Back then any joke, pious advert or £million competition that related to the environment was newsworthy.  Why?  Because the planet was – and still is – on fire and COP 26 was the UK’s time to shine on all things ecological.   

Here we are several Prime Ministers later and there are many more businesses, particularly small independent ones, working hard to find out what ESG means and what they can do to reduce their carbon footprint.

This article was written back in October 2021

As Kermit says, isn’t it all a bit difficult, being green?   

Maybe I’m being greedy, but I think we should be looking at ESG as something that has to make sense economically as well as environmentally. 

We have always talked about economy and ecology as two opposing entities. 

Like the two can’t exist working in combination.   

But that line of thinking is becoming obsolete.   

“As a brand we don’t struggle with recruitment, which in our sector, means we’re doing something right.  One aspect that we know employees see as important, is the work we do to reduce our carbon footprint. This has been making progress step by step, not all at once, because the whole management team has to buy into the plan.  And ultimately, suggestions must make sense for our long-term economic sustainability.  Or the money doesn’t get released.”  

FD, North West UK hospitality chain 

At Groundswell Innovation we feel very strongly that economy and sustainability have to co-exist and work together.  We know full well that if we want organisations to embrace sustainability as a core working principle, we must also demonstrate where the money is.  Otherwise all green plans will be quietly side-lined once the noise of COP 26 dies down.   

But here’s the newsflash. 

Consumption is not going anywhere.

It is changing in nature, but it is not going away.  If you don’t want your employer brand and your company’s products to be as out of date as last year’s spam, you had better get with the programme.   

Listening in to people who are actively engaged in UN sustainable development projects and enterprise around the world, we keep up to date with insight into all aspects of the climate change debate. 

It helps us to see where commercial opportunities are opening up.

We hear what industry leaders think and what expectations consumers have for brands in terms of transparency, deliberate action and sustainable change.   

And to be honest, what they are asking for is not out of line, or rocket science.   

Recent discussions have brought us out at a few simple guidelines for green-ness:  

• Right now, brands [backed up by independent scientists] are more trusted than government or the media.  Let’s keep it that way by avoiding greenwashing.   
• Transparency and positive forward motion are more important than solving everything overnight.  Focus on doing one thing well, then move on to the next.  You’ll take customers and employees with you.   
• ESG is not to an add-on.  It’s a fundamental way of doing things.  Treat it like Wifi not the Christmas party.   
• ESG isn’t just climate change.  Take a look at the UN’s 17 goals to hit by 2030.  Good quality jobs, shared prosperity.  Quality education.  Resilient communities.  Surely there’s something in there that aligns with your company values?   
• Vegan burgers might not always sell like hot cakes, but they send a strong message you’ve noticed the world is changing.  I’m not sure what the ‘vegan burger’ equivalent is for your industry, but think it out.  Send a clear signal that you’re doing something concrete.   
• Scrooge just became your best friend.  Cutting out waste and reducing energy usage is a great way to be green.  AND it delivers immediate economic benefits.   

Creativity can run low when you’re staring at a blank page, trying to think how best to turn sustainability into a revenue opportunity. Luckily for you, we’re really good at helping you with that.

Move over Kermit.  It’s our turn to be green.   

The post Should we be more Kermit? appeared first on Groundswell Innovation.

But as we’re here on Lancashire Day itself, let’s use our brand new devolution deal as a springboard for confirming the county’s identity and communicating it out in an uncharacteristically loud voice.      

In Lancashire, we make things.  

You might have heard of the industrial revolution?

We’ve been making all kinds of textiles for hundreds of years, furniture, lino even.  During the war, manufacture of nuclear fuel was relocated here.  Since then, we’ve generated power and made planes, engines, batteries, a whole heap of low carbon tech and a gazillion different components necessary for these resilient, responsive supply chains to flourish.  All of this has helped to make us the fourth biggest aerospace hub in the world.  

But why is manufacturing such a fundamental part of Lancashire’s DNA?

Because we had power generated from running water, we had coal, we had the right kind of weather.  

No really.  The dampening air is perfect for carding wool and the water is soft, so it’s great for processing cotton fibres.

And if you’re looking for a place to hide a World War II squadron or two, look no further than Lancashire’s pretty regular cloud cover.  Thanks go to Miranda Barker for the reminder of this fact at the recent East Lancs Chamber Supply Chain Conference. 

As strategy gurus would say, we have a ‘harmonized combination of resources and skills that distinguish us from other places’.  

These act as the foundation of Lancashire’s competitiveness.  

I’m paraphrasing, but the point is valid.  

Let’s own the truths of Lancashire that some may advise us to gloss over.  Because like the clouds and rain (which gives us lush landscape as well as a hiding place for air defences) there are opportunities presented by who we really are and what we have here.  

Low carbon tech manufacture is in part centred in our county, because of pollution caused by coal-fuelled factories.      

Lancashire’s recent Independent Economic Review highlighted the fact that 50% of Lancashire’s population live within a 5-mile radius of the M65.  It also highlighted the health inequalities.  As a test bed for Medtech, that makes Lancashire a perfect place to monitor health and evaluate the impact of emerging innovation.  Not only that, but we have the capacity and the capability to feed ourselves back to health, from our own natural resources.  No wonder so many site-specific health projects are happening here.    

