A young Bishop’s Stortford entrepreneur who wants to help blind and partially sighted people communicate and collaborate better with their peers has won a national award.
Greg Hargraves, 23, founded Paige with three fellow Imperial College London students while studying for a four-year integrated masters degree in biomedical engineering.
The company’s aim is to make Braille technology more affordable and accessible to enable visually impaired people to work more easily with sighted parents, friends, teachers and colleagues.
And Hargraves, who went to Windhill primary and Birchwood High School, has been named one of 94 recipients of an Innovate UK Young Innovator Award. The prize includes a £5,000 grant, one-on-one business coaching and an allowance to cover living costs.
The businessman, who was also recently awarded a RAEng (Royal Academy of Engineering) 1851 Enterprise Fellowship which is funded by the 1851 Royal Commission, and his five-strong team are now hoping to take Paige to the next level.
Some of the cash injection will be used to help get certification for the firm’s first product, Paige Connect. It is an upgrade for existing Braille writers which will produce digital copies of the Braille embossed on paper.
Using a web app that is hosted locally on Paige Connect and can be accessed wirelessly using a phone, tablet or laptop, sighted peers can instantly see a translation of what the Braille user is typing and receive it in a digital document, thus enabling fluid collaboration.
Hargraves and his team are also in the process of developing a multi-line braille display as a paperless alternative to existing Braille writers. There are currently very high costs associated with multi-line displays and the business is looking at ways of reducing those.
Hargraves will also use some of the funds from the two awards to move permanently to London. He is currently commuting from the family home in Stortford where he lives with mum Meriel and dad Tim. He also has two older siblings, Patrick and Naomi.
The idea for Paige was developed during his undergraduate studies when Imperial College London was approached by Kilimanjaro Blind Trust Africa. The software has since been tested at New College Worcester and The Braillists Foundation in London.
Hargraves credits the tech department at Birchwood for inspiring his love of engineering. He is also hugely grateful to Kevin Hill at K2 Associates, in Pig Lane, for allowing him to use his company’s laser cutter so he could continue developing prototypes during lockdown.
The Young Innovators Awards recognise young people with great business ideas who have the potential to become successful entrepreneurs and future leaders in innovation.
In addition to the awards, Innovate UK delivers workshops and briefing events to provide practical business advice to a network of over 12,500 young people across the UK.
Science, research and innovation minister George Freeman said: “Innovation is about developing new and better ways of doing things – something young minds naturally do.
“Our Innovation Nation mission – and 50% increase in the Innovate UK budget – is about investing in R&D in all parts of the UK to help drive economic investment and create exciting new career opportunities.
“The next James Dyson, Martha Lane Fox, Hayaatun Sillem or Richard Branson are out there. Helping, inspiring and supporting our top young innovators is the best investment there is.”
