11 April 2018
Having made it to my third “start the week” meeting, it was very sparsely attended, but at least Heidi had arranged a diversion. The “lessons learned” meeting was a blast. Tom Harris described the analysis of the first projects set up under the Technology Programme to finish. It turns out that the format for the analysis had been decided about a year ago, whilst still within the DTI and only implemented late last year – the projects had finished later than originally anticipated.
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29 March 2018
Of course, this was a short week and we used up most of Tuesday in a meeting you all attended, so I will start with Wednesday!!
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22 March 2018
The week started on a positive note. I took part in a NESTA “conversation” on innovation for environmental sustainability. It was a sparsely populated meeting, with Jack Frost (now of Johnson Matthey Fuel Cells, but once of the office next door to me in BP), David Fisk (the RAEng Professor of Sustainability at Imperial), Fred Stewart (currently at NESTA) and Adrian
Smith (SPRU) all taking chunks out of the policy wonk from DEFRA.
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16 March 2018
What with all the meetings about strategy this week, I haven’t had much exposure to the real world, but did manage to sneak in some clandestine interactions.
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08 March 2018
It was about 8.13 am on Monday when my phone stopped telling me about e-mails. I have been getting the usual ones from the larks in the TSB when it just stopped. I rebooted the phone but still nothing. As the week progressed, I learned that nearly every other Technology Strategy Board member in London had similar problems but that we were okay because Vodafone had classed our problem as high priority and would deal with it within 5 working days.
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02 March 2018
The week didn’t start well – I was coming down with a cold by Monday morning, but the recruitment of a nurse to work with Graham Worsley started to cheer me up!!
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23 February 2018
Monday was the Design Council visit. They have obviously decided that we are an important partner, because – in the progress of the planning the day – they upgraded from their Business Development guy to their CEO and several heads of bits.
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15 February 2018
Monday included 2 separate meetings in London. The first was with the Department for Transport – the Chief Scientists Unit in particular. For the last 6 months they have been funding the National Transport Information Incubator. This was the sole outcome of a competition last year for a way to demonstrate the “power of information”.
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08 February 2018
The last week or so have been moderately intense and I thought I ought to dump what I have learned before my ageing brain dumps it to a place with limited access!! It is slightly raw, but lots of it is good.
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31 January 2018
Ten years ago, the Technology Strategy Board was 8 months old, although we had only had a CEO for 4 of them. We had successfully run the first set of competitions bequeathed to us by the outgoing DTI Innovation Unit, and were planning the first of our own design. The Technologists had been out and about meeting companies and trying to see what would help them grow and prosper. For my own part, I had just been offered a 4 year extension to my initial year long contract, and was contemplating the enormity of designing the whole competition landscape.
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