And let’s be proud of what we are not.

We aren’t another Manchester and never should be.    

Or another Liverpool, despite our shared shameful slave trade similarities.  

We are a network of beautifully distinct former mill towns.  Burnley and Blackburn football fans can tell you how tribal that makes us.  If any one place gets too big for its boots, the others all volunteer to bring it back down to earth in a hurry.  

This has created the perfect conditions for a thriving hub and spoke network of distinct places, each with their own character, specialisms and context.  With stunning countryside accessible from each one, you’re never far from a reminder of why people love to live here.  

Over the past couple of years we’ve had amazing announcements and new assets added to Lancashire.  AMRC North West.  RedCAT Centre for Alternative Technologies.  Plans for Eden Project North and National Cyber Force.  All of these represent huge investments that link us into chains of industry that span the world.  

Our task as proud Lancastrians on this and every other #LancashireDay then, is to capture the value and amplify the ripple effects of all this richness, in a way that is wholeheartedly Lancastrian – with humour, hard work and hopefully not too much humility.  

The post The competitive advantage of counties – a Lancashire story appeared first on Groundswell Innovation.

Congratulations again, to Claire Buckle and Ability Consultancy – last year’s winner of the award, and to the 2023 shortlisted candidates such as EY’s Neurodiverse Centre of Excellence, Lisa Edge‘s GB Shared Ltd, Fund Her North (we were at their 3rd birthday party recently – see the photo above!), Financielle, YZen.ai, OnSide Youth Zones, the Multicultural Network United Utilities, BioGrad, and ORCHA. Quite an illustrious list, though I’m confident we will see submissions that are just as strong this year.

As a category, inclusive innovation tends to get caught up in a bunfight over definitions.  Though really, this is just a ‘buy one, get one free’ deal.

What’s the difference between mainstream innovation and the inclusive kind?

In a word, funding.

Brand-new-to-world research draws strong interest, as it should, from private and public funders. The inclusive variety, which often seeks to work with existing ideas but adapt them to the needs of underserved groups, not so much.

If there is a ‘hotspot’ and a ‘notspot’ in the world of innovation, then companies and projects focused on social impact as well as profit are definitely in the latter category.

This is the current reality of UK investment into inclusive innovation, as outlined within Connected Places Catapult research that Groundswell Innovation completed earlier this year.

The funding disconnect means that tragically, many outstanding projects that have strong economic potential do not gain the profile or the investment that would enable them to maximise long-term social value creation.

It’s time that more people woke up to the fact that:
Inclusive Innovation = Financial Returns + Benefits For Society

It’s your standard BOGOF deal.

So the more that campaigns like the Northern Power Women Awards highlight commercially strong initiatives that are ALSO solving a problem in society, the better off we will all be.

The post Being a judge at the Northern Power Women Awards appeared first on Groundswell Innovation.

Making this commitment has been on my list for a few years – since we began working on place-based innovation projects – to make sure our practice is informed by and connected into other initiatives across the country. 

Be more yes.  Be open, optimistic, rigorous, courageous and enabling. 

A succinct way to describe what the organisation and its work are all about.  With a 260-year history of working for the greater good, you might expect to find a culture that was slightly fustier than that, at the heart of the RSA.

Working from the North, we are often told that our project ideas and our business projections lack ambition.  The sums of money we are asking for are not big enough. 

It always makes me feel a little Oliver-esque. 

We absolutely should be asking for more, and bigger and better, for our communities.  But we are perhaps a little too well practiced at making do with less, so that the funds we have stretch as far as they can.  And perhaps the nature of our ambition is different.  I’d rather see companies and organisations scaling deep within Lancashire – building ecosystems that function well and make our county strong – than see them scale up, up and away to other places with more resources.    

One thing that I am really looking forward to as an active part of the RSA, is working with the backing of a really strong network of people who espouse similar values.  With the moral and practical support of national bodies, home-grown levelling-up can be bolder in scope and bigger in impact.     

Take for example, our ongoing collaboration with Lancaster University, Lancaster City Council, Lancashire County Council and Connected Places Catapult to encourage and enable active and sustainable travel between Morecambe and Lancaster.

Gathering partners as we move forward, and building on the human-centred-design work within i-Connect, we have the opportunity to re-green an urban area in a way that will encourage active travel, improve natural habitats and community wellbeing. 

Watch this space for further updates and if you’re part of Lancashire or the RSA yourself, come and help us build something fantastic. 

Jane Dalton, Founding Director of Groundswell Innovation

The post Celebrating our Founding Director becoming a Fellow of the RSA appeared first on Groundswell Innovation.

The World Economic Forum in their Future of Jobs report for 2023 have a more positive view on AI than they did when we last delved into their research in 2016. Most new technologies are expected to be job creators in the next five years, rather than removing jobs. But we still know that repetitious tasks will go to robots – albeit at a slower rate than first feared.  Tasks that call for empathy, interpersonal skills and creativity will go to humans.  Because people, let’s face it, like dealing with people. And critically, the WEF says that:

“Analytical thinking and creative thinking remain the most important skills for workers in 2023.”

