Solving systemic challenges requires more than just technology
It requires a deep understanding of human behaviour, policy frameworks, and market dynamics. Below is a selection of my published research, media commentary, and frameworks designed to accelerate the adoption of novel solutions to complex socio-economic problems.
Innovation Diffusion & Technology Adoption
A core focus of my recent work involves advancing the UK Government’s understanding of how complex systems adopt new technologies. Recent publications and frameworks include:
Ideas to Impact: A co-created adoption pathway framework that synthesises behavioural science and adoption theory to accelerate system-wide technology uptake, specifically applied to UK energy networks through ISO56001 integration and AI-enabled behavioural analysis.
Insights from the UK Innovation Diffusion and Adoption Survey: A quantitative and qualitative analysis establishing the policy framework behind frontier technology adoption for the UK Public Sector and Industrial Strategy.
Making Innovation Matter: this report (DSIT Research Paper 2023/009) analyzes barriers to innovation diffusion and adoption (IDA) in the UK, aiming to help the country benefit from spreading innovative ideas.
Entrepreneurship & Ventures
A short series on the Entrepreneur’s Mindset which I hope to revisit later:
Two questions every entrepreneur should answer (and one they shouldn't)
Three things every successful entrepreneur needs to get right
An entrepreneur's approach to risk
Policy & Advocacy
Previous work has focused on collective action problems for addressing climate change and energy transition.
Media, Commentary & Civic Technology
Passionate about the intersection of technology and community impact, I have pioneered software-driven metrics to validate social system change. My work and commentary on public service reform and civic technology have been featured across national platforms, including:
Published articles in The Guardian and the leading think tank Policy Exchange.
Expert commentary and debates on live national television and BBC Radio 4.
Brokering Cabinet-level digital policy discussions.
Fellowships & Recognition
Fellow, Royal Society of Arts (RSA): Awarded for contributions to promoting community cohesion through civic technology.
Innovation Pioneer, Deloitte: Recognised by the Deloitte Social Innovation Pioneers Programme for scalable impact in the social enterprise sector.
The Entrepreneur’s Guide
February 2016
Two questions every entrepreneur should answer (and one they shouldn't)
Let’s start with the negative. At some point you will be asked: what makes you an entrepreneur? This is a valid but ultimately unhelpful question. Enterprise and entrepreneurship are fluid concepts where exact boundaries are defined only by their absence. More useful is the state of mind behind such a question, one that gets at two of the most important questions any social entrepreneur can ask themselves : Why I am doing this? What I am willing to do to make this happen? (Here’s a hint. If your answers are “Yes” and “Anything” then you are not thinking hard enough.)
The “Why” is important because at some point you will need to remind others and yourself why you are doing this. It is a sad fact that most enterprises fail and even the successful ones fail most of the time before they succeed. This is even more so the case for social entrepreneurs where your most important markets — customer and financial — are still in early stages of development.
The answer to this question will also help you motivate others. I once met a women whose answer was that her newborn baby almost died for lack of specialist care when the country’s top experts were located down the street. She never wanted another person to go through that experience and had devoted over ten years to changing how we find care. To this day her answer motivates me in what I do and I know it was crucial in helping her inspire others — supporters, staff and partners — in what she did.
Answering the second question “What am I willing to do…?” will make the difference between you succeeding in what you want and only getting halfway. In our early days we went from our comfortable offices with guaranteed salaries every month to cold calling and handing out leaflets, when failure meant missing a pay check. As we grew the type and scale of promotion we did changed but one thing didn't — the need to bring in regular, increasing revenue and the relentless focus required to make that happen.
As a social entrepreneur the chances are you may be more motivated by delivering the service or product you offer, perhaps you like to focus on strategy and the bigger picture. You may even be one of the rarer type who are sales motivated. Whatever your interests the difference between success and failure is in realising where your boundaries are and being willing to bring others on to fulfil those roles when needed.
Three things every successful entrepreneur needs to get right
When I left my job at City Hall to start a new enterprise I had no idea of what I should be focused on. Unlike many entrepreneurs I did not know others who had started their own business, nor had anyone in my immediate family done the same.
