Innovation, Disruption and “Loving What You Do”

A Few Thoughts on Innovation

We have also produced three highly successful spin-out companies: Zonefox, Symphonic and Cyan Forensics, and which is a track record that is as good as any other research group in the UK. Zonefox and Symphonic have been acquired, and Cyan advance on an international stage. All of these spin-outs were based on novel research work and backed up with research papers and patents.

So what is the magic sauce?

Being big doesn’t help

Often these are large companies who are struggling to make their innovations successful, and they ask us for our thoughts on how they can improve. One engagement last week really sticks out for me, in they went through each of our projects, and kept asking “What made you do that?”, and the answer was normally:

“Well. It was new, and we hadn’t done that before, and it forced us into a new area, and we liked the people involved, and we kinda had the skills to do it. If we got it to work, it would be really disruptive!”

and they probed on the funding for our work and again it was the same answer:

“Well. We had a track record of success and could point to previous project where we could say we had actually created an impact which wouldn’t have been there without us

And then they asked if I still did some teaching as if the first thing that an active researcher would do is to stop teaching. I told them that the lifeblood of virtually everything that we do in academia is our students. It is through teaching that we find the most amazing individual, and prove them with a route for them to achieve their full potential.

And finally they asked what advice I had and I had to quote Steve Jobs: “You love what you do”, and enjoy disrupting, and being David against Goliath.

Innovation is the lifeblood of our world

With innovation we have the art of the ‘er’ … where we make things faster, better, cheaper, clearer … and we create…