Artisan brands, drawing on ever more creative design, language, and marketing techniques, are impacting all kinds of sectors that have until now, been dominated by big players. 

Industry 4.0 gets us up to speed.  It doesn’t give us the edge.

Digital skill sets, urgently needed in greater supply to bring down the cost of Industry 4.0, have every bit as much to do with creative problem-solving and design as they do with scientific and technological knowledge.  It doesn’t matter how good we get at Industry 4.0 in this country if that is all we have to make us distinctive in a global marketplace.  The same technology is available the world over, to every manufacturing cell from Stuttgart to San Diego.  We can’t be first to market, because other countries are already there with vast economies of scale.  So we need to be better, or different. 

I’m biased.  I’m an arts graduate. 

In a time before tuition fees I was lucky enough to study History of Art, Italian and French so names like Leonardo Da Vinci became pretty familiar.  I didn’t ever need to question what the arts have to do with making things.  Maybe that is what made it so easy to understand the manufacturing environment at Cumbria Crystal.  Without creativity, we churn out obvious answers.  Without design thinking, we create products that reference competitor products more than they do the needs of customers. 

And yet Arts degrees are being squeezed out of many UK universities, because they don’t instantly translate into a specific job, in the way that business studies supposedly should.  If education is going to be all about immediate economic return, let’s convert ourselves into a robot race right now.  Conveyer belt through a work-focused degree, drudge through a career, retire.  Learning as a source of fulfillment, happiness and an end in itself will be effectively eradicated.  As Lord Bragg once put it: “Britain is one of the leading places for study of the arts…it’s not because of some artistic genius that sprouts out of the ground like dragon’s teeth.”

UK Manufacturing’s competitive edge won’t spring forth like dragon’s teeth either.  We need to find and nurture our inherent points of difference.  Why can’t we yet again, be a STEAM-powered nation? 

What can individual manufacturing firms do?

Make use of talent from non-standard backgrounds.  Employ people for their attitude to hard work and their skill sets, not just their experience levels in your sector.

Encourage a wide range of problem-solving techniques within your teams.  This starts with regular conversations between people from different departments, so they can cut across silo working. 

Don’t just focus on cost.  Focus on value.  The value that your products and services can add for clients and end-users.  Not all of that will be derived from technical or scientific excellence. 

To find out more about how we can help you with your innovation challenges, in Lancaster, Lancashire, the North West, and beyond, get in touch.

The post STEAM not STEM. Or we kill UK Manufacturing’s competitive edge. appeared first on Groundswell Innovation.

Growing your company shouldn’t be about taking on risk. 

Far better to gamble on a sure thing than take a punt.  That’s why I’m a fan of innovation.  According to NESTA, innovation is proven to be the best way to bring about step-change growth.  With it we expand outside of our current bounds.  Without it, we become yesterday’s news, very slowly. 

But like many things in life, risk is subjective.  NESTA’s strong evidence base and clear factual demonstration of the upsides of innovation don’t take in to account our emotional responses to the idea of doing something new. 

The fear of ‘losing’ money looms larger than the fear of ‘missing out on more money’. 

Why is it that entrepreneurs are happy to take the leap of faith required to set up in business, yet as established company owners, they can often become risk averse?

Undoubtedly when we’re working in uncertain times, the fear of possible downsides loom larger.  Just like the monster under the bed that appears when the sun goes down. 

The fear of losing something you already have is more compelling than the fear of not ‘gaining’ something new.  If you have money in your hand, you would rather keep it there than use it to create future gains.  So it’s no wonder we don’t want to risk the family silver, dabbling in new ventures that may not pay dividends. 

Why is it we don’t perceive the risk of keeping things as they are?

The trouble is that leaves you with the definite loss of future gains from innovation, that are not being factored in to the equation.  The opportunity cost of not innovating today, is ‘definite’ loss of future revenue and ‘probable’ loss of existing customers to more dynamic competitors.  By standing still, we have to accept that we are moving backwards, waiting for other companies and even industries, to challenge us head on.

Resulting cost / benefit x Probability of something happening = Expectation value (Risk Factor)

Risk management isn’t about eliminating all risk, it isn’t possible.  It’s about managing and minimising risk.  Surely the same should apply to the management of innovation. 

If you approach it right, constantly evolving your company and its product range can open up new market opportunities, increase the lifetime value of customers and give you a robust defence against competitor threats. 

Take the story of the Oxo cube.  If you were in the bottled gravy browning business, things bubbling along nicely, it might seem risky to try out a brand-new product format. From where we stand now, the far bigger risk would have been to ‘not’ innovate. 

The return on investment from creating those first tiny Oxo cubes is almost immeasurable.  But it would have been all too easy, to leave the idea on the table. 

To find out more about how we can help you with your innovation challenges, in Lancaster, Lancashire, the North West and beyond, get in touch.

The post Are you leaving the Oxo Cubes on the table? appeared first on Groundswell Innovation.

What better celebration of innovation than a space designed to showcase and build creativity.  

Leeds-based Ferg’s Imaginary Big Band headlined on Saturday night.  An amazing event to be part of.  And I mean part of, because the entire audience was along for the wild ride as the ‘listening’ section of the band.  I say this having gorged on Edinburgh Festival this summer – these guys should have been headlining there too. 

