We decided to proceed in “stealth mode”, with a small but very focussed team, outsorcing most (but not all) fabrication to external firms with which we established a very tight relationship, so that we could monitor and intervene in all phases of construction. This setup allowed us to complete a number of milestones in a very short period of time, without ANY public grants at all (either from the UK Government, the EU or any other public body), while being in contact  with the Wave Energy group at DNV since the summer of 2008:

1) We have had “steel in the water” from the fall of 2008, implementing a very steep learning curve with a succession of ever bigger and more sophisticated prototypes. We already tested offshore a second generation of full scale machines, and we are going to deploy the third generation soon.

2) We have been working with designers and manufacturers with long experience in precision engineering and in the offshore Oil & Gas industry, thus avoiding (most of) the common mistakes and arriving quickly to working solutions

3) To reach these milestones in such a short time we did not look at the preexisting solutions, developping our own solutions which in most cases turned out to be original and improving on the state of the art, and thus patentable.