BIG 2014 Business Innovation for Growth Conference

by Michael Cropper | Jun 22, 2014 | Data and Analytics, Events, Future | 0 comments

Another conference we attended last week was the BIG 2014 Conference organised by Creative Lancashire. The conference was designed to showcase inspiring examples of business innovation and growth along with future scope and the impact of new ideas and possibilities in business.

Living in a digital world, businesses need to respond quickly to take advantage of expanding and emerging markets. At the heart of this is creativity and innovation, looking at new technologies and an ever increasing list of expectations from customers.

Opening the day was Wayne Hemmingway talking about how creativity is the way to make change happen. Not relying on simply accomplishing a task, but instead looking at more creative ways of completing work both in the digital world and the built environment.

Matt Hunter

Matt Hunter

The first session of the day was from Matt Hunter, Chief Design Officer at the Design Council. Matt was talking about how your customers have absolutely no interest in your horrible legacy back end systems. His message was to stop making excuses for why change can’t happen faster and start to implement the changes needed to stay ahead in the rapidly changing world we now live in.

Transacting with your bank should be as easy as buying a banana. It currently isn’t. Customers are looking for a seamless interaction with your business. To the point where customers, whether end users or other businesses, are more interested in access rather than ownership. This is for resources, data, tools and software. We only have to look at the huge change with Adobe Creative Cloud how this has moved from an enormously expensive system traditionally, to a very affordable monthly subscription to the full suite of products.

Some of the future predictions Matt made included;

• New technology around the Internet of Things
• Increase in the making of things
• Making money while you sleep
• Intellectual property
• International growth and innovation
• Engaging with users

Interesting predictions made and certainly a lot of which I agree with where things are heading.

Chris Sanderson

Chris Sanderson

Next up we had Chris Sanderson from The Future Laboratory who was talking about how a new generation of technology will save us and why mega systems like Google, Facebook, Microsoft, eBay etc. are game changers.

Chris started off by stating that technology doesn’t change society, society changes itself with the use of technology. With the rise in tech hubs, technology schemes, fabrication labs and meet up places such as MadLab in Manchester it is clear we are heading for a big shift in the world.

Mobile devices are often the first thing you touch in the morning when you wake up and the last thing you touch at night before you go to sleep. People have mobile devices almost surgically attached to them with people often being rather worried when their phone leaves their sight.

With the rise of technology, we have lost the traditional B2B and B2C. Chris believes we are turning into a “Trader Age” whereby everyone is both a buyer and a seller which is powered by digital platforms. Quite rightly, Chris asked the question “Is your business fit for purpose in the 21^st century?” This is one that all businesses should be asking their self as relying on old technologies, systems and processes is quite simply not going to cut it with modern consumers.

Chris stressed about the importance of not just delivering products and services to your customers, but to deliver experiences. Add value to your customers’ life beyond the traditional product and service approach. An interesting point made next was around the idea of a cashless future as point of sale alternatives hit the market including Square, iZettle and Google Wallet.

Most retailers have no idea about who is walking through their doors. In the future customers will be easily identifiable, will be able to simply pick up goods and walk out of the shop without going to the traditional ‘till’ setup. Instead, the shop will know exactly who the customer is and be able to take payments automatically as products are tagged up correctly.

One technology leading the way with hands free payments is PayPal’s new Beacon technology;

Other technologies including PingIt and Zapp for mobile banking are changing the way customers pay for goods and services in a retail setting. There will be no need for people to carry around pieces of plastic in their wallet to pay for goods and services in the future as traditional credit and debit cards will cease to exist.

One point made was around the term Big Data. This term is a little confusing to most people and often isn’t actually that meaningful. Instead, in the future we will start to see Big Friendly Data which is all around sharing customer big data with the customer, instead of keeping this data internally within the business. As an example, British Airways Executive Club is designed to put you in control as a customer which shares all of your flight history in your account with information about you. All of which is putting more power and control in the hands of the customer to access the information they need at a time that is convenient for them.

