Before they launch a high-profile gadget, consumer electronics companies usually fly armies of engineers to China, where they spend weeks in remote factories hammering out manufacturing problems that can turn hot new electronics into a hot mess.

Inside the industry, it's called the design process, and it's a slog. "Nobody builds it perfectly the first time," Instrumental co-founder and former Apple engineer Anna Shedletsky said.

So Shedletsky founded Instrumental with an ex-Apple colleague, Sam Weiss, who had also spent months in China troubleshooting Apple products before they were officially launched. The 4-year-old start-up builds a system of cameras for assembly lines, then couples it with software that uses machine learning to detect defects before they go into production.

If Instrumental catches on, it could enable more companies and start-ups to produce2015 Prize

Prize Awards

In addition to £200,000 being shared by the winners of the lobbying, training, public awareness, science and young researcher awards, this year the judges decided to present our first ever Black Box awards, totalling £250,000, to winners involved in mapping the first ever ‘human toxicity pathway’.

This year saw a record number of nominations and 51 projects were shortlisted for the 2015 Prize: from young researchers in Brazil, Europe, USA and Malaysia to training of scientists in alternatives to animal testing in Belarus, Ukraine and South Korea. See the full 2015 shortlist.

Bianca Marigliani, a Young Researcher winner in 2015, explains how the Lush Prize helped her to pursue the research she wanted.