Tag: Insight & Strategy

The risks and opportunities of the circular economy

China – opening the door to success

July 18th 2018

Philip Cohen 

Mechanical Engineer

Many still hold the outdated belief that China’s expertise lies solely in manufacturing, and the ability to copy other people’s innovations. On a recent trip to China, I saw how this couldn’t be more wrong. China is poised for success – it has all the pieces in place, the manpower under its belt and, with the right partners, could outpace growth everywhere else in the world.

I had the chance to attend the Mobile World Congress Shanghai which showcased China’s rapidly growing strength in fields ranging from artificial intelligence to 5G to drones and evidenced the country’s lead on many cutting-edge technologies that are set to have a huge impact in the 21st century. China is now home to some of the world’s largest companies that are not just limited to the domestic market but have become established global brands, with corporations such as Huawei, Xiaomi, Alibaba and DJI all fetching valuations exceeding $10bn. Witnessing the sheer scale and speed of the country’s development during trips to China over the past few years, it’s clear this is just the beginning.

As part of our trip to Shanghai representing CDP, we took part in the inauguration of the Shanghai International Energy Innovation Centre (SIEIC), created by SHEnergy Group – one of the world’s biggest suppliers of electricity and gas. It has partnered with UK-based accelerator BGTA and used the launch to release a report that forms the basis of the centre’s strategy, studying effective open innovation culture and focusing on CDP and the Cambridge ecosystem as a proven centre of success. During the week, CDP consumer insight and innovation leader Cesar Lastra and I ran a training workshop for SHEnergy executives on the importance of open innovation for large corporates and took part judging a start-up competition – on both occasions having the opportunity to talk about how CDP can support Chinese businesses in developing a successful innovation strategy.

Open innovation has seen a large uptake in China but why are corporates there now increasingly focusing on this model? Although the market audience of 1.4bn people is huge, competition is equally vast. Many highly successful Western companies have failed in China, such as eBay, Amazon – and  Uber, which spent $2bn trying to compete with rival private Chinese ride-sharing firms before selling to competitor Didi. A major contributor to getting ahead in this highly competitive environment lies in open innovation – the practice of innovating through the use of external ideas to fast track your progress. Anyone who assumes this means simple ‘copying’ of ideas from the West seriously underestimates the capability of this superpower.

Huawei, for example, is now considered a world leader in the field of smartphones, having outpaced Apple’s global phone sales in 2017. A huge factor responsible for its success has been its open innovation system – a network that connects Huawei engineers with high-profile university academics to help them rapidly solve tough technical challenges. Another exemplary case that can be seen all over China is WeChat, China’s mobile messaging app that puts WhatsApp to shame. Its open strategy of partnering with third-party developers and giving them access to the platform to enhance functionality has made it one of the most-used apps in the world, with more than 1bn active users. What started as a messaging app has become more of an ecosystem that people use to navigate their daily lives – used for social media sharing, payments and a whole suite of other services.

A recent global survey by CB Insights on corporate strategy found that key failure in effective corporate innovation occurs through having a closed attitude towards innovation, trying to build alone as well as having no formal innovation process, which in turn greatly increases the time it takes to develop new products. Many successful Chinese corporations are realising this and are increasingly seeing the value in technology collaboration to remain ahead of the curve. One only needs to look at the pace of the country’s progress to see that they are doing something very right.

It’s clear that open innovation is bringing great success in China and is a successful model that can be followed worldwide. This is what we do every day to help many of the world’s top brands develop market-focused technology and deliver highly innovative products to market.

photo-1514300546238-fc275971c073

What does the new industrial strategy mean for you?

February 5th 2018

David Lewis 

Government-sponsored industrial strategies in the UK have rather fallen out of fashion since Margaret Thatcher was elected in the late ‘70s with free market policies. So you might have missed the launch of the Industrial Strategy in November last year. It’s the UK government’s innovation initiative to address our growing productivity gap and encourage research and development (R&D) investment. I attended a Westminster Forum to learn more about this initiative and how our clients – both in the UK and around the world – might be affected.

