Through the Faster Horse installation and interactive activity, Frontiers Day brings that question to life in a public setting.
Behind the experience sit the real businesses featured on this page, already turning those questions into products and technologies.
Frontiers Day creates the moment. Faster Horse tells the story. The disruptors provide the proof.
Together, they form part of It Starts Here, showcasing the people and businesses shaping what comes next in the West Midlands.
What could your next question become?
If you’re developing a product, bringing new technology to market or considering where to grow, the West Midlands has the expertise, industry connections and support to help you take the next step.
For businesses looking to invest, grow or innovate, It Starts Here.
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