We picked a very good year to be kicking off our annual sponsorship of a Jazz Festival – the same weekend a jazz band wins the Mercury Music Prize.  Ezra Collective are the first jazz act ever to receive the award. 

But wasn’t it great to see a proportion of the praise going to Tomorrow’s Warriors as well as the Ezra Collective?  This is the organisation, founded in 1991, that works to encourage the UK’s next generation of jazz musicians through initiatives such as the Young Artist Development Programme. 

TW might need to revise their yearly impact report, once they figure out how to quantify the generational ripple effects of such a major validation. 

Lancashire doesn’t have a branch of Tomorrow’s Warriors, but it does have Lancaster Jazz Festival, which has its own particular talent for enabling connection, inspiration and collaboration among up and coming musical talent working across the North.  

To give you an example, this year’s festival artist in residence has been mentoring musical duo 40,40A over the past few months.  Performing ‘officially’ as part of the festival for the first time this year, 40,40A’s talented performers are about to study Music in Leeds, where they will be listening and gigging in the same places as more established collaborations like Ferg’s Imaginary Big Band. 

The dividing line between education and industry is extremely permeable within Lancaster Jazz Festival’s community.  One of Ferg’s bravura collective hails from Lancaster and another very junior audience member joined the band as an impromptu addition on the night.  Interaction between professional musicians and the next generation of talent is continuous.  I’m not sure I’ve seen this level of passionate and highly connected talent cultivation in any other industry.  Feel free to correct me if I’m wrong.

The physical performance of Lancaster Jazz Festival is packed away for another year, but the buzz and the fostering of new musical endeavour carries on. 

#talentpipeline

#ecosystem

#creativity

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We do know that many companies consistently get it right.  Take Unilever for example.  They not only innovate new products, but they have innovation ingrained in their systems and processes.  This leads to some pretty impressive results.  In just one example, innovation around product prototyping techniques resulted in year 1 sales for a new cleaning product being 60% higher than first estimated.  This shows that profitable innovation is just as likely to come from ‘how’ you do business as ‘what you sell’.  The best innovation often comes from a different way of looking at what you’ve always done.  And you don’t have to be the size of Unilever to do that. 

Check 1. You and your team have a long list of ideas for fabulous new products and services, but agreeing which ones to take to market is a risky business, so they haven’t quite got off the ground yet. Did you quantify how much value is still sitting on that flip chart? 

Check 2.  You’ve got great product development processes that are regularly updated to take into account supply chain and customer feedback – you just wish they weren’t so cumbersome.  What if the competition managed to cut their time to market? 

Check 3. You operate in a tightly regulated industry, such as financial services, and it can be difficult to differentiate your offerings from the competition.  Such situations often go only one-way, a price war – is that a space that you want to be in?  Spoiler alert – your brand heritage is a great way to avoid that particular doom spiral. 

Check 4.  You are lucky to have a base of very loyal customers that like your traditional products, but your business needs to grow, and things may have to change.  Have you worked out how to keep everyone happy yet – especially the bottom line?

Check 5.  You’ve successfully launched your brilliant new product, your customers love it.  Have you spent time on any poor performing products lately to see how they could be turned around? 

When we have worked with clients in the past, they have generally recognised themselves in at least one of the above scenarios.  At Groundswell Innovation, we have decades of experience of seeking out the less-obvious, and we know the best hiding spots to find the secrets of your continued success. 

You may not be surprised to hear that we work a little differently to many other consultancies.  We like to deliver value from the word go.  So instead of generating lengthy proposals for you to wade through, we’ll go right ahead with a workshop with key members of the team to identify the opportunities and co-create the best solution. One of the things our customers value about us most is our pragmatic approach;  and delivering co-designed solutions that actually work for their business – right now.  

If you would like see if a co-creation workshop could help you do things differently, innovate and grow your business, please talk to us. We work with businesses in Lancaster, Lancashire, the North West and beyond.

The post 5 quick checks to optimise innovation appeared first on Groundswell Innovation.

Lots of companies ‘talk’ about being innovative, but…

Without a leadership open to innovation, there is no innovation.

This is a yes/no gate.

“Building an innovative culture is a long-term play, not one that is focused on short-term returns.”

The person who started the company gave themselves permission to take a leap of faith. Once that new enterprise has been established, the owner will probably continue to try out new ideas. It doesn’t necessarily follow that this permission is devolved or PERCEIVED as having been devolved to management teams working for business owners.

Leaders need the right mindset for innovation. Having an innovation mindset means:

1. Recognising that space to experiment can look and feel like ‘waste’.
2. Devolve permission to fail (within a limited time / resource budget) – otherwise no-one will rock the boat.
3. Do something with the ideas that get put forward – without defaulting to a yes / no decision.
4. If YOU don’t make time to innovate, then you won’t be giving your teams time to innovate either.

Even ‘with’ leadership, management teams skills centre on ‘business as usual’

You hire people for a specific role because of their experience in your sector, or in that particular skill set. They then push forward at full speed, getting the job done.

What room does this leave for new ideas or exploration of alternatives?

“If you maintain a helicopter view – look at broader trends, go and steal ideas from other industries.”

