Articles
Why UKii? Bridging the Divide
Despite the recognised need and prolonged national effort for Industry to find, nurture and adopt UK innovation, too few are taken up by industry end-users.
Large organisations currently experience great difficulties in identifying truly innovative technology companies, products or services. Inundated by supplier claims, end-users are deafened by the noise of start-ups clamouring for attention. There is no structured process in place to find them, nor do end-users have the bandwidth needed to evaluate them.
When large organisations do identify innovation - often in response to immediate business “Pain Points” – too often they have to resort to subterfuge, squirreling away a small percentage of money saved elsewhere for internal research or development.
But those corporate champions who support innovation adoption often take on a high level of personal career risk due to the inherent difficulties in satisfying corporate risk management requirements.
Corporate finance departments have long, drawn out procurement processes, which can be crippling to small Innovators, and they demand unrealistic due diligence assurances that small innovators are unable to provide. Indeed, many Innovators are unaware of the existence and sheer scale of these requirements.
This problem is exacerbated by technically oriented innovators who cannot always easily express their ideas in business terms, or readily demonstrate the longer term viability of their businesses to Industry champions.
In addition, many innovations comprise horizontal capabilities and innovators expect end-users to adapt these for their businesses. However, Industry end-users are looking for vertically oriented solutions that are ready to go.
It is also important to consider not just the dynamics of the innovator/end-user relationship, but the relationship between large corporations. Broadly speaking, they fall into two categories: collaboration and competition.
In most cases, businesses base their need for innovation on the grounds of maintaining competitive advantage. However, the UK Innovation Initiative focuses on business and reputation risk reduction. This horizontal, pan-industry issue falls largely in the collaborative space.
As such we hope to enable peer-to-peer discussion to review innovations in a non-competitive environment. The intended purpose of this is to speed up the procurement decision-making process and also to help identify areas where clusters of different promising innovations can go through a due diligence process together.
Moreover, we ask Innovators to express their innovations in business terms, and also to identify which corporate pain points they are likely to address. By encouraging a mindset adjustment by both sides, supported by hard-nosed questions, practical guidelines, and a basic process to clear the noise for corporate end-users, we hope that the gap between Industry and Innovators will be bridged.