Following on from this, with beacon technology springing up there are now beacons such as the one be Estimote which is a contextually aware beacon designed to send data to your mobile phone based on where you are. The video below explains the concept further;

From a retail angle more shops and stores are experimenting with augmented reality and in-store brand experiences that turn a shopping trip into a shopping experience. To the point whereby Burberry is starting to embed RFID tags into both the tags on products in their retail stores and also within the actual textiles of the products their self, to the point whereby this is in their privacy policy;

This is really interesting technology, since when you re-visit the store in the future, they will automatically know who you are. Reading through their current privacy statement, they state that they aren’t joining the dots between the product and their customer database, yet, although they may do this in the future. Imagine having that personal experience when you visit a store in the future.

Following a similar trend with new technology is around the August Smart Lock which is designed to turn the front door in your house into a smarter tool that you can control. The video below explains how the concept works;

This all being said, a quote from Dave Caplin, Microsoft’s Chief Envisioning Officer sums things up well stating that “Analytics, the way we bring data together, is still a little out of reach for many organisations”. This is true for simply online data such as Google Analytics and other systems, let along bridging this gap between online and offline data.

On the theme of virtual reality, Topshop recently set up a virtual reality cat walk so anyone from the general public could experience front row seats for London Fashion Week 2014. Really interesting way that the virtual and digital worlds are blending, in this example going from physical to digital to physical for people. Imagine this being broadcast around the world for everyone to see;

Another interesting point Chris made was about how we are going to start to see ubiquitous wearable technology in the near future as more people start to catch on with the technology. Including Google Glass, Muse the brain sensing headband and technologies mentioned earlier for cashless currencies.

Muse brain sensing headband

As we start to see further enhancements with improved biometric scanners and devices, we will start to see these break out into the general populous which will allow brands to truly experiment with customer experiences. Including items such as the Sony digital store front in San Francisco with the endless aisle;

Sony Digital Store Front Endless Aisle

Following on from this, Chris talked about the 3^rd industrial revolution with the rise in 3D printing and rapid manufacturing. With the likes of Acustom Apparel using 3D body scanners to scan 200,000 points on your body to fit clothes exactly to your body shape;

Acustom Apparel 3D Body Scanning

What this relates to is personalised manufacturing along the whole supply chain through the use of digital technologies and enhanced brand experiences. Take the idea for the endless chair design revolution which allows products to be manufactured automatically to order with 3D printing technology;

To summarise the areas Chris was talking about;

• Prepare for smartphone supremacy, with a mobile first approach to everything
• Create a cashless future with global office transactions through a mobile wallet
• Use your location to interact with digital technologies, become contextually aware and create contextually aware systems
• Join the Internet of Things, embrace online interactions within physical brick and mortar stores
• Start scanning with 3D body scanners
• Become biometric as technologies progress
• Enable ubiquitous wearables as they become mainstream

A final interesting point made by Wayne Hemmingway following Chris’s talk was that technology should be reducing the gap between those that have and those that have not. This isn’t the case. Technology is making the gap larger. As a society, this needs to be looked at.

In addition, people no longer have to be looking to commute 2-3 hours per day to travel into work. Instead, we are starting to see the rise of community hubs, tech hubs, office hubs whereby people can work from various locations with ease.

A point was also made around the traditional thought process that everything online is free. This time is over. Digital materials are ever increasingly being turned into paid products and customers are starting to realise this and are more willing to pay for digital goods and information online.

Breakout sessions

Within the two breakout sessions, multiple people were speaking about a range of topics, so I’ll look to cover all of these together. The first breakout session talked about New Technologies and included Professor Rachel Cooper OBE from LICA, Dr Ania Servant from the National Graphene Institute, Asa Calow from MadLab in Manchester, Dr Paul Coulton from Imagination Lancaster and Chris Sanderson from The Future Laboratory.

Ania kicked off the session talking about how the potential for graphene is truly ground breaking. Imagine being able to have super-superfast broadband that is cable of downloading a terabyte of data within seconds along with being able to re-charge your mobile phone in only 5 seconds with powerful superconductors.

Asa then talked through how we are starting to see a professional side of the traditional maker industry. We are starting to see hobbyists turning into product companies. With fabrication labs increasingly popping up, we are going to start to see more of this in the near future.

Paul then talked about how the Internet of Things is still in the GeoCities stage of the internet. One tip was that we shouldn’t just be plugging the internet into everything, instead thinking along the lines of what digital things can we turn into physical items.

