About
Developing a strategic innovation roadmap for a preliminary business case for time and frequency capability
Key Client level: Director and Head of National Timing Centre
The National Timing Centre programme led by the UK’s National Physical Laboratory (NPL) has started to develop the UK’s first nationally distributed time infrastructure. It enables the UK to move away from reliance on the Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) and deliver resilient UK time and frequency that provides confidence to its Critical National Infrastructure.
They required a well-developed innovation case for building this national capability.
Engaging the UK’s time, position, navigation and timing community from Industry, Academia and agencies was essential to hear the voice of the customer. Formulating where and what needs were required, prioritising and developing products and services and creating the overall narrative for investment by the government and industry.
This project was delivered via our association with IfM Engage at the University of Cambridge.
Photo by NASA on Unsplash
Assignment
The National Timing Centre is at the nexus of the UK time and frequency community of industry, government and academia. It is also part of a wider global network of agencies interested in position, navigation and timing.
It is a topic with big risks and opportunities. The risks of disruption to navigation and timing are potentially significant, so a resilient system is needed. The opportunity to provide more reliable and accurate timing and positioning services is considerable. Potential users include telecom networks, energy, broadcast, and the finance industry.
The assignment started by investigating the current state of play. Then the community was invited to participate in an innovation process to discover, create and develop high-potential ideas to respond to the challenge.
Process
A two-step process was used following a series of interviews with several national and international experts.
Ecosystem mapping was used to make explicit the organisations in the time and positioning business ecosystem. By understanding the main players, and how value is exchanged, new areas of innovative value were developed. This was achieved through a designed and facilitated two-day workshop. The outcome informed the next stage; to create a strategic roadmap and associate developmental topics.
“That’s quite powerful because there’s no bias involved in shaping that in any way,” says Dr Leon Lobo, Head of the National Timing Centre (NTC), who led the project for NPL
Primed with the outputs of the ecosystem mapping, a strategic roadmapping process was run to develop a roadmap and preliminary business cases for capability development.
“You have people that have been looking at this for years and years and you have people that have never looked at this, or are novices, and the cross-pollination of ideas and bringing together different ways of thinking around the business, the risks, the business cases is really important,” says NPL’s Chris Cobb, Strategic Business Development Manager.
“The workshops definitely identified some gaps, and also started to coalesce key areas of value creation. But, also validated that we weren’t doing anything drastically wrong to date which was very comforting as well. It’s sort of full steam ahead,” he says. Leon now considers the NTC to be “an enduring asset to be developed for the UK as the source of resilient time for the future.”
Results
“The knowledge base of the team, as well as managing the diversity of the thinking into that structured approach and bringing it together was massively useful. The workshops definitely identified some gaps, and also started to coalesce key areas of value creation. But, also validated that we weren’t doing anything drastically wrong to date which was very comforting as well. It’s sort of full steam ahead” Dr Leon Lobo, Head of the National Timing Centre (NTC)
The outcomes achieved included:
- A clear understanding of the strategic drivers
- A set of priority products, services and capability development
- A clear understanding of the technologies, resources and skills needed for future investment.
- An overall, combined voice of the industry to work with Government to make the roadmap a reality.
“We now have a Position, Navigation and Timing (PNT) office in place in government who took on the role of developing the business case. So now essentially we are supporting that business case. But a lot of the thinking that came out from the workshop we have essentially started to embed in that as well,” says Leon.
Rob Munro led this project from enquiry to delivery.
“From the first conversation with Leon, it was clear there was a strong intent but a disparate continuity of practice and the areas of value creation – of innovation- were fuzzy. This is typical at such an early stage. I designed a process in two parts: to “primes” the thinking using ecosystem mapping and to identity potential new value pools. Then to use strategic roadmapping to further the development and get very specific about the necessary skills, technologies and solutions. This is a powerful and demonstrated two part approach for companies and sectors to create tangle value.”
Want to know more?
Read Here about the process to quickly but rigorously produce a strategic roadmap for your organisation. If you are interested in Technology Planning read Here about the approach.
Rob Munro is an innovation strategist and consultant focussing on improving innovation results within organisations. Please get in touch with me to discuss ways to bring greater effectiveness to your innovation and technology management processes.