Business research impact

Our researchers have investigated peer-to-peer learning and generated in-depth knowledge about successful networks. The resulting Profitnet programme has worked with the leaders from over 1,000 businesses in the last ten years, influencing performance and affecting the working lives of around 15,000 employees in the UK, Ireland and South Africa. 

The university has established 84 peer-to-peer networks in these countries, transforming the profitability and sustainability of the participating small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) companies. Evidence from the county of Sussex alone shows that Profitnet-participating firms in Sussex increased their gross profits by 9 per cent while the overall population of SMEs in the county experienced a decrease of 15.2 per cent in profits during the same time.

The programme has successfully introduced the concept of innovation and innovation management process to mainstream SMEs that initially viewed innovation management as the preserve of businesses with advanced technology or for large enterprises. The project investigated the dynamics and the effects of ‘constructed’ learning networks and led to valuable insights for business leaders, policy makers and universities. Involvement in the Profitnet programme has been instrumental in company growth, helping business leaders to collaborate confidentially with peers to address diverse issues and develop opportunities.

Profitnet has been cited as an exemplar programme for supporting small businesses by both the UK Secretary of State for Innovation, Universities and Skills in the House of Commons in 2009 and in the government-commissioned ‘Wilson Report’ in 2012 which reviewed business-university collaborations.

Our research identified the company characteristics, mindsets and skills which contribute to successful innovation. The research provided the core body of knowledge used by the Managing Innovation training programme that has been accessed by more than 10,000 managers worldwide. The programme presents the findings of research in powerful, accessible and usable ways. It has been adopted by some of the world’s most innovative companies, including Medtronic (on Businessweek’s top 100 most innovative companies list), UNESCO, Cisco Systems, Citibank, IBM and Abbott Laboratories, to stimulate personal development and organisational change. A Managing Innovation train-the-trainer programme has been developed that has provided intensive development for certified trainers and facilitated the roll-out of this programme through Australia, Brazil, Chile, Denmark, Poland, Mexico, Tanzania, USA and Venezuela.

Insights underpinning the research challenged several assumptions typically adopted by managers, trainers and teachers of innovation. Specifically, the research found that there was not a single style of management that was ‘innovation friendly’; rather, managers needed to revise, review and reconfigure strategies according to which of five identified phases of innovation they were experiencing: ‘searching’, ‘exploring’, ‘committing’, ‘realising’ or ‘optimising’.

The Managing Innovation training programme was used in CENTRIM’s ProfitNet initiative and forms the basis of continuing peer-to-peer coaching and advisory support. Transferring theory into practice was further enhanced by a collaboration with a specialist training company to develop a training course which subsequently became the Managing Innovation train-the-trainer programme. CENTRIM has facilitated impact by developing 11 bespoke DVDs for trainers, training manuals, one-to-one coaching and a rigorous certification process.

The impact of enabling the adoption of a solid concept of innovation and innovation management cannot be underestimated. Not only does it give organisations a unified perspective, concept and language about the innovation process, it also helps to embed an innovation culture, leading to improvements in areas including improved efficiency, communications, service levels, cost control and decision-making.

The challenges facing international humanitarian action are growing in scale, scope and complexity.  According to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA):

Climate change, conflict and urbanization, among other forces, are increasing vulnerability and exacerbating the impact and intensity of natural disasters..., the number of people affected doubled, from 102 million in 2015 to 204 million in 2016. The total damage also increased from US$90 billion in 2015 to $147 billion in 2016. (OCHA 2017) 

As a consequence, the humanitarian sector has recently begun to embrace innovation as a means of becoming both more effective and efficient. Research in CENTRIM was undertaken in a project sponsored by the Department for International Development and conducted as part of the UK’s contribution to the UN’s 2016 World Humanitarian Summit. Our recommendation to the Summit, including the building of a global alliance for humanitarian innovation (GAHI), was accepted and is bringing together diverse actors to provide a platform for collective learning and action and the creation of a shared vision. The GAHI, established in 2017, is helping organisations working in this field to move from a reactive innovation mode to a more proactive one. Twenty humanitarian organisations including UN agencies and international NGOs have become founding members and CENTRIM has accepted an invitation to become an academic partner to the organisation and will work with the GAHI to improve the evidence base in the sector. 

