Create insight and impact
Global shifts continue to drive change, move goal posts, test resilience, and create new opportunities. While organisations have always sought accelerated and sustainable growth, today’s leaders also want to do better for their people, customers, and the planet. What they’re looking for are ingenious solutions to previously unsolvable challenges.
We know solving complex challenges demands diverse teams of experts. Those who can ignite sparks of brilliance by bringing together different mindsets, experience, and skillsets. Combine this with breakthrough technologies and you’ve created the conditions to unlock opportunity. A practical route to exciting new-to-world solutions and impactful enterprise transformation.
But it’s not enough to just focus on what’s ahead. Clients need innovation that accelerates results. With a confident understanding of the challenge, progress is made with fewer roadblocks, faster handovers, and de-risked long-term solutions. Progress through collaboration happens as exciting new partnerships and relationships shape policy and regulation, and transform organisations impacting business, economies, and societies for the better.
As we collectively push for a safer, healthier, more equitable, prosperous, and sustainable world, we must never stop disrupting, moving goal posts, testing our resilience, and creating new opportunities.
Diverse experts unlock opportunity
Diversity of expertise – from perspective to experience – leads to better ideas. To deliver innovative and effective solutions to previously unsolvable problems, organisations need the right blend of diverse experts in perfect combination with emerging technologies. Our strategists, innovators, designers, consultants, digital experts, scientists, engineers, and technologists complement clients’ own teams to surface better solutions in accelerated timescales.
It’s exactly how we helped the team at Amsterdam Airport Schiphol reach its ambitious goal of becoming one of the most sustainable airports in the world. And why the team at security company, ADT, understood it would take a broader blend of expertise and deeper knowledge of Google’s cutting-edge digital solutions capabilities to help it create an award-winning home security system.
The power of deep industry expertise is also how a team of energy transition and market investment experts helped Invenergy and energyRe beat the odds to win a major offshore wind auction, gaining entry and significant market share in one of the fastest growing sectors in the US and global energy transition.
Leaders understand that global solutions are needed to tackle global challenges, and these demand a wide breadth of expertise. Our Global Threat Assessment 2023 report, in partnership with an international network and steering committee, informs WeProtect’s Model National Response to prevent and tackle child sexual exploitation and abuse around the world.
Breakthrough technologies made real
Whether the answer to a challenge is a change in strategy, a new product or service, or a wider enterprise transformation, organisations look for those who can deliver technology-enabled real-world innovation in shorter timescales.
This can mean optimising existing technologies for better performance, which is exactly what Rentokil Initial got when it asked us to augment its digital, data, and analytics capabilities at speed to improve customer experience.
And it can mean exploiting newer technologies to create brand new market offerings, like we did with Danish logistics company, PostNord, building a customer experience generative AI chatbot in just eight weeks.
For Hubly Surgical, in 2020, we designed and tested a pioneering new life-saving bore drill to replace existing archaic and high-risk methods in intracranial surgery. In 2023, it received FDA approval meaning this new-to-world neurotechnology can now be brought to market to save lives.
Responding to – and pre-empting the needs of – the empowered consumer is a common catalyst for breakthrough technologies. Our Vision for banking research leverages our innovative FutureWorlds methodology to help financial service organisations better understand the opportunities of an evolving fintech landscape.
Innovation accelerates results
For innovation to achieve real impact, it needs to be viewed through a full lifecycle, end-to-end lens. Efforts to truly transform organisations often fail because short-term point solutions don’t take a holistic view of the challenges and opportunities. This slows time-to-value and can incur significant risks and costs. Understanding the impact of potential changes across a complex system is imperative to secure a rapid return on innovation investment.
Safely, securely, and cost-effectively cleaning up decommissioned nuclear sites requires navigating layers of complexity. Our work, in partnership with Jacobs, for the UK’s Nuclear Decommissioning Authority saw us lead a digital enterprise asset transformation journey within a highly regulated landscape. Our joint PA and Jacobs team combined nuclear sector expertise alongside digital, data, organisational design, and people and change skills to rapidly transform NDA’s asset support capability, resulting in major savings for safety critical, regulated assets.
Access to banking is another critically important factor in the safety and security of citizens and must be viewed with both a wellbeing and an economic lens. When Bankomat set out to bring its cash-in-transit services back in-house to improve Sweden’s banking resilience and financial inclusion, our experts helped the bank pro-actively de-risk the solution at each stage of the complex supply chain – from transport, logistics, and infrastructure to data science, security, and HR.
Accelerating results within complex systems were equally as important when we were called upon to lead the UK National Health Service’s rollout of 20 million doses of life-saving vaccines in just two months during the COVID-19 pandemic. Overnight, we mobilised a diverse team – from those with deep experience delivering complex healthcare and life sciences programmes, to experts in strategic planning and finance, modelling, operational performance, and behavioural change communications. All focused on the uninterrupted supply and deployment of the drug that continues to keep people safe.
We have invested in long-term research to understand how innovation can accelerate results in multiple industries. In 2023, we published our Healthier at home research revealing the opportunities for healthcare leaders to create wider, faster, and more personalised access to healthcare.
Progress through collaboration
Our team thrives on solving the most complex challenges. Creating strategies and leading transformations across organisations and industries. Often that happens through new and innovative collaborations. Bringing together different perspectives and stakeholders – regulators, the public sector, the private sector, start-ups, supply chains, the science community, and more – can unlock new value.
As part of our new defence and security consortia, Team Protect, we’re now collaborating with the UK’s Ministry of Defence (MOD) to deliver CRENIC – a project that will keep soldiers safe from radio-controlled threats. The project has so far brought together 110 diverse and globally dispersed businesses into the same ecosystem – breaking down some of the traditional barriers around public sector procurement to fast-track innovation.
Our work with the Building Safety Regulator (BSR) put human-centred design at the heart of new digital services for regulation to improve the safety of high-rise buildings. In just three months, we took BSR from policy to initial launch. Bringing together our own diverse experts with the UK’s Health and Safety Executive’s regulatory policy, communications, and operational experts, and blending this with our deep Microsoft relationship and other technology partnerships, the new digital service is a vital step in turning new building safety law into action.
The impact of sectors and partnerships collaborating in new ways is explored in our The always-on advantage report which evidences how the partnerships can transform a nation’s transport systems and infrastructure.
