Matt Millington: My name’s Matt. I’m an innovation strategist.
Eloise Page: I’m Eloise. I’m an applied physicist in our GITC.
Matt: We’re obviously both coming from different disciplines. What do you think is unique about this place as an innovation centre?
Eloise: What’s unique for me is the people. Both in the diversity and the breadth of technology and experience that different people have, and also their drive to make a project the best that it can be. I think the people here are really great. How about you?
Matt: I mean, obviously I’d echo the people. I love that I can come into work and talk to a physicist or I can talk to an engineer or an expert in manufacturing. I think the other thing is all of the labs, all of the amazing equipment. I just think that commitment to having everything required for innovation and new product development actually in one place, including the people, is pretty unique.
Question: How do you balance customer needs and technical feasibility?
Matt: Lots of innovation companies are all about identifying and designing “the new,” whereas here we will yes, take a technology and engineering approach, but couple that with obviously human centricity. So understanding what are the actual problems that need solving? Are we solving it right, are we solving it in a way that a person will actually want to use?
Eloise: Often the science or the engineering when we’re developing a product or a platform is the hurdle that we first need to overcome. So I think at the beginning of the project especially when it’s new technology there is some element of creative chaos that we need to go through to ideate and come up with a solution. But then in order to test those and prove that it works, often you need to go through a very methodical and structured way of testing those things and prove out the feasibility.
Matt: The reusable/refillable deodorant for Dove that launched a couple of months ago, that was a really nice example of PA being able to bring all of those teams together at the very beginning of a project because we had to move really fast, but we also had to move safely as well. There was no room for mistakes. So, whatever we were coming up with in terms of what we were finding from consumers, translating that into a design solution, but being able to understand whether that was actually feasible in from a manufacturing perspective was absolutely critical. Because you don’t want to get to that point where you’ve come up with something that you think is the best thing in the world and someone says “we can’t make that,” or, you’d have to redesign an entire factory line to do that. So I think that sort of radical context of all those different capabilities coming together is really important.
Question: What technology blows your mind right now?
Eloise: In the health and life sciences world, we’re starting to see quantum biosensors come in to diagnostics devices, which is very exciting. It’s actually something that we’re designing and developing at the moment in house. So the principles of quantum biosensing in lateral flow for earlier detection, of say for example, COVID. And this is a breakthrough technology that’s coming through right now and we have been able to design and start to build one in house here.
Matt: I mean, I’m going to say AI of course. But, I think particularly at the moment, things like synthetic personas are really valuable. So often throughout the innovation process we don’t get the time to check in with consumers as much as we’d like. It’s expensive, it’s time consuming, it’s inconvenient, etc. But being able to create almost digital twins I suppose is an easy way to think about it. A digital twin of a different consumer type is really great, because it helps us ideate. It’s almost like having a consumer in the room with you so you can check your ideas. It’s not ever going to replace real consumers, because it’s too risky to go on what just AI thinks, but blending those two different methodologies together is really powerful when it comes to the kind of front-end innovation and the sort of middle point of the innovation pipeline.
Question: What does the average Tuesday look like at GITC?
Eloise: My typical Tuesday would be predominantly in the lab. So, testing, designing anything that we have designed, or want to prove its efficacy. It might also include a little bit of brainstorming on whether we’re coming up with loads of ideas in the initial phase, or it might be that actually we’ve hit a problem in the lab and we need to figure out what’s going wrong and you need to get a few different voices in and different perspectives that might have a different approach to the problem.
Matt: This week I was having meetings with people about developing digital companions for people with various different types of disease, but also having a meeting with the packaging design team looking at actual samples and different material finishes and things like that for a really high-end whiskey brand that’s coming out.
Question: What’s one thing people often get wrong about innovation?
Matt: Well, there’s a lot of dangerous assumptions. I think the first one probably is that it’s easy and it’s all about having great ideas. That is a tiny, tiny part of it. Most of it is hard work in actually delivering innovation to market. That’s only really where innovation matters or where it truly becomes innovation is when it’s actually impacting the world. I think the other thing is that innovation can be done by “innovation teams.” So, innovation is a team sport. As we’ve already talked about, it requires multiple different disciplines, lots of different organisations coming together to unlock and enable something. So, it’s just as much around financial modeling, commercial strategy, as it is around engineering, or creative thinking, or research.
Question: Final wisdom on innovation
Eloise: So, we have one rule in a brainstorm, and that is to never say “no.” There could be some genius idea that comes out of something that you might originally perceive to be a bad idea, but actually if you work through, it comes up with something really creative, really new, and really fun and ingenious that does solve the problem.
Matt: For me, the most obvious thing is innovation is hard. So don’t go into it blind. Make sure that you’ve done all of the research to validate that this is a problem worth going after. Before you start to invest all of this time, emotional energy, money, into the innovation process, make sure you do the groundwork first and ensure that this is a valuable problem to solve.
