Six months of innovation in one week

Under starters orders for blue sky thinking

My first day (and a night) at Northumbrian Water Group's Innovation Festival has been both inspiring and informative. Critically, it is turning creative inspiration into tangible plans.

On arrival last night I was treated to traditional northern hospitality. Pie & Peas no less. And a series of bands, primarily made up of NWG employees, showcasing creativity of their own.

In the light of day today the range and scope of activity became apparent. From a full-on hackathon ,where available data is being interrogated to try to solve the problem of water leakage, to VR demonstrations, through the teenagers' bedroom of the future, everywhere there is a spirit of collaboration and creative building.

Where stickies go ideas must follow

This is the first NWG Innovation Festival. It's been sponsored to the tune of £250,000. NWG's commitment has been in bringing the event and the people together and committing as many as 180 of their own people to the full five days of the event (400 plus partners, academics, schools and customers are attending in total each day).

CIO and Innovation lead Nigel Watson is sure it's worth it and is already commited to delivering NWG Innovation Festival II next year.
Design Thinking is being applied to six sprints:

1. How do we reduce flooding?
2. How do we know about leakage from water pipes and how can we fix it?
3. How do we upgrade our infrastructure effectively and affordably?
4. What will living and working look like in 2030?
5. What can businesses do to improve the environment of the North East of England
6. How do we optimise a mobile workforce for a complex network business

Defining solutions

Design Thinking is far from brand new at NWG. It has been in practice for 18 months. Each month a new sprint is embarked on - always off site and always with a suitable and or eccentric mix of people and skills engaged. In one sprint on billing a baker and a gamer were involved, Nigel says.

NWG uses the Double Diamond approach, taking their inspiration for the initial problem from business KPIs - which in their case are focused on delivering improved customer service.

Where they see evidence they are under-performing, that's where they focus the Design Thinking approach, to deliver a step change. This means innovation always delivers against business need.

The first job is to unpack the initial problem and really work to understand what are the true causes of the problem. Using these, they define the area to focus on and reach what Alastair Tawn (who leads Design Thinking at NWG) calls the 'Critical Problem'.

With the critical problem defined, the team can then work up a range of solutions before focusing back in on the solutions that will work.

For Nigel, the Festival delivers six months of innovation in a week.
Each of the problems the sprints are tackling are ones the water industry as whole need solving. Which explains Nigel's other ambitions for the event

1. To improve the industry 
2. To give small businesses in the NE exposure
3. To enhance NWG's own reputation

"And if just one idea come that makes a significant difference to our business we’ll judge this a success," he said.

With programs for dark fibre to monitor for leakage, movement in pipes and changes in temperature;  universal mobile sensors moving above and below ground and new approaches to getting utilities to share both infrastructure and data among those in development on Day 4 of the event, Nigel should be confident.

We'll get a clearer idea tomorrow when the final ideas are presented.

I'm also planning to share a bit more about the culture of innovation at NWG.

Watch this space, as we used to say when space was limited...

If innovation should be fun, this should be innovative

As Glastonbury lays fallow, I'm preparing for a very different kind of festival, a festival of innovation.
A quick jump around Google will show you (ironically) there is not a lot that is either new or novel about a festival of innovation.
However, what this particular one does is focus on a series of questions that are important to the sponsors and those taking part. And in applying Design Thinking they aim to have built things (at least Minimum Viable Products) within five days.
The Northumbrian Water Group Festival of Innovation runs on a dedicated site (at Newcastle Race Course) for the week of July 10-14, 2017.
It's taking on some pretty hefty challenges - with a wide range of thinking being brought to bear (from universities, consultancies, industry and beyond) in an agile framework;

• Sprint 1 – ‘Rain, Hail or Shine’: How can we reduce flooding? 
• Sprint 2 – ‘Keep it flowing’: What do we know about leakage from water pipes and how can we fix it? 
• Sprint 3 – ‘Preparing for the Future’: How do we upgrade our infrastructure for the 21st Century effectively and affordably? 
• Sprint 4 – ‘Tomorrow’s World’: What will living and working look like in 2030?
• Sprint 5 – ‘How Green is Your City?’: What can businesses do to improve the environment in the North East? 
• Sprint 6 – ’21st Century Reach’: How can we optimise a mobile workforce for a complex network business?

I'm planning on being there for Wednesday evening to witness the conclusions of the process on Thursday and Friday.
The festival vibe will be enhanced with a tented village, live comedy and music and inspirational talks.
The best innovation comes from fun - the most creative sparks from clashing ideas and approaches. The Play Ethic at play.
I've been invited to blog from the event - so watch out for more here and from my twitter account (@davidcushman).

Transformation without innovation isn't enough

When we think about the great business tasks of our time Digital Transformation is the must-do. It is often heralded as some kind of future-proofing excercise. But without innovation as both its beating heart and foundational principal, it can be little more than a retro fit.

Digital Transformation is the widescale response to Digital Disruption - ie a disruption that has happened. That disruption is often to the way people behave: People, machines and information now connect in such a way that a human behaviour has changed - ie how people consume content has been disrupted by new connections between people, machines and information. That has created new needs. To meet them is to transform to meet the needs of digital disruption.

Each strategic goal in digital transformation is therefore a response to a need created by a digital disruption.

But if you take an innovation-first approach to digital transformation, you create the space to become the disruptor.

Consider the impact of the technologies we know of today. Prepare for them to impact faster and more broadly than the web ever did. Imagine and expect the improbable.

The opportunity, for those who will understand the potential of AI and who can imagine its possibilities, is not to be digital - but to be the disruptor.

Why robots are essential to kick-start our next age of innovation

Yamaha's Robot rider could one day end the  chore
of riding fast motorbikes... er, ok it's not all good.