The second breakout session talked about Our Relationship with Users and included Wayne Hemmingway MBE from Hemmingway Design, Darren Evans from The Engine Room, Richard Scholey from The Chase, Kayleigh Davis from the Lego Group and Katie Gallagher from Manchester Digital.

As part of the discussions the key message was always to focus on the users. The example for which I always personally use when talking to businesses particularly in manufacturing is to focus on the customers and not the machine, as was reiterated during the session.

Often manufacturing companies have invested heavily in a specific machine which can cost near to £1 million for the single machine, and rightfully so they are proud of this investment. Although customers couldn’t care less what machine you have, nor what brand it is. All customers are interested in is WIIFM – What’s In It For Me. Talk about the benefits in terms your customers can clearly understand.

As an interesting example, the Magimix transparent toaster was shown, which clearly has thought about the user. Every single person reading this blog post will have at some point burnt a piece of toast as toasters aren’t smart enough to realise that when you have the setting on ‘Number 3’ when the toaster has just been on, then it really only needs to be on ‘Number 2’, which ultimately results in lots of pieces of burnt toast. The Magimix toaster resolves these issues;

Magimix Transparent Toaster

Next up we had Kayleigh from the Lego Group who talked about the design process of lo-fidelity prototyping which means that products can be tested quickly and feedback can be given. Lego’s best tip is to always get feedback from users at the beta stage of the product so you don’t invest to heavily only to find out that something isn’t quite right.

Interesting insight into Lego’s prototyping stages including Lo Fidelity prototyping, High Fidelity prototyping and Beta Launches;

Lego’s Lo-Fi Prototyping

Lego’s Hi-Fidelity Prototyping

Lego’s Beta Launches

The conversation then turned to the question for businesses about “What is your digital strategy?” Often most business don’t have a solid digital strategy in place. Instead, the focus is on websites, mobile applications, social media. This is not a strategy, these are parts of the strategy. What do you really want to achieve for your customers and users? Understand this and you will see how all the different parts link up and can work seamlessly together. This will also allow you to focus clearly on what is required and not on areas that aren’t in line with your digital strategy.

In a digital world, there really is no excuse to not know what your customers are saying about you online. With so many monitoring tools available, businesses need to be getting engaged in the conversations that are happening. An interesting point made was that some businesses will need to fundamentally change how they do business and re-look at their business model. With the question being, how are you going to put the user at the center of everything you do? It is time to critically assess your business for a digital age.

One example given by Wayne was with a recent project to design new staff uniforms for all of Transport for London’s 22,000 staff. Part of this process was to engage with every single person to get feedback throughout the process, and most importantly to get buy in throughout the process at a time when there has been many issues with salaries and strikes.

This wasn’t a design by committee approach, but instead about giving the staff a voice on the new uniforms through the use of technology. Utilising a staff intranet, this led to over 16,000 people commenting on the work which is practically unheard of for large scale projects like this.

Following on from this a point was made about not trying to argue a point one way or another. Instead looking at a point and proving this point with data and evidence, both quantitative and qualitative. The amount of data available online means that you no longer have to rely on ‘gut feelings’ to make business decisions.

Daniel Charny

Daniel Charny

The next session was from Daniel Charny from From Now On who talked about the business of making. He has been seeing a renewed interest in making with lots of commercial value.

Stating that this is often more about knowledge sharing and sharing best practice between peers within group spaces designed to facilitate this sharing. One example Daniel talked about was with the Maker Library Network which is designed to link together the ideal of a library, gallery and a maker space all in the same venue;

Maker Library Network

This co-working space means that the skills and people are around to help with projects. An interesting idea talked about was the “Gift Economy” which isn’t about you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours, but instead is more of I’ll scratch your back and you scratch someone elses.

Phil Jones

Phil Jones

In the final talk of the day we heard from Phil Jones the Managing Director of Brother UK. Phil was talking mainly to the audience of creative businesses in the room for the last session which covered some interesting topics.

Stating that creative businesses need to be more sustainable. This often comes down to not revving harder, but instead changing gear in the business. Often businesses don’t simply need to be doing more of what they are doing, but change what they are doing and focusing on more profitable areas in the business.