Let’s explore the concept of being a customer-centric company. In a B2B environment this can create a great deal of customer-reactive innovation – jump, how high? Next brief… etc. “Of course we understand our customers. We talk to them all the time” Here, we’re in danger of falling in to the Henry Ford mentality – “If I’d asked people what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse” Don’t deliver the perfect fax machine, create email.

“Let people in the B2B business get exposure to the customer and the customer’s customer so they understand ‘all’ of the downstream needs and their relevance to our product design.”

The power stays with the company that has closer links to the end users of your product.

A ‘customer reactive’ supply chain enables an environment where huge companies can remain agile – because they outsource innovation to much smaller companies. Contrast this with a company anticipating the ‘outcomes’ that customers and ‘their’ customers need. You become part of a much bigger conversation and gain a weightier voice when it comes to supply chain negotiation.

If we are standing still in the current business climate, that is equivalent to going backwards at full speed because everything else is changing all around us.

We don’t need to react. We have that choice. But then surely we are developing ‘deathstyle’ businesses, not lifestyle ones. Lifespan businesses, set to operate over a finite time period with no plan to sell them on as a going concern.

The problem underlying this compulsion to ‘change nothing’ is the fact that the perceived risk of doing something looms larger in our minds than the actual risk of standing still in a flowing current.

Innovation happens ‘somewhere over there in R&D’ and only in the form of big tech projects that don’t concern the rest of us who are concerned with servicing current orders.

Maybe the time has come to re-frame the language we use around ‘innovation’.

What if we started talking instead, about keeping everything the same – same budget, same workforce, same capabilities and assets.

But reducing our cost by 10%. Or increasing operating profit by that amount.

Would innovation start to seem more appealing?

This is where we can ‘make things differently’ rather than just ‘making new things’. The HOW of innovation, not the WHAT – altering for the better, the everyday ways of doing business that we take for granted.

Smaller companies with a fixed business model find it more difficult to justify the distraction from ‘business as usual’ when it comes to developing new ideas.

It is clear that relatively young companies or those with low-level investment in capital plant, can change their business model and their company culture relatively easily, to embrace innovation and idea generation in all its forms.

“Innovation doesn’t have to be one big idea. It can be 100 small ideas that all bring positive results”

Conversely, innovation becomes difficult to embed or optimise in established companies where the culture is set and the pre-conditions for creative thinking are not in evidence.

As an established company with a strong order book, it can be difficult to justify rocking the boat by trying out new ideas. What is the incentive? Failure, wasted effort? And besides, there is enough to keep everyone busy just filling current orders.

In these circumstances, no amount of new idea generation will create an innovation culture. Indeed, such activity is likely to be short-lived and become a demotivating activity for staff if ideas are not valued or progressed.

But the SMEs who do build in innovation can start to move faster than big companies.

As a small company there is far less to get in the way of quickly evaluating and exploiting ideas. We can be far more ‘agile’ than larger companies.

So is now a good time to evaluate how your leadership style cultivates innovation in your business?

Interested? Contact Jane to see how innovation can make your business more agile – to put more money in the bank. We work with businesses in Lancashire, the North West, and across the UK.

The post Identifying the barriers to innovation appeared first on Groundswell Innovation.

Of all the topics that could have dominated our discussion, I wasn’t expecting bus journeys.   

A couple of weeks ago I ran a workshop about creativity in business, with a room full of Masters students.   

12 nationalities represented, many different sets of life experience. But when I asked them to work in groups on an issue they would like to change, 4 out of 6 groups chose bus journeys. Why?

Because they’re a major pain.   

Grumpy bus drivers who don’t seem to like students, expensive tickets, Wi-Fi that is promised but rarely works, no room to put your shopping bags, not even any way of queuing at the bus stop to make sure you have chance of getting a space when the bus eventually arrives. It’s an old, old set of annoyances.   

What an introduction to life in the UK. What a great impression to leave people with.   

I’m surprised we don’t see more bus stop punch-ups to be honest. When you think about it, they’re a big intersection point for lots of different stresses and strains. To break it down a bit –  

Grumpy bus drivers – are they on strike, or just feeling like they should be?

Here they are, being paid less than the cost of living, having to deal with jumped-up students who get nice new accommodation built for them right through the city while other people around here can’t find anywhere to live at a price they can afford.   

Expensive tickets – don’t people realise how much it costs to run a bus service?

We’ve got drivers asking for money, ever-higher energy costs, a fleet that constantly needs repairing, and a load of unprofitable routes to run.  But according to the media, we’re almost as money-grabbing as the train companies. Why are students complaining anyway? We run free bus services to Sainsbury’s every Wednesday afternoon. What more do they want? 

Sainsbury’s? 
What happened to supporting local trade?

How are we supposed to keep independent retail alive on our high streets if you’re ferrying people for free, right up to the door of a major supermarket? Students live out of town, get ferried in for food, then head straight back out again.  Not so much as a cuppa bought from the high street.   

– Just a short summary of the points raised by students with a bit of context thrown in, courtesy of other stakeholder conversations we’ve been hosting about place-based innovation.   

Even in this paraphrased form, it’s pretty clear to see that the current system isn’t working well for anyone.   

