Insider’s Liverpool Innovators roundtable took place at the Digital Innovation Facility at the University of Liverpool. Participants met in the drone lab, surrounded by robotics and experimental prototypes, including one machine that bore an uncanny resemblance to a Stranger Things demodog.
The setting provided a fitting backdrop for a discussion on how innovation is being redefined across industry. Topics ranged from the rise of AI and humanoid robotics to the role of gender diversity, collaboration and skills. The innovators also discussed the UK’s position in the global race to turn research and development into productivity and growth.
What does innovation mean to you?
NICKY SILVANO, MANAGING DIRECTOR, WEBBER (NW) LTD
We’re a low tech business. We’ve got guys with grinders and burning gear and welding gear and they take it to steel and they chop it up and they weld it back together and we make frames. So I’m going, what am I getting out of this innovation stuff?
But the last time I came here and we looked at the robots and the humanoids, it got me thinking for the first time that we should be doing more in terms of innovation.
We’re going to do a little project now on how we can make the job cards that the guys use on a bit of paper electronic, and then it goes straight into a central database and then we can do analytics on it. So for me, I had to redefine what innovation meant.
DAVID MILLAR, MANAGING DIRECTOR, HEAP & PARTNERS
It’s about survival. If you don’t innovate, you’ll die. We’re trying to compete on a global market and the technology changes we’ve seen across our history pale into insignificance compared to what’s going on at the moment.
It’s rapidly changing and we’ve got to run just to try and survive and compete.
MADINA BARKER, DIRECTOR / OWNER, CNC ROBOTICS
Innovation is the ability or the freedom to experiment and fail. There are not many businesses that want that failure.
We work on quite a lot of different projects and a lot of those are R&D projects.They’ve not been done before, and we have to lead the customer on that journey of ‘this might not work, this has not been done before’.
Yes, we want it to work, but we are going to have to milestone this project, get to a certain point, and then assess it when we’ve got to that point because it might not work.
That, I think, is true innovation: the freedom to experiment and fail.
Why has innovation been slowing for the last few years?
KATE BLACK, FOUNDER, ATOMIK AM
There are not enough diverse workforces.
Particularly in an engineering field, it’s still white male dominated. You’re not going to get innovation when you don’t have diversity of thought.
The way that we think is not helpful for innovation. The way that we educate is not helpful for innovation.
We’re still using the education system that was founded in the first industrial revolution. We’re expecting to apply that with new technology and wondering why it’s not working.
The rate of innovation has declined because we’re not thinking in the right format. My business would call itself a solution focused business. What I mean by that is rather than saying what’s the problem we need to fix, we say, if we woke up tomorrow morning and that was working well, what would we see? What would it work like, what would we see around us?
SARAH JACKSON, FOUNDER, HATTER’S DIGITAL AGENCY
Innovation is a break from tradition. It’s looking at how everyone else does it and going, I want to do something different.
What terrifies me [about AI] is because we all [use it], there’s no one around this table that doesn’t use some form of AI, even if it’s as a therapist. But the more we use it for that brainstorming moment, the more we’re leaning into what’s already gone before, because that’s all it does.
It just keeps churning out what’s already gone before. So we need those people who step outside and go, what if it was different? What would it look like if it was better?
ANDREW BORLAND, CHIEF INNOVATION OFFICER, UNIVERSITY OF LIVERPOOL
ChatGPT had one million users in five days. It took Facebook four years.
We spent £610m of taxpayers’ money running something called the Faraday Battery Challenge, which got academics funding and everyone was really happy and it was great. Ninety odd percent of lithium batteries are made in China.
So that was great R&D expertise, but we forgot the link of don’t we want to keep the value here rather than somewhere with slack environmental regulations.
JEN FENNER, MANAGING DIRECTOR, DEFPROC ENGINEERING
We do things for hardware, we also do software, and we’re able to take a bespoke approach to all of our clients’ work. Because of the design background, we’re able to take into the people part of the technology as well. We had a great example where a client came in, pitched the project, and they’d already got a proof of concept, which was great.
They were all male and the proof of concept was wearable tech and it was on an athletic male figure, and they were talking about introducing it into different industries.
I was the only woman in the room that was like, how do we take into account a female body or different body shapes? And then suddenly it was like, oh, right, okay. And then that informs their product design. It meant that the product design was then able to fit on anybody once we’ve finished.
If I hadn’t been there, that potentially wouldn’t have been considered.
ANDREW MACFARLANE, BOARD DIRECTOR, CURTINS
We work in a very high risk industry, so things change slowly. We’ve got 10,000 projects at one time, all full of innovation. The outcome is very often a steel frame or a reinforced concrete frame, it looks very similar; the fact is Liverpool innovated these things about 150 years ago. We did the first of all of these things. Whether it’s underground railways, steel buildings, reinforced concrete buildings. The ‘what’ changes very slowly, the methods and the how are where we find the innovation.
When I joined the business 25 years ago, I joined in the day of pen and paper, looking across at the first computers. That has changed massively because computers to 3D printing, to VR, to AI, to data, in these 25 years has been an absolute revolution.
The challenge for us is getting that to effect the ‘what’, because at the end of the day it’s driven by policy and frameworks. If it is also risk adverse, it’s not incentivized; the methods change, but the outcomes don’t.
NICK SUMPTER, OPERATIONS DIRECTOR, ENVOGEN INSTRUMENT SERVICES
One of the things that comes up is the lack of collaboration. Everyone’s working in silos and creating their own problems that someone else will then fix five years later. It’s competitive. There’s no joined-up thinking, and that comes back to financial systems again.
Ultimately, it’s backed by people who want to make profit. People keep ideas. The same applies to skills. No one wants to trade.
David Millar also said: “Humanoid robots will be wonderful. They’ll be able to help my staff, they’ll be able to work with them. What we want to do is grow as a business, but I don’t want to employ any more people. I’d like to keep employing the same number of people and double the size of the business, because I feel under threat as an employer. I’ve got the HSE after me, I’ve got the government after me, everything is attacking me and telling me not to employ people. They’re going to be more expensive and they’re gonna be difficult. So I have to be very careful.
Andrew Borland added: “The Government is obsessed with job creation. But you’ve got businesses [talking about] the aging population and tough times. If you want productivity and growth, that’s going to come from keeping the head counts but growing through automation and skills and training. That’s a different world for you guys. The outcome isn’t job creation. It’s people kept in the workforce, mobilizing the workforce.
PHIL ANDERS, CLUSTER MANAGER ADVANCED MANUFACTURING, LIVERPOOL CITY REGION COMBINED AUTHORITY
“Productivity is the big challenge at the moment. It’s combined with people and technology to create productivity outputs and to drive that, people are essential going forward.
“We’ve heard a lot about using people’s brains and innovation to create the next generation of products and services. One of the biggest challenges with SMEs creating innovation is the commercialisation of it and the exploitation of it that we really suffer from in the UK.
“One of the things that we really challenge across the whole UK is how do we change that? How do we make sure that the IP is retained in the UK, exploited in the UK, creates jobs in the UK and creates wealth in the UK?”
