Don’t Just Sit Back … Go Be Part of Building Our Future: Discover, Engage and Create Impact

Don’t Just Sit Back … Go Be Part of Building Our Future: Discover, Engage and Create Impact

The great companies of the future are being born now and they might be just be created in your city!

If you are a great company, and doing well, why not give something back, and fund a PhD student in a university that you think best matches your vision of the future? I’m not speaking about companies like Apple, Google, or Microsoft — as they will build their own future and a few new ideas could be a bit of a threat to their increase dominance in our lives. It is those companies who have benefited from graduates in order to grow their companies. So why not give something back? At the very least, share your knowledge and help support great SMEs.

In a world increasingly dominated by Goliath, go and support David.

Those who will build our future

Our future will be created by our kids listening to inspiring teachers, and who show them a vision of the future.

Our future will also be born in the minds of those attending Meetup’s, and in sharing their ideas and vision.

Our future, too, will be born in the minds of our great PhD students, who aim to break down barriers in our advancement. It is up to those who are involved in their supervision to guide them into areas which will maximise their opportunities and create most benefit for the student, and for society.

As a research group here, we have three highly successful spin-out companies (Zonefox, Symphonic and Cyan Forensics), and we have always engaged widely with our communities and tried to understand the problems that we needed to solve. Each startup, though, was born through core PhD research (Dr Jamie Graves, Dr Omair Uthmani and Dr Phil Penrose), and then carefully crafted through the building of strong teams who understood the problems to be solved, and how to take the solutions to the market.

Knowledge exchange is the linch-pin

So it’s great to see the PhD students in Scotland meeting and sharing their ideas, and in breaking down knowledge exchange barriers:

For some reason, in Computer Science, we like to segment our students up into subject areas, and then build barriers for them to share knowledge within their areas, and also to other communities. Computer Science will be the foundation in the development of many parts of our lives, including in health, law and government. It will build new communities and support a focus on citizens in a way that we could never imagine in the past.

A key part of events such as this is the sharing of ideas across institutions and subject domains. Too often we end up just speaking to those in our own community, and get little in the way of an understanding in how our work could scale to others. How many great ideas have been lost, by the lack of support or vision by those how could have helped build their ideas?

Great companies of the future will be born through sustained vision and belief, and also by the knowledge of those with experience of innovation and driving things forward. Our economies of the future need to fuse these together, and that blind vision will often end up with little in return. We need those with the experience of success and failure to help guide those who have the amazing ideas.

If there’s no problem to be solved, then why solve it? Every academic should know the problem they are solving, and set in place routes that best address this. It might take a decade, but they will know when they have solved it … and it’ll be a high impact spin-out or a life-time achievement award … but they can sit back and say … “I made that happen”.

A metric driven system?

Unfortunately, for many in academia, we are increasingly driven by research metrics, and less by the resultant impact of the work. A researcher thus focuses on their PhD award, and this is understandable. But academics, too, need a good citation count and evaluated on journal impact metrics.

But if that’s why we do research, we are really missing out on the true focus, which is making an impact. The work should change something, it should make someone’s life better, it should drive the creation of new companies, it should make an impact. Each person might contribute a little bit, but the drive of research is to end up doing something which is real.

A slide I often use is shown below. It outlines that research is all about discovering, engaging and then creating impact. There are NOT a sequential thing, but all three things happen as the research evolved, and will spin-off each other. The middle bit is the “Engage”, and we need to create mechanisms to make sure this works, and the “Impact” will not work as well as it could. To engage we need to exchange knowledge, we need to listen to other peoples thoughts and motivations, and we, especially, need to understand how others feel about our work. A great idea and vision will bring on others. A bad idea, will switch other off. We thus need to break down barriers within our disciples and into other community, and enable debate.

A quote I think is relevant is:

Successful people build each other up. They motivate, inspire and push each other. Unsuccessful people just hate, blame, and complain.

The gap between industry and academic research

I do appreciate that academic research often looks at the 3–5 year horizon for high impact work, and greater than that for blue skies work, but we do need to understand what our horizons are, and for industry and academia to work together to develop IP and build the skills for the future. Otherwise we end up being unfocused, and where industry and academia go off and do their own thing. The true high impact companies are born from a long-term and a sustain drive to build knowledge and skills.

The research gap between academia and industry, I think, is increasing. I may be wrong in this, and it is purely my viewpoint. I appreciate that there are great examples of high impact companies, including Pure Lifi, but apart from those, I think academia is more worried about its research assessment scores than actually linking its research that industry would define as key research problems. Each academic is looking after themselves and trying to maximise their own score, as their future career and how they are perceived in their department is highly dependent on their scores (typically though 3 and 4 star papers).

Bring academia and industry together with a shared vision

We have seen many grand visions from governments and the EU, and which aim to bring industry and academia, and it often doesn’t work. For some reason, it is difficult to match the things that academia want to do, to those that industry would understand. There are, though, many successful areas, such as the Knowledge Transfer Programme in the UK.

For me, students and academics should be going along to Meetups, and interfacing with small companies who have a big vision. And rather than waiting for industry to come knocking on their door to pick off their latest research paper, that academics go out and engage with those with great ideas, and see how they can bring their work closer to their vision.

Conclusions

Well done, SICSA. Get people talking. People create impact. People want to help make things better. People are our best investment for our economy, and we should support those with the best ideas and vision, and help them along their way.

For us too, we have the privilege to form a partnership with Blockpass of the funding of a Blockchain Identity Lab, and which will allow ideas and vision to fuse, and to create the visions of the future in a form that others will understand, and to break down our key barriers. If you have ideas, just come and drop by for a chat or go and talk with your local university?

Why not go along to a Meetup near you, and get involved in defining a vision of the future, or go fund a PhD studentship in your university. In fact, just get involved, otherwise you can’t just sit back and in a few years say that that was all wrong … it will be part of your fault it didn’t quite happen. Like never before, we need to find our great people, and help them.

Here’s a Blockchain one that we are hosting in Edinburgh [link]. There are ones on Data Science, IoT, and lots of other areas, so go get involved. Our future economy could be dependent on You!