Walking through the stage set of a bus stop in this way helped students to see things from all sides. An ecosystem becomes visible. They could see their place within it. They could also appreciate their role and agency in making it work better. Suggestions started to flow, like a multi-trip (rather than weekly) bus pass, bought in advance to make the driver’s job easier. Tie that prepaid card in with discounts at local stores and hey presto, you have a happy Business Improvement District.   

I asked the question at the start of the session – who here is confidently creative?

One and a tentative half hands went up.    

An hour into the workshop, students had some structure to their thinking and a well-defined challenge to work through. Less than an hour after that, students presented back a range of logical, practical, and often downright radical plans for action. 

Their own combined creativity had opened up a flurry of ideas, arriving all at once. Just like those buses.  

The post Bus stop bust up appeared first on Groundswell Innovation.

Right?  About what?  Amid a wave of online customer surveys, what are we actually finding out?

Henry Ford reportedly said “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse”.  I think he was right.  Ask customers direct questions about the future and people will give you their best guess, which usually bears no relation to what they will actually do when deciding what to buy.

So where does customer research work well?

If price promotions are your default option for bolstering sales, then chances are, a bit of conversation wouldn’t hurt.  Everyone likes a bargain, but there are always other factors involved. Customer grumbles are a great place to start.  Dig a bit deeper and you start to reveal the ideas competitors have overlooked: 

“I want to feel safer… I don’t want to compromise on… I’m not bothered about that, but I really do need something easier to use here..’  All of a sudden you know exactly how to build things people didn’t even know they needed.  

There are definitely some questions that should never be put forward in the first place – should it be pink, should it be £3.50? Don’t even go there.  If you want to get a thumbs up from customers, ask them what ‘outcomes’ they are looking for.  Not what features they like.  There are ways of asking questions so you get in-depth understanding, not hearsay.   

If you can get to know a customer’s world like you would a foreign country, you’re likely to find something really interesting. Here’s an example. 

How do you sell credit cards in a country where they are advertised by law, with a ‘ball and chain’ government health warning? 

First and foremost, you do it by understanding customers.  Culturally first.  Then in terms of the attitudes and behaviours that are socially accepted in that context. 

Did you know the Dutch use the same words to talk about excess spending as they use to talk about flooding?  In their eyes, credit cards pose a constant threat of ‘inundation’.  For a country in constant peril of merging with the sea, that is a pretty fundamental threat. 

Yet they regulate other things with strong social downsides in a very different way.  Their policy is to ‘let a little water in, to stop the flood’.  Allow a certain level of activity under a watchful eye, to stop the whole thing going underground.  So why not apply this to credit cards? 

We did just that.  Strong rational reasons for credit card use get overlooked in credit-hungry countries like America and the UK.  But in the Netherlands, they suddenly became relevant.  By reminding people that credit cards have in-built customer protection, we shifted their thinking and their behaviour.  Buying on plastic became justifiable for investment items, like washing machines or good quality furniture. 

Easy, when you understand the context.

A set of simple messages and a few poster campaigns later, we had a strategy that opened up sales channels with three high-street bank chains.  Not bad, for a market that had been written off as a dead duck. 

Maybe listening to customers does have some value after all. 

The post Customers are always what? appeared first on Groundswell Innovation.

How much evidence do we need that British manufacturing needs to keep incorporating creative talent as well as scientific and technical skills to stay competitive?  It’s time to add Art to the list of must-have talents for UK plc. 

The World Economic Forum have told us exactly which jobs are going to go, once Artificial Intelligence (AI) takes hold in the workforce.  Repetitious tasks will go to robots.  Ones that call for empathy, interpersonal skills and creativity will go to humans.  Because people, let’s face it, like dealing with people. 

Artisan brands, drawing on ever more creative design, language and marketing techniques, are impacting all kinds of sectors that have until now, been dominated by big players.  That’s why brands like Heineken are being forced to reassess how they build traction with consumers in light of the never-ending creative explosion of craft beer. 

Industry 4.0 gets us up to speed.  It doesn’t give us the edge.

Digital skill sets, urgently needed in greater supply to bring down the cost of Industry 4.0, have every bit as much to do with creative problem solving and design as they do with scientific and technological knowledge.  It doesn’t matter how good we get at Industry 4.0 in this country if that is all we have to make us distinctive in a global marketplace.  The same technology is available the world over, to every manufacturing cell from Stuttgart to San Diego.  We can’t be first to market, because other countries are already there with vast economies of scale.  So we need to be better, or different. 

The second annual Festival of Marketing conference in Blackburn made a strong case for a much more active collaboration between the two fields. 

I’m biased.  I’m an arts graduate. 

In a time before tuition fees I was lucky enough to study History of Art, Italian and French so names like Leonardo Da Vinci became pretty familiar.  I didn’t ever need to question what the arts have to do with making things.  Maybe that is what made it so easy to understand the manufacturing environment at Cumbria Crystal.  Without creativity, we churn out obvious answers.  Without design thinking, we create products that reference competitor products more than they do the needs of customers. 

