Thinking big: experts explore the potential of new technologies

Photos: Tom Hampson

The 2017 Industrial Strategy set out the government’s aim of becoming “the most effective champion and partner of business in the developed world”. It identified four “grand challenges”, each with specific objectives, to put the UK “at the forefront of the industries of the future”.

From these challenges, government has set out several missions aiming to stimulate innovation. They range from using artificial intelligence to improve healthcare to creating a net-zero carbon industrial cluster, and will require government and industry to collaborate to find solutions.

The grand challenges provided the focus of discussion at CSW’s inaugural Innovation Lecture in January. The event, which was sponsored by BT Enterprise, saw experts and policymakers gather to share the latest advances towards meeting the goals of the Industrial Strategy.

Five speakers provided context around each challenge, and set out some of the problems which industry and government will face in addressing them (see box-out below for more details on the talks).

Collaboration

“We don’t innovate on our own,” Dr Nicola Millard, principal innovation partner at BT, said during her talk addressing the challenge of an ageing society. She recognised diverse, collaborative workplaces as one safeguard in ensuring the Industrial Strategy delivers a future which works “for everyone”.

She stressed the need for diversity of thought and encouraged collaboration with innovators of emerging technologies – which have the potential to support all the grand challenge areas. For example, as society ages, technology such as automation and AI will become even more important, she said.

“We’re looking very closely at a lot of these trends that are shaping the future of work,” Millard said, and went on to outline the initiatives BT is supporting across its network of university partners, start-ups and research centres.

During his talk on AI in healthcare, Dominic Cushnan, special adviser in AI and digital health at NHSX, spoke of a similar attitude within his organisation, which was recently launched to boost the digital transformation of health and social care. He said NHSX considers collaborating with private sector organisations, researchers and policymakers as key to having capability “built into the system”.

Although AI is Cushnan’s particular area of expertise, all the speakers talked of its immense potential. “If you look at what humans are good at, and what machines are, there’s actually very little intersection,” Millard said. Therefore, the hope is that these technologies will give some freedom back to those in the workplace, by performing time-consuming tasks that would otherwise be left to a human, leaving employees more time for interesting tasks.

 

Speakers (from left to right): Matt Sexton, Fotis Karonis, Professor Paul Taylor, CSW editor Suzannah Brecknell, Dominic Cushnan and Dr Nicola Millard

As well as taking some of the load from workers, technology can also encourage deeper collaboration between professionals. During his talk on mobility and connectivity, Fotis Karonis, enterprise and 5G executive lead at BT, explained how new technology enables people to work together in new ways. 

He explained how advances in connectivity will transform the way we work, driving efficiencies and enabling us to re-think how people and goods are moved about. He presented evidence of mobility and connectivity working in tandem at the Belfast Smart Port, which uses 5G technology to enable the work of remote engineers, and at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham, where a 5G-enabled virtual reality system is used by paramedics to allow those in the hospital to see patients while the ambulance is still in transit.

The system allows for “massive connectivity”, he said, which not only saves valuable time, but actively presents opportunities for better collaboration between specialists.

Transparency

Of course, the success of any innovation is dependent on its reception, and public buy-in can be particularly difficult to obtain in projects involving AI or large amounts of data. This is especially evident in digital health initiatives, said Paul Taylor, professor of health informatics at UCL.

Taylor – who pointed out that personal data is fundamental to the success of many digital health projects – gave an academic view of the progress in digital healthcare, and said that without citizens opting into data-sharing, the tools are simply unable to function as intended.

“It doesn’t make the headlines when people die because the IT is crap,” he said, “but it does happen.” For this reason, he was keen to stress the importance of clear communication with the general public, and spoke of the need to “demystify artificial intelligence,” saying, “we have to make it seem a little bit less like black magic and a little bit more like high school maths.”

Before we can discuss what solutions are being used, however, innovation requires clarity and transparency about the problems being addressed. Simple issues such as a lack of clear terminology often can cause confusion, said Matt Sexton, chief strategy officer at Futerra, when speaking of efforts within the Industrial Strategy’s Clean Growth mission.

“We have people talking about climate positivity,” he said, as well as “carbon debt,” “carbon positive,” “climate positive,” and “carbon negative” – the last of which, he stressed, “is technically correct, but sounds really bad.”

Transparency is also needed in the interactions between government and industry, which are often much more complex than they need to be, Sexton said. He explained that “a lot of the people sitting in boardrooms find the policy environment for bidding arcane and distant.”

Government “could do a lot more” to make the paths of engagement clearer, he said. 

“We need to demystify artificial intelligence, and make it seem a little bit less like black magic and a little bit more like high school maths” Professor Paul Taylor, UCL

Stability

Clear communication is an important step towards securing a productive partnership between government and industry, especially in areas such as Clean Growth, where the lack of stability and rate of change can mean industry is nervous to invest, Sexton added.

He acknowledged that creating a sense of certainty in rapidly changing sectors is not easy, but if government can “make the external environment stable, and prevent any undue buffeting, then businesses will be as innovative and as agile as we need them to be”.

There has been a “marked shift”, he added, in the way sustainability is being treated by businesses now, but one thing which unifies them is that “they don’t truly know how to get there”. For this reason, communicating policy between government and the boardroom will be “key” in encouraging further innovation.

This is an attitude that NHSX has particularly embraced, Cushnan said. The unit “went out to the market” before setting out policy aims, in order to understand what might be feasible. “We asked – what is in the market? What are people actually doing? What’s in the research?” he said. This way, “we help industry tell us where they are in the lifecycle”.

And with a project firmly grounded in what is possible now, Millard said there was no harm in being prepared for the future too. She said it was important to “stimulate thinking” around rapidly changing sectors and suggested that government and industry should be working together to “look at a number of possible futures” so that they would be “prepared if any of them starts to emerge”.

Balance

It is therefore clear that a close relationship with industry is important to stimulating innovation, but government must also balance this with its role as a regulator.

In the weeks following the Innovation Lecture, BEIS announced the formation of the Regulatory Horizon Council. It will be chaired by Cathryn Ross, former civil servant and BT’s director for regulatory affairs. The council has been given a remit to “look at reforms to the UK’s regulatory system and advise government on how to remove barriers to innovation”.

Back at the event, Cushnan said improvements are already being made in this area. He said that, within NHSX, the question being posed was: “How do we create the right amount of regulation without being restrictive?”

When it comes to policy, Cushnan said he was starting to see “some positive signs” that bringing operational delivery into commissioning conversations, as well as the creation of units like NHSX, was finally “mixing these two world s together”.

We may still be some way from definitive responses to the grand challenges, but government and industry are certainly on the road to success. As Cushnan said: “I think we’re starting to ask the right questions in the right room.”