The hardest part of the Innovation process is the scaling up process. It’s known as The Valley of Death for a reason: you’ve delivered a trial with promising results that met all (or most) of its objectives, your sponsor is chomping at the bit to get it installed and the supplier emails you every week... Continue Reading →
Last month, I had the pleasure of taking part in a panel discussion at TransCityRail South alongside Gareth Evans (Network Rail), Anna Saunders (High Speed One), Richard Graham (KeolisAmey Docklands) and Yung Loo (Arup), fantastically moderated by Helen Fospero. We were looking at the use of AI in asset management. The basis of this is... Continue Reading →
Hands up if you’ve ever used a transport mode of any kind, and found that for reasons beyond your control, you’ve had to research and select an alternative option, most likely using your smartphone? Yep, we’ve all been there. Frustratingly, for all the travel booking apps we have access to from our phones, the burden... Continue Reading →
Over the last year or two, I’ve noticed a gradual, somewhat pompous trend in predicting the demise of the humble software developer to see them replaced by AI. There is no question that AI is going to profoundly affect many professions, particularly in terms of productivity, but these claims mask the reality of modern software... Continue Reading →
Terminology is vital in most sectors but never more so in the innovation process. For an industry in its relative infancy, getting the nomenclature correct will help innovators articulate the benefits of what we do to others. And one area I believe we’re struggling with at the moment is the definition of evidence when testing... Continue Reading →
Innovation is about change, but it is, of course, not the only business function concerned with the improvement of an organisation. The growth in awareness of Continuous Improvement techniques underpinned by the Lean Six Sigma methodology means many corporations are setting up their own, with impressive results at super-low costs. And the world of design... Continue Reading →
Sir Dave Brailsford, the infamous sports performance coach best known for being the architect of British Cycling and professional Sky team successes, once coined the term “marginal gains”. Or at least he was among the first to put that phrase in the public’s vernacular. He proved that a collection of slight, minute improvements in different... Continue Reading →
When I first heard of Sora, I immediately thought of the Shimano gear system on my road bike. That this name is to be used to describe the next huge shift in AI brings to mind a related analogy; if AI was a gearbox, Sora is surely the equivalent of shifting up a gear as... Continue Reading →
A quarter of a century ago this month, I got my first job post-university as a Technical Consultant, joining a startup as its first employee. 25 years is a long time, and technology as we know and use it has changed beyond all recognition. I’ve since worked in seven different businesses in a mixture of... Continue Reading →
Wow, Elon Musk doesn’t do things by halves, does he? His arrival at the social network Formerly Known As Twitter has been a tale of change delivered at breakneck speed, a pace so fast even his employees struggle to keep up. And this week, Elon’s fascination with the letter “X” took on a whole new... Continue Reading →
Digital Is Not Rocket Science 