Making the best new ideas happen for your organisation

The idea

Faced with mounting challenges in the water sector such as leakage and environmental impacts, water companies in England & Wales recognised they could stimulate innovation through releasing open and shared data. But previous attempts to continuously release data as an industry had struggled to gain momentum.

What we did

Idea Steer’s CEO led the Blueprint work on Stream, a collective of 16 water companies and 7 partner organisations focusing on unlocking the potential of water data. The Blueprint defined Stream’s vision, value proposition, architecture and delivery plans.

After securing innovation funding, he also oversaw the Implementation phase, taking Stream from MVP to live service and defining the long term commercial model.

The outcome

Stream is now a live platform for open and shared water data, enabling innovation, recognised for its cross-sector collaboration and winner of OpenUK’s Open Data award 2024.

The idea

Despite rapidly rising to become the UK’s no.1 home delivery pizza company, further growth was under pressure from geographical saturation, competition from food delivery apps, and higher food and labour costs. Utilising customer data better was seen as an enabler for an improved digital proposition and customer experience, but a clear vision and new marketing tech stack was needed to unlock that potential.

What we did

Drawing inspiration from multiple sectors, a set of data-driven marketing initiatives was priortised to move towards best practice, setting a future vision for the company’s marketing and defining steps to advance its digital maturity.

The prioritised initiatives also highlighted the capabilities and business architecture required, enabling a further partner to define the new technical architecture required

Leveraging Idea Steer’s previous experience of contextual targeting and digital customer experience optimisation was instrumental to managing stakeholders, driving valuable discussions and buy-in with franchise operators, the company’s advertising agency and technical partners.

The outcome

Implementing the new marketing tech stack has advanced the coordination between TV advertising and direct comms such as SMS and email, now personalised with smart contextual targeting for true one-to-one messaging.

The company’s impressive growth continued, with annual like-for-like sales in the years following the project averaging 9%.

The idea

As a Critical National Infrastructure provider this telecoms company was trusted to provide connectivity for many of the UK’s utilities and was being asked if it could help them in other ways. But what might that look like, and what would it take to make it happen?

What we did

The initial focus involved defining a new growth strategy for the utilities market, including outlining value propositions, testing demand, specifying capability requirements and building the investment case.

Propositions were designed to meet utility companies’ needs for help with collecting and enhancing their network data - through deploying sensors, securely managing connectivity, managing data, and providing advanced analytics, prediction and AI.

With the growth strategy agreed, Idea Steer’s experience also drove subsequent phases - defining the go-to-market plan, prioritising the sales pipeline, engaging new and existing capability partners, running proof of concept trials, and rolling out briefing packs to sales teams.

The outcome

The growth strategy is now being successfully implemented, with major contracts starting to be signed for the provision of managed connectivity and secure data management to utilities companies.

The idea

A leading Media & Entertainment company was looking to bring a game-changing customer experience to set itself apart from competitors and brands in other sectors. Recognising a growing customer desire to self-serve, they wanted to employ a “digital first” approach. But how should that be defined and implemented in a way that customers love?

What we did

By combining stakeholder and expert views with our analysis of customer pain points, and comparing that with best practice examples of digital customer service across sectors globally, we were able to agree a compelling vision for digital first customer service.

AI and data-enabled value propositions, customer journeys, benefits cases, capabilities roadmaps and required investments were all defined, to support an omnichannel approach to customer service where the customer remains in control.

The outcome

Adoption of its digital first customer service channels rapidly grew to 50% of all interactions in the year following the project, with the company placing first for customer service across all categories in Ofcom’s quarterly tracker. 

Operating costs also fell by 3% as a percentage of revenues in the same period.

The idea

In a world of increasingly sophisticated threats, this Defence & Security organisation was looking to enhance its synthetic test & evaluation capabilities alongside its physical testing, to enable new military technologies to be deployed faster despite continuing fiscal pressures.

What we did

By examining relevant best practices from other industry sectors, not just in the UK but worldwide, be brought key insights to accelerate the client’s development and integration of synthetic testing.

Setting out a model for effective deployment of Digital Twins and the implementation of Digital Threads, we identified requirements for sensing, data management and asset management and their evolution across a digital maturity matrix.

The implications and opportunities for greatly enhanced data-driven decision making were presented to an audience of data and testing experts from across the armed forces.

The outcome

Integrating synthetic modelling in combination with physical verification data has enabled acceleration of testing & evaluation whilst maintaining test results credibility and opening up wider opportunities for deployment.

In addition, the implementation of digital threads is enhancing access to reliable, consistent data available to internal experts and external customers alike.