The UK’s investment in R&D lags behind that of many other developed economies when measured as a percentage of gross domestic product (GDP). The Industrial Strategy is therefore supported by the government’s stated commitment to increase expenditure from 1.7% (OECD 2015) to 2.4% of GDP over the next decade – and reach 3% in the longer term.

At the heart of the Industrial Strategy are five foundations which are underpinned with a range of initiatives that will be administered by a new organisation – UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) – which launches in April with a £5bn budget initially, rising to £8bn in 2022. UKRI brings together the seven Research Councils, Innovate UK and a new organisation – Research England. Its remit includes the development of a new international strategy to encourage and grow cross-border collaboration that will head off concerns over Brexit. Whilst attempting to simplify the landscape, the conference participants – drawn from industry, academia and the public sector – expressed concerns over the complexity and bureaucracy associated with the new entity.

The new approach accepts that industrial strategy needs a focus on what the white paper calls ‘grand challenges’ – major social needs which can give direction to private sector investment and help strengthen UK supply chains. The government has chosen four: artificial intelligence and data; clean (i.e. green and low-carbon) growth; mobility (electric and driverless vehicles, etc.); and our ageing society (health and social care).

So, at the macro level, we can hope for the UK to develop into the world’s most innovative economy – the stated goal of the Industrial Strategy. In the meantime, what does this all mean to you? Well, it’s a long-term strategy being played out, and our clients are typically focused on commercial objectives set around innovation pipelines. Therefore, more immediate interest may lie in access to funding and expertise.

If you’re operating in one of the ‘grand challenge’ areas, you can expect increasing opportunities to work on themed projects aligned with the challenge goals, where UKRI is set to allocate £725m. These projects aim to foster collaboration and partnerships between research organisations and business, partly through increased funding for outreach programmes. More generous funding for ‘younger companies’ is another aim, with matched funding from partnering venture capital firms. There is also talk of a new £2.5bn investment fund to be administered by the British Business Bank – and an increase in R&D tax credits to 12%. The scope and value of the new programmes is still being finalised but further details are expected to be available in April. Our contacts at UKRI suggest that Innovate UK will remain as the main funding vehicle.

Our experience in accessing these funding programmes shows that you need to invest time in understanding and navigating these initiatives to get the best out of them. There is constant change in the government departments that administer them, which means the processes can be clunky and the staff that populate them can be unfamiliar with the success criteria for funding and how commercial businesses typically operate. These problems may well be compounded by the current reorganisation – challenging questions from the floor of the conference certainly suggested this was the case.

The Catapult centres have been running for five years now and have received a mixed reception. Ernst and Young was commissioned to undertake an independent review last year, which concluded that the centres are not being managed effectively – both by government and within the individual centres. Kevin Baugham, deputy CEO at Innovate UK, said there was “some need to step up their game”. However, our experience is that the centres are asset rich and hungry for work. Again, you need to invest time in identifying capability and engaging with the centres to get the best from the relationship, and it’s helpful to understand the political and funding environment within which they operate.

The newly formed Research England has funds which are primarily focused on academic institutions. However, our contacts are indicating that its remit may also extend to encouraging collaboration with industry, with funded programmes to support this goal.

Unsurprisingly, Brexit featured in many discussions, with a number of delegates highlighting the negative impact of uncertainty on their businesses or research funding. Heading off the challenges of Brexit is a central plank of the Industrial Strategy and this includes £300m allocated for attracting world-class talent to the UK for associated projects. The new interventionist strategy should be good news for our clients around the world as it aims to create an environment within which CDP can continue to thrive.

The Industrial Strategy has laudable goals, aligned with the interests of many of our clients. To be truly successful, it will need to address the limitations of previous initiatives by reducing bureaucracy and increasing engagement with industry. To this end, we have lobbied UKRI to use tools familiar to innovators and draw on a ‘user-centred design’ approach for the roll-out of its programmes. Let’s see how innovative government can be when encouraging innovation!

The science of innovation

The science of innovation

January 23rd 2018

Nicki Sutton 

Senior innovation consultant

As someone who was originally trained as a physicist, I am often asked how I have found myself in an innovation insight and research role – something more commonly associated with social science rather than technical disciplines. I can be honest and reply that, at the outset of my career, I certainly didn’t envisage myself where I am today. However, nor is my job at odds with my physical science background.