There is an argument - and a well made one at that - that our era is not an age of great technological change - but actually one that is quite stagnant.

Robert J Gordon made the case in his book 'The Rise and Fall of American Growth'. He points out that the Great Inventions that caused real change arrived between 1870 and 1970.

The internal combustion engine changed the way we travel (removing the growing threat of horse manure - which experts predicted would reach 9 feet deep on London's roads by 1950 if allowed to go unchecked). It changed the way we travel much more than any subsequent improvement in performance or styling.

Urban sanitation similarly had a greater impact on our health than medical inventions of more recent years. The invention of the telegraph versus the written message carried by ship, horse and hand which preceded it is a far bigger shift than fax to email or phone to mobile.

The impact was that we got to live (US childhood mortality tumbled from 1/3 in 1860 to 1/200 today), we got to live longer, and we got more time to do with as we pleased (being liberated from household tasks such as washing clothes and preparing meals which had taken 58 hours in 1900 - and 18 in 1970).

Jesse Frederick argues in his assessment of Gordon's ideas that our blindness to the comparative stagnation of the modern era can at least be partially attributed to the fact that the technology of the past mainly created time, whereas today’s technology fills it.

Gordon, published in 2016 - sees this stagnation as permanent. Mostly because the big wins for technology have already been won. But part of the problem is for all our technology we feel as though we have less time. And time is essential for the ideas that make real change.

Enter Robots. the AI revolution and the robotics it is driving are about to answer Jesse's criticism of today's inventions. They are certainly not a technology that fills time, they will create at least 18 hours for us (finishing up the last bits of housework our inventors have failed to resolve so far - ironing, dusting, food prep and cooking, physically moving the devices about etc). The internet of things completes the picture in shopping.

Ok, an 18 hour saving isn't as great as the 40 hour leap that got us here - but this one will come in 5-10 years. The last took 70.

And we haven't even considered the saving in time AI will bring to our working (and commuting) lives. Finally, the time technology promised to free for us will actually arrive.

And yet, even for the slam-dunk win our robot friends will provide, there's an even bigger opportunity for genuine life change: How we organise is changing.

How we organise is society and society is how we live.

As I have long argued; the web enables adhoc self-forming groups to get things done. That's a fundamentally different form of organisation than preferred by 1870-1970. That era was also an era of centralisation and mass production. The next 10 years is about decentralisation and personalisation; whether it be through micro factories in every home (3D printing), the move away from public transport (driverless cars, drones) medical technologies that self diagnose and repair (nanobots) or how we learn, get justice, make contracts and exchange value (blockchain).

We will have the opportunity to live entirely unique, separated lives. But all the evidence of the world since the web is that we will use it to become closer and better connected - without the need for central organisation.

A future without centralised or top-down direction is being enabled through the technologies of this decade and the next. 

Very soon we will have the collective time to carefully consider what our future should look like and imagining how we can reach it - kick-starting the next age of innovation.

And that, when we pause to reflect on the shift from 2010 to 2030, will, I believe, provide us with a case to say we really do live in a time of not just fast, but radical change.

Why we should embrace GDPR

The General Data Protection Regulation due to come into force next May should be regarded as the biggest hint yet for companies to reshape themselves for the digital world - aligning with The 10 Principles of Open Business.

Rather than fear at the number of sticking-plasters that need to be applied to support business as usual, forward-thinking companies will be taking the hint; data ownership is no substitute for genuine relationships.

That's the real message of GDPR - stop hoarding data to exploit customers.
In fact it's very difficult to see in a post GDPR-world why any customer would choose to allow a company to retain their data unless (and they have to be transparent about this) their is a genuine and positive partnership defined in their data notices.

Of course companies can (and many should) spend time, trouble and money ensuring compliance by (for example);

• Appointing a Data Protection Officer
• Reviewing each and every business process to ensure data protection is designed in
• Ensuring default privacy settings are set to high at each and every touch point
• Making it crystal clear exactly what data is being stored about whom, for how long and for what purpose - at every relevant interface
• Providing complete data portability - enabling users to withdraw access to all of their data and take it with them, at any point they choose,
• Devising Data Protection Impact Assessments
• Developing new processes to respond to requests for data and complaints about use
• Preparing to defend your use of logarithms for the decisions they deliver and offers they make or do not make

With up to 4% of last year's global revenue at stake as a sanction, there's much sense in taking this very seriously indeed. However, much of the data storage, privacy and permissions issues become much less onerous if you shift  the nature of your relationship with customers - and in doing so your relationship with their data.

Start to think of data as less a substitute for a relationship - and more an enabler for building one through genuine engagement. 

The start point requires three simple steps:

1. Understand the role of the customer in your business: (Hint - the passive consumer no longer exists, if they ever did).

• Where are the benefits in partnering; how far into the centre of the organisation can customers be brought
• How do you score for trust?
• Set a new goal state, roadmap for organisational change and supporting technology architecture

2. Why do you want to know more about your customers - what is driving you to build engagement?

• Is it to build trust?
• Get direct insight?
• Get help in decision making?
• Find savvy co-creators?
• Deliver a better experience, better serving need?

3. Now you should devise a customer data strategy;

• What data could be available to you – what can you learn from customer interactions? 
• What value for third parties and customers could that generate 
• Consider role of Decisioning (NBA)

By now you have a handle on what you want to achieve with customer data and how you are going to 'sell' that to customers in a way they will see as a fair exchange.

And that's a far better place to start from when working towards compliance with GDPR.y 2017

*This is always the case with my writing - but given the legal complexities of the GDPR I want to make it even more clear than usual - these views are mine and mine only and should not be assumed to represent those of my employer.