Don’t get me wrong, there were and are a huge number of books, blogs and other sources that talk about marketing, investment, product development and so on. The problem was it is a bit like someone telling you to construct a plane and describing all the elements but forgetting to mention what it would be like to actually build the thing.
Couple that with the fact that managing an enterprise as it grows is a bit like building that plane in mid-air and you have a recipe for disaster. An in-depth understanding customer acquisition cost modelling is of little use while you are struggling to re-attach the wings.
This post and the others that follow are written in the spirit of something I wish I had read back when I started. To kick things off I have introduced the three areas that you must always get right. Each of them could merit a book, let alone a post, in their own right but for now let‘s cover the basics…
People
Whether you are providing a service or a product, people are your organisation. Every successful enterprise needs talented, driven people with skills that cover the full range of activities — from product engineering to finance and marketing.
Now most of us will have some but not all of these people in our circles. That’s ok but only as long as you are prepared to go out and fill that gap. For social entrepreneurs one of the most common gaps is technology. In an age where digital is absolutely essential for scalable operation this can severely hamper an otherwise successful enterprise. When we began Stickyboard we had a fantastic digital agency to build our first products. The problem was this allowed us to put hiring a dedicated developer on the back burner, a decision that was to cost us valuable time and money down the line.
Plan
This is not about business plans! After five years and umpteen versions I, like many other entrepreneurs, have developed a pathological hatred for these dreaded documents. No, this is about Planning, specifically defining:
what your end goals are
what stages you need to reach them and how you know when you are ready to progress from one to another
what your alternative plans are if you fail
Write these down on a piece of paper, draw them, whatever you feel like, just make sure you think them through. Before you move on try to evidence your thinking. For example if you have decided to use Visitor Traffic or Monthly Recurring Revenue as a criteria for success then look at similar enterprises and see what they were doing at this stage. Don’t just shoehorn references either. This is your enterprise, you are basing yours and your team’s success on these plans so make sure you are confident in the numbers before building a future on them.
Lastly make sure you think through your success and failure scenarios. We have a strange myopia where despite knowing that most enterprises fail to meet their original goals, we spend most of our energy thinking through the minority of cases where everything goes right.
Resources
The usual adage of things taking twice as long and costing twice as much is true. However this is more about challenging yourself as to what your enterprise needs to succeed and how are you realistically going to get that money. If you have done your planning correctly you should have a pretty good ball-park figure (and it will only ever be that precise). This will be based on your own experience and projections supported by independent references for your enterprise type and stage.
You should also know who might be able to provide those funds and have a realistic plan for pitching, negotiating and closing such deals (this incidentally applies to all types on finance — bank, VC, crowdfund, grant etc). One of the biggest lessons we learnt with Stickyboard was that the finance market was as, if not more, important than our customer market. Finance rounds take a long time, particularly once you have gone beyond seed stage, so this is not something you can address as you go.
Landing
When I look back on our experience (and stripping out the role fortune always plays) I can trace everything that went right and everything that went wrong to how well we managed these areas. No matter how pressured things become, focus on the above and you’ll make it through.
An entrepreneur's approach to risk
As an entrepreneur one of the hardest truths to grasp is that most new endeavours fail. Worse still, of the tiny minority that succeed, luck is often the deciding factor.
This is not to say that talent and hard work do not play a part. They do, and are in fact the minimum bar for entry. But if you think that just by giving your all and being smarter than others will guarantee success you are fooling yourself.
So how do you acknowledge this truth without being paralysed by fear of failure? As F. Scott Fitzgerald said:
The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.
In this case the ideas are that you have all it takes to succeed and you probably won't. The key to making this work is to imagine both success and failure, think each scenario through with equal rigour and plan so that whichever outcome occurs you can progress in good order.
As CEO you have to be 100 per cent behind your strategy, providing the motivating force for you, your team and everyone who deals with your company. You also have to be fully prepared for everything to go wrong and able to pick up the pieces as you go.