At the heart of Omachron Science is a diverse, multidisciplinary core team of about 45 scientists and technologists where openness, collaboration and innovation are the cornerstones to our culture. We focus not only on technology, but also on our people, to allow long-term and constant growth of the individuals who make up our company thereby ensuring the success of the company as a whole.
Our staff support each other on projects as needed, not just on projects to which they are formally assigned thereby creating a "fluid yet self supporting structure" which ensures the success of all of our projects and people.
At Omachron Science Inc. we consider our unique corporate culture and environment to be our most important asset.
We combine our passion for research, development and learning with the practical necessities of converting ideas into tangible useful products and processes to create "Sustainable Technologies for a Better Future"™ and make that future begin TODAY.
We accomplish this through a careful balance between innovation, creativity, a responsibility to deliver stakeholder value while being dedicated to integrity in all of our daily activities.
Basic Research
Basic Research at Omachron Science Inc is a theoretical and experimental exploration of nature. It is stimulated by a researcher's interest in a particular field and may be further motivated by a technical challenge posed by a third party.
The technical staff of Omachron Science Inc meet regularly to discuss science and technology and to develop fundamental new ideas. Experiments are conceived to validate new ideas and provide preliminarily quantification of the related phenomena. Unlike an academic research environment, experiments are focused on "How to make a phenomena work", that is, commercially apply it, rather than the more esoteric question of "How it fundamentally works". Omachron often partners with universities and colleges to study the underlying mechanisms of new phenomena once basic intellectual property rights have been secured.
The Research Projects Committee reviews all proposed methodology for experiments to ensure safety and good scientific rigor. These reviews are not a barrier to creativity as they do not consider the commercial merits of an idea at this early stage. Basic Research often results in patentable new commercial opportunities not originally envisioned and that only come to mind after experiments are completed. The opportunity to work in a team that conceives new ideas, experimentally verifies them, and eventually embodies them is a major motivation in recruiting and retaining great staff. Basic research occupies 25% of the time of the lab.
Advanced Research
Successful Basic Research leads to proposals to construct more sophisticated working models or prototypes and to assemble or construct associated experimental apparatus to quantify new ideas and phenomena further. Omachron Science Inc selects projects to move forward as Advanced Research based upon the associated costs and technical risks of a project versus the commercial value of the concept if fully proven. Successful Advanced Research projects result in a Technology Enabling Report which is an "engineering handbook" to enable a new technology to be exploited commercially. Patents are often filed at this time.
Omachron Science Inc receives requests from its business partners, affiliates, and new potential clients for new products or processes or for improvements to existing products or processes. On a quarterly basis Omachron Science Inc reviews its intellectual property assets, including new concepts for products and processes, and establishes priorities for the various commercial opportunities and requests. Resources are assigned to the highest priorities to conduct Experimental Development.
Experimental Development
When a new Experimental Development project begins, a Project Team is established consisting of technical & marketing staff from Omachron, from our partners, and from the factory designated to manufacture a proposed product or to implement a proposed process.
All projects begin with a written functional specification for the new product or process that clearly outlines the project requirements. While it is recognized that elements of this specification will evolve based upon the results of laboratory and consumer testing of models and prototypes during development, changes can only be made with the written consent of the entire project team. A clear functional specification is requisite for success.
One or more Technology Enabling Reports and the creative spark of the project team combine to develop an initial design for a working model. As there are often many unknowns in combining and scaling different technologies, a series of systematic changes are made and experimentally verified as the working model evolves to meet the requirements of the functional specification. Typically three to five generations of working models are required to achieve the basic performance metrics of the functional specification.
Subsequently, three to five generations of prototypes are constructed and tested to evolve the working model into the final design which incorporates the technical and the geometric and functional constraints of the industrial design of the new product or process.
A Working Model refers to an assembly of components that can be tested to quantify and verify the performance characteristics of a proposed new product or particular elements or a proposed new product.
A Prototype is a first, full-scale model of a new product that is fully functional and embodied in an industrial design representative of the final product. It may contain internal workings that are different from the final product but nevertheless enable verification of the technologies employed in, and performance characteristics of, the final product.