Overall, a very energetic talk with some really exciting points made for all creative businesses and corporate businesses looking to work with creative industries. Often both groups speak different languages, so bridging the gap through effective communication is key.

Summary

Overall the day covered an awful lot of great and exciting content, so a huge thanks to Creative Lancashire for organising the event. I’m sure a lot of the information, topics and example above have got your brain working to see how this could be implemented within your own businesses.

If you would like to talk through more about the topics discussed above then get in touch to find out how digital can transform your business.

Future Cities Symposium Manchester School of Architecture

by Michael Cropper | Jun 22, 2014 | Data and Analytics, Events, Future | 0 comments

Last week we attended the Future Cities symposium at Manchester School of Architecture which was talking about how the future smart cities are going to look and what is being done about this right now. Fascinating event and great to see how local councils are already starting to think through how technology is going to transform the world we live in. Over the next 5-10 years, I predict that the world we live in will be unrecognisable. The amount of development into smart cities, superfast internet and the internet of things is going to significantly change how the general public interact with the physical world around them.

The speakers at the event ranged from architects, directors of technology strategy boards and futurists. Below we will talk through the key topics that were brought up throughout the day and what this means for businesses and councils in the future.

Rory Hyde

Rory Hyde

The first speaker of the day was Rory Hyde, the curator of Contemporary Architecture and Urbanism at the V&A in London along with the author of the book Future Practice.

Rory opened the talks by saying that architects suffer from a “crisis of relevance” which he said wasn’t just about creating buildings but instead about being relevant for the space where the building lives and for the users of the building. He talked about 4 retreats from solid relevance including;

1)      Avant-garde: Which is to try new and experimental ideas within architecture

2)      Commerce: Currently developers often set the agenda, not the architects which often leads to extravagant developments that you can see throughout Dubai

3)      Icons: Where architects often seek to chase new and exciting shapes of buildings to truly stand out from the crowd. Take for example the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, The Gherkin in London and Sydney Opera House

4)      Urban interventions: Looking at personal utopias with clearly fenced off areas from the outside world

Looking into the future, Rory talked through ideas around schools and the availability of rooms and facilities. Imagine an ‘Airbnb for schools’, whereby everyone could get automatically updated with what is happening, information sent directly to their smartphones. If you haven’t heard of Airbnb yet, then it is the hotel booking website that is seriously disrupting the travel industry. The online service allows people to rent out their homes or spare bedrooms through the service. Launching only 6 years ago in 2008, they already have over 550,000 listings in 192 countries and will soon have more availability than the Hilton Worldwide and InterContinental Hotels Group globally. Imagine a system that knew when meeting rooms in a city were free and available for people, that knew when the buses were due so you could be directed to the most relevant place for you.

Smart Schools

An interesting point Rory made was around the idea of community architecture such as wind turbines. Often these are installed by large corporations which provide no benefit to the local communities. Which is often one of the reasons why there is so much negativity towards new installations. Instead, imagine a situations whereby local communities directly benefitted from new installations which provided revenue to support local services. This would significantly change the perception of these technologies and would benefit local communities far more.

Following on from this, talk was around a future city that blended with nature. The example given was from Studio Gang’s Bubbly Creek which would allow nature and city to merge together into a natural symbiotic system;

Image source: http://www.wbez.org/blog/alison-cuddy/2012-03-21/can-cultural-resources-help-spur-different-future-chicago-river-97515

While this is an interesting concept, personally I’m not too sure this would work to the extent described in the plans. What is interesting though how future cities are significantly changing as traditional industries are often dwindling in size and scale. Less space is taken up as production increases which is leading to a hollowing out of the traditional urban core.

Tom Cheesewright

Tom Cheesewright

The next speaker of the day was Tom Cheesewright talking about how the future smart city will blend seamlessly with digital technologies. Tom is an Applied Futurist at Book of the Future.

Tom started his talk off by asking the question that if the current technology is affordable and accessible, along with data being cheap then why are smart cities and home automation such a challenge to crack? It comes down to user experience, he stated that “user experience is the last hurdle to for truly smarter cities”.

Smart cities today are essentially technology applied to the build environment to reduce the expenditure and increase efficiencies. This isn’t difficult, it just requires a significantly different approach to thinking about how the systems within the city are used and accessed by the users.

