A Chat With: James Byford, Founder of the Adventures and Wisdom Institute

14 Dec

Innovation has been on our minds here at Chalk Eastbourne over the last few months. From Zunoma winning the Innovation category of the Eastbourne Business Awards, sponsored by Switchplane, to the launch of our Chalk Connect group aimed at inspiring those in our industry to develop their passion projects, it’s got us thinking about how the CDT sector can create more space for innovation in the day-to-day.

We’re asking ourselves: What conditions breed innovation and how can we make it part of our culture?

Who better to speak to about this than someone who has not only been actively engaged in research exploring how innovators are made, but has also pivoted many times in his own career and driven innovation forward throughout each organisation he has been involved in?

James Byford, an experienced leader, educator, and innovator, shared his wisdom with us, highlighting that the best innovations come when we step out of our digital bubble and disrupt the way we think and interact.

A tech and creative fusion

James Byford was one of the researchers involved in the preliminary Brighton Fuse study, a two-year research project focused on a cluster of Creative, Digital, and IT (CDIT) companies in Brighton and Hove. Around 500 firms were involved and interviews were carried out with 77 local entrepreneurs, involving businesses of all sizes and offerings.

The research generated a number of surprising and informative insights into what drives innovation in a modern, dynamic, and industrial cluster. One of the essential findings was that the more that you fuse tech with creativity - at the founder level or within small businesses - the higher the propensity there is for these businesses to outperform their peers. This, along with environmental factors such as collaboration, sharing of contacts, and a wide pool of freelancers to call on, can make a huge difference.

The outcome of this research led to the creation of Brighton FuseBox - a live lab with James as the researcher in residence. Taking what had been learnt from the Fuse report, plus his own experience, James and the team explored how they could create the right conditions to support a group of innovators. They constructed a programme, selecting participants who were recruited based on their desire to develop a new business, product, service, or way of operating.

An innovation toolbox

Again, essential to this process was making arts and humanities a tangible part of their regular business activity, and this was incorporated throughout the programme. A toolbox of techniques was developed, which was designed to challenge, disrupt, and support critical reflection and connection between the group of innovators. The activities also involved connecting with customers and the market, and enabling accelerated creation, articulation, and iteration of propositions.

By focusing on innovators rather than single business ideas, FuseBox24 aimed to equip individuals with learning strategies to make them robust and sustainable innovators going into the future. The idea was to challenge the individuals and bring them out of their comfort zone. Just some of these creative toolbox activities included:

Pecha Kucha format presentations, delivering 20 slides of 20 seconds each, totalling 400 seconds, ideally on a large screen in a social space with drinks and snacks (see pechakucha.com).
The FuseBox business canvas; large whiteboards on wheels where participants could create a single-image business plan. The commonly used ‘lean canvas’ model evolved during the programme through collaborative exercises into the equally important ‘fat canvas’ model where quick iterations of canvases were created, thinking about gaps in propositions.
Utilising collected/donated recyclable/upcyclable matter (junk), stationery, glue, scissors and large amounts of cardboard to create a smorgasbord. This helped the team bond in the early stages of the programme as well as helping to experiment and remove blockages in minimum viable product tests.
Short smartphone video interviews with participants at key stages of the programme to help develop their reflective capacities and practice.

The 24-week programme featured different phases. Starting with an initiation (immersion) into the programme, they then explored their proposition ideas further (readiness), iterated on these, and then exited the programme in ‘Jump’ mode, able to repeat the iterative learning process in their future trajectory with the resilience gained from all they had learned.

For the full report and findings, visit The Brighton Fuse website.

All the findings from the live lab led to Innovate UK and The Arts Council putting together a fund for three other cities to run a similar programme. All these programs are focused on preparing individuals to build, test, and learn.

So what can we learn?

The FuseBox24 findings highlight the importance of new kinds of incubator live lab spaces and innovator support programmes shaped by creative arts, business, and technology. But what can businesses that are already established take from the research? How can these businesses inspire a culture of innovation, and potentially pivot in new directions, whilst at the same time balancing on the fine tightrope that comes with keeping a business afloat and managing its day-to-day service?