And yet Arts degrees are being squeezed out of many UK universities, because they don’t instantly translate in to a specific job, in the way that business studies supposedly should.  If education is going to be all about immediate economic return, let’s convert ourselves in to a robot race right now.  Conveyer belt through a work-focused degree, drudge through a career, retire.  Learning as a source of fulfilment, happiness and an end in itself will be effectively eradicated.  As Lord Bragg put it in a recent Sunday Times article: “Britain is one of the leading places for study of the arts…it’s not because of some artistic genius that sprouts out of the ground like dragon’s teeth.”

UK Manufacturing’s competitive edge won’t spring forth like dragon’s teeth either.  We need to find and nurture our inherent points of difference.  Why can’t we yet again, be a STEAM-powered nation? 

What can individual manufacturing firms do?

Make use of talent from non-standard backgrounds.  Employ people for their attitude to hard work and their skill sets, not just their experience levels in your sector.

Encourage a wide range of problem-solving techniques within your teams.  This starts with regular conversations between people from different departments, so they can cut across silo working. 

Don’t just focus on cost.  Focus on value.  The value that your products and services can add for clients and end-users.  Not all of that will be derived from technical or scientific excellence. 

Join in the debate on Thursday 7th June and beyond with IOD North West

The post STEAM not STEM. Or we kill UK Manufacturing’s competitive edge. appeared first on Groundswell Innovation.

Under no circumstances should you change.  Radical advice.  

A brand with history is a brand with a customer base, who understand and like what you are about. The last thing you want to do is alienate them.  

But we might not just want ‘them’, we might want to attract a broader range of different customers so that our brand grows over time.  

Trying to stay true to your roots whilst still remaining relevant in a world that is constantly moving on is a real challenge.  It’s easy to stick your head in the sand and go with ‘what you look like now’ because, after all, that has always worked in the past.  It would be just as easy, though obviously far more risky, to jump on the latest trend or design fashion and re-invent your brand at a superficial level.  Just like the pub chains do when they adopt the latest ambiance.  Basically, ‘do nothing’ or ‘panic and do something’ are both well-practised strategies.  Even though you won’t find them in many text books.  

But the approach that gives a much more solid brand strategy is to stick to what you’ve always done really well.  The values, principles and stories that make up the cornerstones of your brand’s heritage shouldn’t waver.  The new bit comes from understanding how best to re-express these values in a contemporary landscape.  We find the best place to look for this is a deep understanding of customers, current and projected in to the next 5-10 years.  Because from here, we get a way of communicating what we are about, using language that is taken from them.    

Think for example, about the problems you are good at solving for customers.  Do all of these needs still exist?  Have any new ones emerged?  Is the usage occasion you built your products around still the same, or has it altered over time?  If you look in to how these elements might have shifted; and view your brand through the eyes of any new customers you would like to attract, you can start to see how to re-express what you stand for in line with the shifting sands of consumer need.  

Worth remembering:

• First understand what values, principles and stories best explain your brand. Describe it as you would a friend – what anecdotes do you pick that best demonstrate it’s personality?
• Understand what problems you can solve for existing and new customers – what kinds of products or services will people buy from your brand?
• Above all, stay true to what you stand for. Just make it relevant for today.  

The post How to project past glory as well as future ambition in the same brand. appeared first on Groundswell Innovation.

It’s a simple, if slightly odd sounding concept but if you grew up with any kind of dressing up kit at your disposal, you’ll understand the power of a piece of clothing to spark imagination.

If you are lucky enough to have grown up watching Mr Benn – we’re talking anywhere from the 1970s to the 2000s – you might remember seeing the bowler hatted businessman escape the boredom of everyday life by spending his day as a clown, a knight, a spaceman or a roman gladiator. Look it up on YouTube if you’re bored of cat videos. It’s clear where Jeff Bezos got his inspiration.

Who knows if Dr Edward de Bono, lateral thinker extraordinaire who died in June of this year, was influenced in the writing of his Six Thinking Hats technique by Mr Benn? I like to think so.

De Bono’s legacy to teachers, students and business leaders was the idea that creativity could be applied in life by anyone and everyone.

He firmly believed that lateral thinking – a manner of solving problems using creative approaches that are not immediately obvious – can be taught.

To prove it, he applied just as much rigour to structuring creative thinking as you might to a spreadsheet or a Total Quality Management process.

During his writing career, de Bono gave us books and books of tools and techniques for children and adults to try out. In so doing, he demystified the creative problem-solving process and gave us winning strategy-setting tools like the Six Thinking Hats.

De Bono’s 6 hats exercise is a very practical method of asking people to look at an issue from multiple perspectives. It’s a great way of seeing past your own viewpoint to take in crucial details you might have overlooked.

The Six Thinking Hats

The blue hat is for big picture thinking. For the visionary in you.
White is for facts and information – what is our evidence base, what do we know to be true?
Red is for feelings and emotions. With this hat on, you can share your gut reactions.
With a black hat you can only talk about the negatives of the issue or idea under review.
With a yellow hat, only the positive aspects.
And the green hat is for new ideas. No judgement allowed.
All these new bits of thinking get written up for future reference, even if they don’t get carried forward now.

Depending on what you are trying to achieve with your team, these proverbial hats can be applied in several ways to bring group discussion forward in a helpful way.