To prove the point, Tom has started to turn his house into a Smart Home with the use of cheap technologies such as the Arduino and Raspberry Pi. Basic implementation initially with automatically turning the lights on and off when entering or leaving a room. The point being that this technology is available now. The future smart city is possible now, when this technology is used throughout.

Arduino and Raspberry Pi

Taking this to a whole new level, the Santander Smart City in Spain. The project in Santander is a world first city-scale experimental research system for future smart cities. The project is designed to stimulate the development of future applications for users within the city. As part of the project, over 20,000 sensors were fitted across the city to monitor data across a wide range of points.

To give you an idea of the scale of this setup, here are a few statistics;

• Around 3000 IEEE 802.15.4 devices
• 200 GPRS modules
• 2000 joint RFID tag / QR code labels deployed on streetlights, bus-stops, busses and taxis
• Environmental monitoring with around 2000 Internet of Things devices installed to monitor temperature, noise, lighting and car presence
• Outdoor parking area management with almost 400 parking sensors used to identify empty and full car parking spaces throughout the city
• Sensors installed in over 150 public vehicles including busses, taxis and police cars
• Traffic intensity monitoring with around 60 devices located at the main entrances of the city which are designed to monitor traffic volumes, road occupancy, vehicle speed and queue length
• Guidance to free parking spaces which link up the live data from the 400 parking sensors with 10 street panels showing exactly which parking lots have spaces
• Parks and gardens irrigation with around 50 devices being deployed in city green zones to monitor moisture temperature, humidity, pluviometer (aka. a rain gauge) and anemometer (aka. a wind speed monitoring device)
• And much, much more, read the full details over on their website

Santander Spain Smart City

I’m sure you will agree that this is seriously cool. Exciting times ahead with future cities on the horizon. This isn’t a simple and quick fix for cities and towns to implement, although this is going to happen in the near future. The reason why this is the direction we are heading in comes down to resource planning, reducing costs and waste while improving efficiencies. Some of the statistics that Tom mentioned through his talk included how sensors placed in bins reduced the fuel bills for the council by 25% by simply only emptying the bins that needed emptying along with how the parking sensors and signs saved approximately 8 minutes for how long it took people to find a car parking space in the city.

Smart cities of the future will be context aware systems that optimise the build environment for its inhabitants. No longer will people have to go elsewhere to find out information about where they already are. This is interesting as we should start to be prepared for a post screen environment which allows people to interact with the city without being tied to a specific device with a screen.

Smart Cities Data and Processes

Whenever anyone talks about smart cities and home automation, we always have to mention Nest, Google’s recent acquisition. This is really important though as Nest claim that their US customers save on average 20% on their energy bills. This isn’t just about cool tech, well ok, it is partially, but it is also about how this new technology can have a significant improvement on current technologies to save money for people and businesses.

Nest Thermostat

The smart cities go beyond a reactive system. Imagine local councils knowing the actual noise and traffic levels produced from a factory near to a housing estate. Understanding this system allows the council to start to plan the towns and cities intelligently by using this environment and social feedback from the smart city technologies.

Tom went on to talk about the idea of connected councils where public services are reoriented around the citizen by connecting disparate data system to present a consistent and context aware experience for users. This is what Tom labels as “citizen centric design” which is all about the user opposed to a service centric design.

The main driving force for councils is to increase efficiencies, increase capabilities, increase satisfaction and increase engagement from the citizens. Smart cities work towards all of these goals. One example given, albeit a rather 1984 approach, was for adult care services. For example, if there are two call outs for environmental services at a property, there is a likelihood that adult care services should visit to see if there is any help needed.

Currently these conversations will be happening already in the council although more of a manual process whereby person A will walk over to person B in another department and mention it over making a coffee in the morning. The ability with smarter systems means that people don’t have to be used for the process, the system is used for the process. Meaning that people can be used for productive and value added work such as actually talking to the end users in this example.