A second impact in this field relates to our recommendation for the need to ensure funding mechanisms across the full range of innovation activities from search and discovery through to scaling – with specific attention to be paid to the latter. We argued for tangible and visible support for scalable innovations. In response to that recommendation the Humanitarian Innovation Fund (supported by £1.2 million from the Netherlands government) created a new innovation stream specifically focused on scaling (Accelerating the Journey to Scale, Humanitarian Innovation Fund, 2016).

This research examined a series of megaprojects in London which demonstrated a new capability in the UK to successfully deliver megaprojects. The research built on and extended previous CENTRIM studies of capital goods suppliers, which showed how firms could build new project capabilities over time as they learnt from their previous project experiences. The initial study focused on BAA(the owner of Heathrow Airport)’s deliberate strategic efforts to improve the delivery of routine capital projects and a one-off mega project -Terminal 5. This breakthrough project led not only to BAA developing new project capabilities, but also those of its main suppliers as well. These capabilities were further exploited and developed in the construction programmes for the London 2012 Olympics and Paralympics, Crossrail and Thames Tideway programmes. Each of these projects built on the learning from previous megaprojects and incrementally improved capabilities to deliver successful outcomes.

CENTRIM researchers in this area are working closely with the Association for Project Management as members of various ‘Enabling Change special interest groups aiming to provide thought leadership in developing project capabilities in both the Transport and Public Sector sectors. This work has led to recommendations to change the APM’s Body of Knowledge to accommodate learning from our research on complex projects.

Future research in this area promises even more dramatic impact as the focus shifts to improving the performance of public sector projects. Working with the IPA our current research addresses a huge portfolio of projects (currently valued at approximately half a trillion pounds) and feeds directly into mandated procedures for their delivery. If new procedures reduced costs by 1% in just 5% of the projects in the GMPP this could save £250m. If the research helps the IPA reduce costs by 20% (which has been achieved using ‘intelligent client’ methods in the private sector) the savings could potentially be £100bn.

CENTRIM was a major partner in three research grants from the EU programme which have researched the system of coaching for business innovation in Small and Medium-sized Enterprises. The projects have developed a range of tools to allow business innovation coaches to interact creatively with their clients and foster the development of innovation processes within the SME to serve its strategic objectives, such as tools for: 

• reflecting on the SME business architecture and its mid-term and long-term strategy
• realise their current stage of development and the next stage of development to follow
• assessing the SME’s position on the four innovation vectors
• understanding the needs of their customers
• generating a segmentation of the targeted market
• considering the macro design of their organisation
• assessing their absorptive capacity. 

The developed system included also the development of the following:

• Method Handbook to define and explain the main concepts and main approaches used (e.g. differences between innovation coaching and other forms of coaching);
• Key Account Manager (KAM) role, responsible for a diagnostic session to assess the innovation needs of an SME and identify a short list of proposed coaches;
• A special training programme to train business innovation coaches to deliver a session for the SME that is effective both from the results and the learning point of view;
• An Organisation Handbook to explain how the different parts work together to deliver an effective system; 
• A tailored IT system, the Case Tracker, to support the workflow of the business innovation coaching system. 

The system was piloted, developed and eventually implemented in full-scale with great success in several SME support agencies in Europe such as the Platinn in Switzerland, JIC in the Czech Republic and LIC in Lithuania. Thousands of SMEs have experienced the coaching system. The feedback from hundreds of SMEs has been tremendous with SMEs in a range of sectors reporting the generation of real value out of the process. In 2015, the Executive Agency for SMEs, part of the European Commission, has asked a consortium in which CENTRIM was the academic lead partner to develop a system for developing innovation coaches to be used in their flagship programme, the SME Instrument. 

More than 4,000 SMEs have benefited to date from the coaching services in the SME Instrument programme. A recent independent evaluation report has shown an impressive record. 88% of the involved SMEs have improved their business strategy, 84% expects their funded innovation project to progress faster while 83% report an improved decision-making. Only 4 years after the start of the scheme, each 1€ invested generated already €1.6 of further investments. In fact the supported SMEs have managed to attract €1.35 billion of follow-up funding with €966 million coming from private equity investments. The average-time-to-invest dropped to 9 months after receiving the support, compared to 18 months before the support while the average investment raises to €6 million after the support compared to €4 million before the support.