Market research, consultation and analysis

• In-depth market and needs analysis conducted across stakeholder groups to identify standards strategies required to support growth in emerging areas.
• Senior industry stakeholder engagement to understand views on where standardization is required and benefits that this would deliver. This can be in the form of depth interviews, focus groups or larger workshop events.
• Planning, managing and conducting workshops with sector experts. These can be informative events to update key industry players of recent developments, or interactive events to help define the scope of a standard.
• Custom market reports that are developed to include specifications such as market sizing and current and emerging trends.

Challenge: Technology organizations are innovating fast, in ways that impact both individuals and society, and this affects how products and applications are developed, manufactured and brought to market. Innovate UK, the UK’s innovation agency, wanted to understand the desire for standardization around ‘responsible innovation’ in sectors that were working with cutting-edge technologies.

Our solution: We carried out 48 in-depth interviews with leading innovators across a range of technologies and sectors including AI and big data, life sciences, robotics and autonomous systems, social media, and advanced materials. The research revealed that an overwhelming majority of these participants saw the importance of having a framework governing innovative technologies.

The result: The findings gave Innovate UK the evidence to move forwards with a guidance framework to help organizations demonstrate responsible innovation. The research uncovered stakeholder opinions about why a framework would be important to their industry and exactly how it could be used by them and others connected with the innovation process in future.