Making innovation happen video and transcript

Sir George Cox

Author of the Cox Review on Creativity in Business

Making the best use of the UK's creative capabilities

We're seeing a change in the economic balance in the world, in the economic power. And what we see of course is countries like India and China advancing very rapidly. But they're not just advancing in terms of all the low skilled jobs, which we always thought might be the case, but of course they're putting an enormous amount into high skills, educated workforce, research, local design capability and so on. Now that gives us a real challenge; it gives every industrialised nation a real challenge because there's nothing we can do cheaper than such countries. So if we're going to offer services or products on the world stage they have to compete on something else and to do that we've got to make the most use of our creative abilities. And that's good news because we have got terrific creative abilities in the United Kingdom; we just don’t exploit them. I don’t mean in terms of selling them the services around the world but in terms of getting their skills fit into British products, British designs, services and so on. We need that, to use that skill much more if we were to compete in the world and maintain our position. 

Will Hutton

Executive Vice-Chair, Work Foundation

The need for an innovation ecosystem

Well, one of the hardest things that explaining an innovation eco-system in Britain is we've got no idea what it looks like or what it is because we haven’t got one.  If this was Sweden or Finland or South Korea or America, even Canada or Australia, people have a better idea about I'm talking about. But what it is, is a well-understood system in which all the moving parts that are required to support the active innovation and productive entrepreneurship are in place and it goes from, it’s a layer of intermediate institutions, it starts with universities, research centres, horizon scanning institutions, you know networks of designers, networks of creative hubs, ways of mobilising finance, ways of supporting skills development. All of these ideas, these kind of big words I've just said, all have lots and lots of sub-components and the idea is to whack out what all that looks like at a national level, and then reproduce it in regions and cities so that, if you’re an entrepreneur in Leicester or Leeds or Manchester and London you know actually who to go to. 

Robin Bew

Editorial Director and Chief Economist, Economist Intelligence Unit 

Innovation strategies for a slower growth market

Well I think one of the things we're going to have to get used to is, it’s going to be a slower growing economy, a high-tax economy, and those things mean that companies have to be a bit more innovative about their own business process, because clearly what you're likely to see is that revenue growth is going to be slower, and yet shareholders are still going to demand that profitability increases – and that requires you to be much smarter about how you run your business. It isn’t a story about cost-cutting, because you can’t cut costs forever; we've seen a lot of that over the last 18 months, but it’s going to be increasingly difficult to use that as a route to bottom-line growth. So companies need to be much more innovative about the way that they strategise for a slower growth market; so I think that’s a big issue – companies need to re-think their entire business model around that. 

Jonathan Salem-Baskin

Global Brand Strategist

Collaboration and co-creation

Collaboration as an ideal is a very powerful idea and very powerful term. The devil is in the details, but I think that the idea that any of us are necessarily consumers as much as co-creators of experience is a powerful concept and I think it’s true. So when businesses and designers are looking at what is their role together, I think the idea that a business would let or give a designer a remit on a project and then the designer would come back with the thinking, whether it were product design, market strategy, org design, whatever aspect of design, I think that’s an old model, versus the business and the designers actually being a collaborative process together.

Nick Jankel

Chief Executive Officer, wecreate

Enabling collaboration

You enable collaboration through... you’ve got two main drivers. You’ve got process and things like regulations and rules and pilots. That’s one area you work in, and then there’s the area around people and how you help them become collaborative because one of the challenges that most businesses and organisations face is they think collaboration is about what you do. Collaboration is actually about who you are. It’s about how you respond to different people's ideas. It’s about how you respond to frustrations between two collaborating partnerships. This is where collaboration fails. Collaboration doesn’t fail because you haven’t got a good match. Collaboration fails just like mergers fail because the cultures don’t fit.

Will Hutton

Design as the bridge between entrepreneur and consumer

Design actually is the bridge between the entrepreneur and the business and the consumer, and the more complicated and technically sophisticated stuff can be, the more it has to be user friendly so it gets early adoption, and that act is actually the heart of design. So actually design is actually a core part of the investment prospect and design is a core way of actually translating an offer into a potential usable service. It’s, design is also often a way of actually proving the production process with inside the organisation. So I mean I think that designers are right up there with kind of R&D, universities, banks, skills as part of the innovation eco-system.

Steve Evans

Professor of Lifecycle Engineering, Cranfield University

Design and sustainable innovation

I think one of the big debates is about world view; how people see the world, and the design as taught primarily in the UK is excellent at delivering a certain set of world views and some of that is expanding; so social innovation, public service innovation. Service innovation is coming into the design curricula and people are doing it very well. I think that trend is going to continue and we're going to include ever more aspects of our lives until we’ll see that it’s about sustainable innovation. I'm not sure it’s happening yet though, but the signs are there's going in the right direction.