David Johnson, Sales Director
David Johnson is the Sales Director at South Coast Science, who design and build high-precision, affordable, highly-connected environmental monitoring devices, circuits and open-source software.
Tell us a little about your background.
For the last 30+ years I’ve worked for manufacturers of sensors, from resistive, to fibre-optic to electrochemical (air quality). Over this time my prime responsibility has been to develop routes to market around the world through innovative marketing.
Tell us about your business’ purpose and vision.
With our current product the Praxis/Urban, we strive to produce the ‘white van’ of the air quality industry. That is, a product that can be used by anyone, is robust yet versatile and is competitively priced. However we appreciate that now more than ever there are different applications for air quality monitoring, and we must respond to these needs with focussed solutions. As such, our vision is reflected by our product pipeline and that is to offer solutions for each of the main market sectors: outdoor air quality / indoor / personal exposure and Smart City.
Tell us about your Sustainability journey.
Whilst it has been relatively easy to introduce a process of pre-qualification of supplier’s sustainability credentials, that changeover is not always straightforward with new parts having to be tested and approved. Waste and energy reviews have been useful as they highlight areas for improvement that can easily be taken for granted. Currently we are investigating the availability of government backed aid available to SME’s to improve their sustainability ratings - and happily there appears to be much to consider.
Tell us a little about the work your company is doing.
Our company tag-line is ‘Openness Is Our Innovation’ and this refers to our open-source business model. It is not uncommon in this and some other industries to promote a product off the back of the latest algorithm. This makes it difficult for customers to evaluate the quality of the data produced by a given manufacturer. We give customers access to all but the tiniest part of our code, because we have the greatest confidence in the quality of our data. This is a policy that we will apply across all of our products and we encourage others to do likewise.
What does being part of a community such as the Future Economy Network mean to you?
Membership of the network has opened our eyes to both the scale of what sustainability means and the possibilities that exist. Although quite typical of a tech company, we’re a bunch of engineers and scientists and often have little inclination to see what is undoubtedly the bigger picture. It helps us understand what we are, how we contribute and what we can do in our efforts to ‘clean up our act’.
What does a Future Economy look like for you?
In a previous life, I worked within the Quality Assurance department of a large engineering organisation where we were responsible for maintaining MOD quality requirements. Part of this meant traceability on every single component that came into the company or was manufactured by the company and at a micro level I can see some overlap with what we are trying to achieve by way of a sustainable future. I think we need to look at the detail and go back to the design of a product and understand the impact of the process used in its creation. At a higher level, we should be encouraged to be more versatile and our rolls be less highly confined to a single responsibility or role within a company and find ways to identify and build on other innate talents that we may have that can serve to support colleagues or processes.