The traditional ‘black hats’ in your group can try being a ‘green hat’ for a while. The creatives in your team can try their hand at disproving their own brilliant new ideas. The point is that as a whole team or sub-team, you all wear the same hat colour at the same time. So, you all push in the same direction as each other, rather than fighting for air space with competing suggestions whilst digging into an entrenched position.

Using this kind of technique stops a team falling into traditional ‘well you would say that’ potholes of debate. It gets you out of a rut and towards solutions that the whole team are prepared to try.

At Groundswell we know that creative problem-solving isn’t something only creative types can do. We have years of evidence that the right tool kit generates strong shared strategy, in corporates and small independent companies alike.

Winning new ideas, be they business models, products or incremental process improvements, are there to be devised by all comers. All comers that is, who are prepared to put on a different hat.

So, cheers to Mr Benn and cheers to Dr de Bono.  They’ve saved us from a lifetime of thinking and acting just like the next man. 

Edward Charles Francis Publius de Bono, author, doctor and consultant, born 19 May 1933; died 9 June 2021 

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‘Depop is the community-powered fashion ecosystem that’s kinder on the planet and kinder to people.’ 

Simon Beckerman and Maria Raga are the chief executives of Depop, founded by Beckerman himself in 2011.

The company was created originally with the intention of giving the readers of Beckerman’s PIG magazine an opportunity to buy items from the young creatives featured. However, he quickly realised the app required a selling function. This idea was reinvented as a marketplace which enabled its predominantly Gen Z users to build a new progressive and diverse space for fashion. 

Depop or Ebay? Depends on what you care about most.

Whilst sustainability always has been, and will always be of great importance, its ‘popularity’ is thriving at the moment.

Depop has enabled an eco-friendly younger generation to have access to contemporary, yet cheap fashion in a more sustainable way. It also provides a safe space for people to show their authentic selves and feel good about the style choices they make. 

The company has developed into a great example of modern disruptive innovation in the fashion industry, their aim being to mirror the disruption of Spotify in the music industry and Airbnb with travel accommodation.  

Depop is for the entrepreneurial, the cost savvy and the environmentally conscious.

It’s ‘the eBay of our generation’ with ‘the right interface and language’.

With eBay – to buy an item you have to email the seller and wait for them to respond before being able to purchase the item. Instead, Depop was developed with the integration and combination of social networks, geolocation and smart notifications, allowing the purchasing process to be much more instantaneous. 

Depop is not just somewhere to buy clothes on the cheap. Depop is Instagram and eBay. 

Depop is a place to grow a business and a side hustle, somewhere for you now and what you may become. 

This app is something we’ve never seen before in the fashion industry and yet it feels completely familiar to a Gen Z follower. 

If you want to know how to speak this emerging consumer language fluently, ask us how we can connect you with a global community of conscious consumers. 

: sourced via Groundswell’s transcription from the Innovation Places Summit.

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Sheryl Sandberg is one of the best-known business-women in the world, but this is a position she actively strives to change.

A CV second to none quite literally, this is a name which has taken the business and tech worlds by storm.

When delving beyond the headlines, however, we must acknowledge the formidable lack of female power in such positions within tech giants. Although this makes Sandberg’s achievements all the more astonishing (if possible), does this not call in to question the very foundations on which the industry is built?

One might wonder where the downsides lie for a woman who has defied the odds to reach impressive new heights, but the cracks in Facebook’s reputation over the past few years have presented a more sinister side to being a woman in the tech industry, albeit, the most successful one.

With a third of the world’s population well within easy reach, we may question the morality of Sandberg’s position of power. However, it only takes a small amount of research to gain a broader context of how this power has been used for good. A prominent figure in business, but how does she do it?

One of the greatest testaments to Sandberg’s legacy of innovation is her revolutionary leadership style in Silicon Valley. Encouraging feedback for colleagues at all levels of the business, and acknowledging the power of peers as mentors are two of the things that she accredits her success to.

Contradictory to the commonly acknowledged ‘cut-throat’ culture, she creates an environment of constructive feedback. 

And let’s face it, it works. A book with sales well within the multimillions paved the way for the Lean In community.
With over thirty-five thousand members in 160 countries, you wouldn’t be wrong for thinking Sandberg can add peer mentoring innovator to her list of titles.  

“In the future there will be no female leaders. There will just be leaders.”

Sheryl Sandberg

Lean In is an example of innovation in its purest form – rethinking the way individuals interact with one another, to create mutual benefit from the synergy of encouragement. 

At its core, the community rests upon the provision that we don’t have to look ‘up’ in business to gain valuable, steady guidance. The proof? 85% of members state positive change to their lives, stemming from involvement in the initiative. She does it again. 

However, Sandberg goes a step beyond innovation for the ‘now’. She has not only inspired the current generation with her pioneering approach to leadership, but she has also created a vehicle which allows this type of innovation to continue into the future. Life-long, sustainable innovation, stemming from an invaluable arsenal of tools for the leaders and creators of tomorrow. 

Sheryl Sandberg has paved the way as not just a woman, but as an individual, in her respective fields.
An innovator, inspirational leader and trailblazer. Even in the face of controversy, Sandberg teaches us all a lesson or two, through a legacy of leadership and corporate-feminism which is sure to span generations.

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