Citizen centric design is designed to integrate data platforms and publish public APIs, allow for smarter strategic procurement which looks at the system as a whole, not just a specific job or department which will always lead to disparate systems being created. Using a hybrid agile development process for digital engagement skills and processes. Most importantly user testing, not simply pushing new technologies onto citizens

Current service centric design approach

Citizen centric design

Dan Hill

Dan Hill

Next up we heard from Dan Hill, the Executive Director of Futures and Best Practice at the Technology Strategy Boards Future Cities Catapult. Dan started his talk by stating that we need to understand that a city isn’t a static environment where changes can be made periodically, instead the city is a real time system that we need to tap into.

Dan gave the example of Masdar smart city in Dubai which is best explained through this concept video from a few years ago;

Really interesting how leading cities are grasping the idea of smart cities and capitalising on this opportunity. While this is still under development, this is certainly an interesting way smart cities are taking shape.

One interesting point that Dan expanded on was that we don’t make cities in order to build infrastructure. Often cities are designed with an infrastructure led approach. Instead, he argued, that we build cities for culture, commerce, community, conviviality and the city itself.

When designing on an infrastructure led approach, the design lifetime of an infrastructure is often planned out to be 100 years such as for a metro system, which in reality is often much less when change of government comes into play. With digital you are lucky if a website stands the test of time of 100 weeks before it is out of date. This means that digital systems have to be able to adapt at a much faster rate than ever before.

Dan went on to talk about the value and cost of inefficient systems that smart cities could improve upon. Quoting Cedric Price with “Technology is the answer, but what is the question?” The question was raised that if we have made it clear to citizens the value of a smart city to them. I would argue that we haven’t which is why privacy concerns are often at the forefront of people’s minds.

An interesting The Museum of the Future in the UAE showcases how cities will look in the future;

Museum of the Future

Really interesting concept looking at future cities and future technologies and how this will significantly change the world we live in and aid citizens with their daily life.

An interesting term was around “Urban Prototyping” which is all around creating products and services for the 21^st century city and urban space. Looking at what citizens need within a modern city and looking at creating products and services specifically for these people.

Another project talked about was Sensing London which follows a similar theme around creating a smarter data driven city. The project is designed with three points in mind;

• Collecting data for insight
• Mashing data for innovation
• Trailing innovations in real city environments

With something much closer to home, it will be interesting to watch how this project progresses over the next few years. Another piece of technology mentioned was DisplayAnts which is designed to create interactive public displays with public information available.

Dan then went on to talk about how software and hardware is blending with the use of smart software to unlock vacant resources in the city. With one recent example being the Uber taxi app that has been spreading around the world. Interestingly too is that this new technology isn’t always welcomed with open arms with Uber getting a lot of criticism in both London and Spain from angry taxi drivers, bringing the locations to a standstill. If you aren’t familiar with Uber, it is the taxi booking app that connects you as a customer with a taxi with the click of a button and is really disrupting the traditional idea of booking a taxi. This type of disruptive technology is going to continue to increase over the coming years in a range of industries.

Another interesting piece of information was about research from MIT which stated that we could have 80% fewer vehicles on our roads if we were using smart cars. This is an enormous saving and one that I’m sure any commuter would appreciate. Then going beyond smart cities, Bridj was mentioned which is not just looking at real time data, but predictive data based on historic information and demands. Essentially allowing more resources to be deployed in an area that is likely to need more resources soon.

Beyond this, we have the likes of KickStarter for more product based ideas. Well we also have BrickStarter which takes the same concept but looks at projects for cities and the urban environment. Interesting idea for allowing citizens to essentially pitch ideas in their local communities.

All this being said, we still have a long way to come, with planning notices still being tied to lampposts. This is still seen as the best way to engage with the public about work that is happening in an area. Quite frankly, this is a joke. 99% of people simply walk past this and take no notice at all. This is not a good way to be engaging with citizens within a local area.

Planning Notice on Lamppost

Final Thoughts

The smart city is coming. This also requires a new approach within governments and local councils to fully understand how this change is going to impact the world we live in. Education is also going to be key to ensure the citizens fully understand what the smart city is, why it is so valuable and most importantly teaching people about a new way of interacting with official bodies.

One final thought to leave you with, imagine in the near future with a publically accessible CityAPI, maybe powered by things such as Fi-Ware. Whereby you can easily plug your business into this system to send and receive data that is essential for you and your customers. We already have cool WiFi Marketing & Analytics technology available for businesses, so this is an even more exciting time ahead in a digitally enabled world.