To explore this more, we can again look to James.

As well as undertaking his academic work, James has run, sold, and transformed businesses throughout his career. After completing the FuseBox programme and disseminating the research findings, he was keen to apply what he had learned in new contexts. In one example, he described using a ‘collaborative but disruptive approach’ with a business to discover who their customers were, what their needs were, and what the team really wanted to do as innovators. The products and services that emerged were clear: customers wanted triple-AAA quality, often gamified, learning experiences; which were informed by R&D focused on developing consumer VR games that the team wanted to make. This motivated the team, satisfied the customers, and formed the basis for an R&D-led strategy for the business. It included techniques such as the lean canvas to create a clear visualisation of the business model and iterate on this. He also ensured that the mixed income model of retainers and larger project fees were augmented with tax credits claimed for R&D with grant funding to ensure that they had budget ring-fenced for innovation activity. In short, he created the conditions at a strategic level for an innovation culture and, in James’ words, “made sure everybody knew that’s what we were doing and being as a business.”

He also took his learnings to Chelsea Football Club’s Foundation, where he was responsible for the full lifecycle of the Chelsea FC Entrepreneur Programme, an inclusive and innovative bootcamp supporting London-based adult learners into self-employment and business start-ups. The Programme was designed to deliver on the Foundation’s core values of inspiration, motivation and engagement. James said, “I treated all of the participants as innovators committed to personal and professional transformation. Many were furloughed, made redundant and forced into career pivots during the pandemic. For others, they may have been experts with high levels of education in other homelands prior to settling here. They all benefitted massively from being grounded in an innovation culture with peer-to-peer support networks emerging out of the cohorts - many of which remain connected years later.”

As James shared with us, the most important thread in embedding a culture of innovation is “really connecting with your people as a number one priority; letting them voice new and different ideas and committing the business to driving some of them forwards.” He added, “Ideas for new methods and approaches, products and services are all around us and whilst for many ideas the conditions, (often timing with technology, for example) might not be right, some will be crucial. My learning from evidence is that if you align business strategies and structures to openly support idea generation and rapid prototyping/testing, a culture of innovation will develop and you will reap the rewards including real change and growth.”

Innovation in the day-to-day

As business owners, we can give space, time, and support for our team to explore new ideas and test them out, encouraging collaborative activities that feed into (or draw out) a creative mindset and bring new ideas to the surface.

How much time should be dedicated to such activity will, of course, vary depending on many factors, including where your strategic focus lies. But, by creating some of the key conditions for innovation to take place and instilling a sense of creativity and innovation in your day-to-day, larger and more focused activity could come easier when you are ready to make a more focused pivot within your business.

Adventures and Wisdom Institute

Another key learning from the FuseBox model was that most innovation outcomes don’t derive from linear processes. As a result, James is focused on a theory of change to embed innovator capabilities in education, business support, and the culture sector and their overlaps through new approaches.

Adventures and Wisdom Institute, is his new research-innovation business which will offer programmes, learning experiences and tools to support innovators and the development of innovation cultures. His initial focus is with young people and career changers, working with Talent Accelerator across East Sussex to try and overcome the challenges that come from the lack of access to and wider participation in conventional creative industries work experience programmes. He is working with young people to create experiences and resources that work for them, where they are. This means the Institute is a pop-up innovation lab in its current iteration.

James shared, “it’s about helping people make change in the world and making change in their own lives. If people have the capacity to innovate, no matter what the challenges, they can pivot to find the opportunity. This innovative mindset is absolutely key to business survival, helping organisations to pivot or adjust when they need to be able to not only survive, but thrive”.

To find out more about the Adventures and Wisdom Institute, please visit https://www.aw.institute/

Share your wisdom!

If you are already finding ways to foster more innovation in your businesses, please get in touch and share your learnings. We would love to hear and report on some real-world examples in future newsletters. Or join us at a future Chalk Connect session and support those needing help, guidance, or just an enthusiastic ear to turn their passion projects into a more solid reality.