Arden Photonics Arden Photonics is a small company offering products and services in fibre optics from its base in Knowle in Warwickshire. Managing director, David Robinson, has been involved with the Photonics Cluster (UK) for more than two years and in the early days was utilised as a consultant to explore technology areas which would be exploited in the future. Robinson has been in the optics business for 20 years and saw the opportunity to break out on his own to develop test instruments for the fibre optics industry in addition to offering high level consultancy services. He has now designed his first products, which test the capability of optical fibres to work at the extremely high bandwidths being demanded in telecommunications and data networking. David said: 'When I started the company about two years ago I was able to use a workspace at the Cluster's application centre facility and was based there for a year. When I was starting out it was very useful to have a base and a ready source of contacts. We are currently exploring a return to the science park…however; the return will be as an established and well-funded organisation. Our product was developed partly with funding from an Advantage West Midlands scheme, which I came across at one of the Cluster meetings. It was a relatively small grant, about £10,000, but it was a cash award with not many strings attached. It just kicked us off to work on a project which we already had in mind and gave us the cash to go out and buy a few expensive components, which we otherwise might not have been able to afford from our cash flow. We would not have had that product today without the grant and now we have secured a large order for it from a US manufacturer. I have been on a mission to Stockholm with other Cluster members and that was very beneficial - not so much from the contracts with the companies in Sweden, but from the contacts I made with the other guys from the UK. I gained one long-standing client and have been working on a major project with another, just from the meetings we had in the back of the minibus.'