Innovation is essentially a problem-generating (finding unmet needs) and problem-solving (generating solutions) process. My science training always taught me that a problem is best approached in a structured way – breaking it into manageable chunks to uncover and understand the evidence that points to the solution. Innovation is a multidisciplinary challenge – and subdivision facilitates matching the most appropriate analysis tool to each task. That’s why we use an end-to-end innovation process that we call Potential Realised. Its Phase 0 front-end innovation activity embodies this structured thinking in the same way as technology development phases do later on.

In the front-end phase, we analyse the opportunity from several different perspectives to make sure we understand the complete picture. We look into the future through a sort of ‘information telescope’ to scan horizons for new trends, technologies, expectations and the changing attitudes in society that are likely to direct future markets. This big picture often identifies hotspots that we can zoom into and inspect at a higher resolution, through an ‘innovation microscope’ – using direct observations to categorise and dissect markets to learn, measure and prioritise the ideas that will define innovation. We create hypotheses and invent in-vitro and in-vivo experiments to challenge them and systematically build evidence behind the discovery.

You could say we take a ‘bifocal’ outlook, visualising and plotting both the near and far-off opportunities – patterns that could be the foundations for growth for our clients. At each step along the way, we are filtering information and insights – leaving on the table only the opportunities that are relevant to the market and our client’s business.

In summary, we scan, inspect, observe, dissect, experiment, measure, plot, filter and focus. Yes, innovation as a whole is a creative process, and some might even argue that it is an art. But that doesn’t mean we should not apply a little science at the front end to guide us on our way!

New connected wearable device helps medics save lives in disasters and on the battlefield

August 6th 2015

Innovative technology and design consultancy Cambridge Design Partnership today announces that it has developed the world’s first wearable device designed to measure and monitor the vital signs of multiple trauma patients for emergency response in disasters and battlefield situations.

The First Response Monitor is designed to help medics monitor both heart rate and respiratory rate. Respiratory rate is often neglected by automated monitoring systems and has been described as the ‘forgotten bio-sign’, as many existing wearable monitors focus on heart rate alone and those that do measure respiratory rate have low accuracy or are difficult to use in an emergency situation. However, the benefits of accurately monitoring respiratory rate are clear, and when combined with other parameters – such as heart rate and body temperature – can indicate life-threatening conditions such as sepsis.

When designing the new compact device, Cambridge Design Partnership interviewed a range of army medics about their needs and challenges in multiple casualty emergency situations. An unmet need was identified for a low-cost device to bridge the gap between manual methods of vital signs measurement – which can be laborious and challenging amidst the noise and stress of a disaster or on the front line – and more expensive patient monitoring systems.

The lightweight, robust and low-cost wearable biometric device not only monitors patients but collects and transmits data in real-time, enabling the medic to care for a greater number of casualties, providing more effective casualty triage to deliver improved patient outcomes.

The small device clips onto a patient’s nose and monitors breathing rate and heart rate, giving ‘at a glance’ indication of both parameters, and this data is added to a trends graph showing how these measurements have changed over time. This enables the medic to focus their efforts on providing care rather than taking measurements but also enables the care giver to understand how the patient’s condition has changed over time. The data can then transmitted using Bluetooth low energy to a smartphone app or tablet, enabling other data analyses such as multiple patient triage or situational awareness across the group.

Although the device has been primarily designed with first response medics in mass casualty incidents in mind, it has applications in many other fields – such as civilian medicine where additional monitoring of conditions has demonstrable benefit in patient outcomes, wellness monitoring and within sports for training and performance monitoring. The technology can also be developed to provide a low-cost solution for low resource healthcare settings.

Speaking about the new development James Baker, Partner, Cambridge Design Partnership said: “At Cambridge Design Partnership we’re always looking for ways to find a solution to a clear, unmet need. With the First Response Monitor we’ve combined our expertise in wearable connected devices with our extensive medical experience to develop a technology for effectively measuring breathing and heart rate. The monitor can help save lives in a variety of environments and we’re really keen to speak to partners about developing the potential applications further.”