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Transparent Anti-Contamination Stepping Plates

Breakthrough:
Deb Leary invented lightweight transparent stepping plates which allow investigators to examine crime scenes in minute detail without disturbing important evidence. Her crime-fighting innovation reduces the threat of crime scene contamination.

Inventor:
Deb Leary, United Kingdom

Financial reward:
$100,000+

The Story:
Transparent Anti-Contamination Stepping Plates

In 2001 Deb Leary accompanied her policeman husband Richard to a conference in Toronto on forensic identification. During a conversation the topic of equipment came up and a British police officer mentioned stepping plates. For some reason that she doesn’t know why, Leary made a note to find out more about them. Her husband explained that they allowed investigators to walk through a crime scene without contaminating it, but when she saw one, she was amazed; she couldn’t see how investigators could see what was happening under the plates as they were made of aluminum. “Police are going into a crime scene and they can’t actually see it. The opportunities for challenges from the defense were huge, for example police officers could be accused of hiding things under the plates.”

Obvious Solution

The light bulb appeared and the idea of transparent plates seemed so obvious to her that she was convinced they must already exist. She conducted a patent search and was astonished to find that they didn’t. So Leary went into action to develop prototypes, and formed a company (Forensic Pathways) with her husband to develop and market the plates that are now standard issue for police forces in the UK. This was all achieved without any prior experience in business or manufacturing. And her only knowledge of forensics up until that point came from the crime novels she had studied as part of her English degree.

Leary knew that she had to protect her invention and so she downloaded a confidentiality agreement from the Internet and customized it for her own use. She found a manufacturing company in the UK, but the quote of $150,000 (£90,000) for making the tooling was far too high. “I laughed hysterically, it was way too much.” So an agent was appointed to find a manufacturer in China.

Rough Prototype

In the meantime Leary cobbled together a rough prototype and sent it to every police force in the UK. Almost immediately the phone was ringing with orders. She had to point out that the plates didn’t exist yet as she was only conducting market research at this stage to determine a need. “So I started to go out to police forces and found out about the problems they were having with the aluminum plates which just reinforced for me that I was on the right track.”

A start-up quote from a Chinese manufacturer came in, and although lower than the previous figure it was still too high for someone on a modest salary. Fortunately, she won a UK government sponsored innovation award and the rest of the costs were met by a business loan. Leary’s trajectory from concept to market was swift, with the first plates rolling off the production line just two years after she conceived the idea. “A lot of inventors that I talk to go for perfection first, and if you go down that route you’re never going to release the thing; I call it ‘inventor’s disease.’ So I decided to get it out there and get people using it, playing with it, and throwing it about. They knew this was the first version and there would be another version coming along. But, unless it was out there I would never know if people would really take to it.”

Disaster

Then disaster struck. Although her customers were happy with the plates there was a perception that they would break. None did, but because of these concerns Leary felt she had to respond to what the market was telling her, and so she went back to the manufacturer and asked them for a redesign. And that’s when the problems started. “So they came up with a new design but it took ages for it to be produced, it just went on and on and on. Anyway the new design came out, and this caused huge problems. Whereas we weren’t having any breaks, we were now having intermittent breaks and the reason for that was the way they were redesigned.”

Leary’s solution was start all over again with a new manufacturing company. The new plates can now support weights of 849 kilograms; they were deliberately over engineered, and they started selling again in January 2009. They are being used by police forces in Germany, Australia, the United States, the United Kingdom, the Falkland Islands, and the Netherlands. Orders are pouring in all the time and they form part of recommended practice within the European Crime Scene Manual. They have even appeared on episode of CSI: NY!

Recognition

Leary has also collected a whole trophy cabinet full of awards such as: Business of the Year 2003, Most Innovative Business 2003, Business Enterprise Award for Technology and Innovation 2003, British Female Inventor of the Year 2005, and Middle Market Exporter of the Year 2007: Awarded by the Dept for Trade & Industry.

Innovation Continues

The Transparent Anti-contamination Stepping Plates are the company’s lead product, but by no means is it their only innovation. Leary believes strongly that she must continue to innovate and diversify, and Forensic Pathways also invents, designs, and develops new software analytical tools for data forensics which are changing the way police forces interrogate data. They are a leading supplier of forensic solutions and their data analysis tools saved one bank $28 million (£17.5 million) in fraudulent loans, insurance claims, and other criminal activities.

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