The story of Jyrobike, according to its CEO Rob Bodill, is a neat illustration of “how people without a hardware background can get into hardware”.

In 2012, Bodill, an Australian entrepreneur living in England, went to the US in search of new technologies . When he found what he was looking for, he got more than just permission to distribute the product in Europe: he was offered the chance to own it outright.

The product, invented and commercialised by students at Dartmouth Engineering College, New Hampshire, was a clever piece of engineering called the Gyrobike (the “G” later became a “J”). Bodill says: “It is the application of a gyroscope – a spinning disc or what’s called a flywheel – that sits inside the front wheel of a bicycle. It creates a stabilising field very like gravity around the bicycle, so that when a rider starts to tip or wobble, the bike corrects that tip and keeps them upright. We see this as a new category in cycling,” he says. “An auto-balance bicycle.”

It’s not just kids learning to cycle who can benefit from the technology. “It can also be used to teach teenagers and adults who find cycling difficult for various reasons such as dyspraxia, a balance disorder, or autism, which also affects co-ordination. Yesterday, we were at a training session with a little girl called Lucy who has both and finds it incredibly difficult to ride a bike. We were in a park for 10 minutes and she was pedalling. Her parents were over the moon.

“It’s also good for older people who have lost confidence,” he adds. “People who used to ride but haven’t in 10 years and want some reassurance.”

The original US version was only a partial realisation of the overall concept – just the front wheel. Over the past two years, as well as refining the wheel, Bodill has been developing a full Jyrobike and an app to go with it. But since he had no product design skills – his expertise is in marketing – he had to find someone else to do the work for him.

He thought of recruiting his own team but quickly nixed the idea. Instead, he farmed out the main tasks to a design consultancy in London which was able to prototype the different parts of the bike and bring it up to the manufacturing stage. “The value of selecting a good partner for hardware is immeasurable,” he says. “I could have ended up spending three times as much if I’d brought it in-house – and that’s much higher risk too. Using an external team, you benefit from their economies of scale. I have access to 40 full-time engineers, battery experts, etc, and they just dip in and out as needed.”

That’s not to say Bodill, who runs the company from Belfast, didn’t roll up his sleeves. “That’s the best part of it. I’ve been involved in each step of the design phase and I know everything about the product now, from the type of plastic we use to the moulding to the battery. The amount I’ve learned has been incredible – it’s like a mini engineering degree.”

The bike and the wheel are currently being manufactured – separately – in China and Taiwan. Bodill says they’ll hit the shops in the last quarter of 2015. Has this balancing act been worth all the effort? “Absolutely,” he says. “It’s been the best three years of my life.”