Working out Loud with Waterstons Innovation
Adventures in Innovation #1. Alex and Andrew introduce their first efforts to work out loud!
We want to work out loud and share with you the work we do and the process we use to get there - whether we are successful or not. An important part of innovation, as we see it, is partnering and collaborating with other folks to achieve things you couldn’t do by yourself.
This means we go and meet lots of inspiring, incredible, and ingenious individuals to hear what they are up to. We have the privilege of seeing the fantastic things they make and get to understand the process they use to create new technology. We take this information back home with us and try to find places out there in the world to apply it. By joining all these pieces together, we hope to find innovative solutions to the business problems we encounter every day. Adventures in Innovation is our bi-weekly newsletter to document those journeys. Alex and I will go over the exciting things we have been up to, and give updates on our major projects.
Welcome to our first attempt at working out loud!
Alex (Associate Director - Innovation & Leadership)
The past couple of weeks have been quite a whirlwind. Along side my innovation role I also look after leadership at Waterstons and I spent some time delivering our Leadership Programme this week. I really enjoy delivering it because I get to spend a couple of days with so many brilliant, enthusiastic Waterstons people.
Andrew and I also had a meeting this week with one of our largest clients about our innovation work. It was incredibly useful on two fronts - first the client was really interested in the research we have been doing around robotics and AI and wants to run a bigger, bolder innovation workshop with us in the future. Second, it gave us an opportunity to talk about how we think about innovation in front of some of our colleagues for the first time.
Finally, we’ve been having conversations with the Digital Catapult about a pair of 5G connected Virtual Production Stages that they have. We’ve got a couple of opportunities to use the stages for projects that aren’t directly related to TV and film production and that’s really exciting. In the very least the idea of being able to look at renders of large 3D objects at 1:1 scale is really interesting. Imagine you’re designing houses, caravans or tunnel drilling machinery and being able to see it at scale!
Andrew (Innovation Consultant)
The last two weeks have been very busy - partly as I have been on annual leave most of it in Lisbon! This involved a lot of wine drinking and pastel de nata eating.
The days I was actually working though had a lot of stuff crammed in it. I spent a day with our learning and development team writing a course about public speaking and giving talks. This was based around our personal experiences, and also a fantastic book about storytelling1.
We had a big step forward in one of our major Innovation projects (more info about it is right below this!). We had a great meeting with York University about developing hardware to help prevent mould growth. We have been working together for a while, so it’s really exciting to have work progress to a point we are discussing how to practically create hardware.
Looking forward, we are spending a lot of time planning workshops, to show folk’s the art of the possible within their sector. It’s early days there, but I’m really excited about it.
A lot of other fun things in the pipeline too - a hackday with a windfarm innovation centre, and beginning of defining a project to run with a virtual production stage
Project Spotlight
🦠 Mould Detection: We are working to make Social Housing tenants safer from mould and damp. These can seriously damage your health, but current solutions on the market cannot adequately address the risks. We are partnering with the Institute for Safe Autonomy at York University, and North Star Social Housing to build a sensor system to try to give assurances to tenants they are safe.
This is a challenging project! We have not undertaken something like this before. Internally, we can build fantastic software systems, but hardware development is not something we usually do. Because of this, the project has been kicking about for a while, as we learn more about what it means to use sensors and Internet of Things devices. Getting an external partner who has expertise in hardware development, but also ethics and safety has really helped us.
At this stage, we have a prototype software stack and are exploring what the actual devices look like. They need to be able to monitor the whole house (not just one room) and have the ability to control the boiler if there is a risk of mould. The cost of controlling the boiler can be covered by the housing associations.
We have a bold timeline to get these into homes ASAP, while also running a separate, long-term, stream of work in parallel looking more theoretically at the problem. We had a productive meeting last week, and are now looking to begin development work and set up workshops with tenants!
Roundup
We have a lot of exciting things happening in the Innovation team. Over the next few weeks, we will go deeper into each project - whether they are successful or not!
🐕 Robot Dog: we are currently setting something up between a robotics lab and a client of ours. Can we use a robot dog to remove humans from dangerous environments?
👟 Sneaker Advert: We are tangentially involved with making an advert for a fashion company involving robots. Can robot arms make for a cool advert for a pair of shoes?
🤖 AI Document Generation: writing documentation sucks: it’s boring and repetitive and not the most valuable use of your or your client’s time. Can we use modern AI models to speed up the process of writing draft documentation?
📺 Big Screen: Virtual Production Stages are a modern way of handling special effects - they use it in The Mandalorian. We are working with one of our clients to find other, novel, uses for it.
Storytelling for You - Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic