Tech For Good - Issue 16

VERSION 1’S PATHWAY TO TALENT DEVELOPMENT ADDRESSING THE DIGITAL DIVIDE IN EDUCATION HOW GETTING DANCING COULD SAVE THE PLANET DERK ARTS’ VISION FOR THE FUTURE OF MEDICAL SCIENCE

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CARING FOR INNOVATION The National Health Service has innovated at speed to tackle the pandemic. But can this be maintained?

We speak to healthcare leaders to find out

DANIEL BRIGHAM Content Director

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ver the last 18 months, health organisations have faced extraordinary strain. In the United Kingdom, the story is no different: the National Health Service fell under enormous pressure from the pandemic, with overwhelming numbers of seriously ill patients in need of hospital beds and care. The impact on the rest of the NHS was severe, and remains so.

Sometimes, though, out of the most appalling of situations comes hope, and change. Traditionally, healthcare systems have not embraced nor fostered innovation. Risk-taking is not something that can be signed off easily when lives are at risk. However, innovation is a necessity, and health services across the world including the NHS - have been forced to be agile because of the pandemic. Innovation in the NHS has led to enormous

benefits not only in the UK but across the world. But will it last?

We speak to leaders in medical science, including Dr Wieland Sommer, CEO of Smart Reporting, and representatives from private sector organisations and the NHS, to find out where the NHS goes now. It’s a fascinating read, and a story of the aspirational nature of innovation where it’s needed most: saving lives.

Elsewhere, Version 1 reveals how to look after employees to forge their career pathway, education charity The Brilliant Club tells us why closing the digital divide is imperative, we speak to a 12-year-old coder in Teenage Tech Stories, and find out why nightclubs are embracing a greener future.

I hope you enjoy the issue!

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From volcano energy to heart disease detection, we round up the latest news

We head to Berlin and Glasgow to find out how clubbing is going green

GLOBAL GOOD

ENVIRONMENT

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Healthcare leaders on how well placed the NHS is to innovate post-COVID

Blue Prism’s Alex Alcalde on educating the future intelligent workforce

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EXPERT INSIGHT

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How The Brilliant Club and Times Higher Education are tackling the rising digital divide

How Derk Arts is helping Castor reinvent the future of medical science

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LEADERSHIP

Version 1 on talent management and the pathway to successful careers

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TEEN TECH STORIES

We speak to 12-year-old coder and NFT creator Benyamin Ahmed

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GOOD OR BAD?

Can solar geoengineering stop climate change?

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GLOBAL GOOD

SpaceX launches first all-civilian crew to orbit

El Salvador uses volcanos to mine Bitcoin El Salvador has mined its first Bitcoin using clean energy from a volcano, the country’s president announced in a tweet.

El Salvador sits on the edge of the Pacific ‘Ring of Fire’ and has 20 potentially active volcanoes, which generate 21.7% of the country’s energy. El Salvador made Bitcoin a legal tender in September 2021 and it plans to build a 100% clean Bitcoin-mining plant.

The first all-civilian crew has been launched into space aboard a SpaceX spacecraft. The crew spent three days in orbit before returning to Earth.

The mission signals the start of a new era in the space tourism business marked by rise of private flights. “We’re very aware of how lucky we are to be able to be part of this history that SpaceX is creating right now,” said Jared Isaacman, a member of the crew.

Children to receive malaria vaccination across Africa

GLOBAL GOOD In case you missed them, we’ve debriefed six of the most interesting Tech For Good stories from the last four weeks 6

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The World Health Organization (WHO) says the RTS,S malaria vaccine should be rolled out across sub-Saharan Africa following successful trials in children.

WHO says it is a “historic moment” that could save “tens of thousands of young lives each year”. In 2019, more than 260,000 children died of malaria in Africa.

Trials show the vaccine is safe and reduces severe malaria by 30%.

NEWS DEBRIEF

Artrya cleared to bring AI heart disease detection tool to market in Australia

UK sets new National Artificial Intelligence Strategy The UK government has published a new 10-year plan to bolster its machine learning capabilities and make the country a global “artificial intelligence superpower” post-Brexit. The National Artificial Intelligence Strategy aims to “level up” the development and applications of artificial intelligence among the nation’s businesses and develop the next generation of homegrown tech talent.

Artrya will market its AI heart detection tool in Australia early next year after satisfying regulators. The tool, called Salix creates a 3D image of a patient’s heart and generates an assessment of issues within 15 minutes. Salix has been developed in partnership with researchers from the University of Western Australia. Artrya is set to raise as much as $40m from an IPO.

Edtech Riiid buys Langoo to expand into Japan Riiid, an edtech startup from South Korea, has bouts its distribution partner Langoo. The acquisition will allow Riiid to expand into Japan.

Riiid’s AI-powered app specialises in tutoring and has rapidly grown in popularity in the region. In May, the company raised $175m in new funding from Softbank’s Vision Fund 2. Japan is seen as one of the biggest education markets in the world.

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INNOVATION

NATION The global pandemic has tested the UK’s NHS to its limits, and it has innovated in response. Can it maintain the momentum?

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ealthcare systems worldwide are notoriously difficult environments in which to innovate.

They are too big, too important, and too political to easily accommodate the freewheeling risk-taking that is core to a dynamic startup culture.

However, the rigours of the SARSCoV-2 pandemic have revealed a remarkable ability in healthcare systems to transform fast and at enormous scale when confronted with a crisis.

The UK’s National Health Service (NHS) is a prime example. An employer of more than 1.3 million people, it leveraged technology to pivot how it operates while simultaneously using its unique structure to stand up capabilities in clinical trials and genomic sequencing that were - and continue to be - of enormous benefit to the rest of the world.

Fostering innovation in the NHS is a hot political topic, and advancing technology forms a central thread in the Long Term Plan for the NHS, unveiled just months before the global pandemic took hold. In particular it aims to improve data sharing to help divest more control to patients and their communities.

But while the coronavirus crisis has empowered backs-to-the-wall innovation in the NHS in the short term, how well placed is it now to maintain that momentum?

Tech For Good sought the views of healthcare leaders both within the NHS and in industry to find out.

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THE INTEROPERABILITY DREAM

By Andrew Raynes, Chief Information Officer at the Royal Papworth Hospital NHS Foundation Trust

The health industry is playing catch-up when it comes to data sharing. For example, if you’re talking to an insurance company or an electricity supplier, you only have to give them your details once and you’re on record with them, and that data is easily shared between departments within the company. This, unfortunately, isn’t always the case in health and care.

But it is changing.

I’m the chair of the Cambridgeshire and Peterborough Integrated Care System (ICS) digital group, and the next chunky piece of work we’re undertaking concerns record-sharing, using an integration engine that has data moving in and out, safely and for the purposes of direct care, between public health organisations. The end goal is that a patient will only need to hand over their information once, and in doing so we can make sure everyone has the information they need to give that patient the best possible treatment, wherever and whenever they need it.

We hope that means there should no longer be a need for a patient to have to share their personal details multiple times, and this journey has already started for 10

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us with our neighbouring NHS hospital.

Next, our job is to scale it.

Where you start with a shared care record at ICS level, that can then be shared at a regional level, and then onto data sharing on a national scale. This has been a long-time coming: I’ve been in the industry for more than 20 years, and we were talking about this when I started. But, finally, we’re on the cusp of achieving something great.

In that time we’ve moved on from believing all data has to be on one system, to realising that the answer actually lies in being able to efficiently share data for direct care across multiple

Andrew Raynes

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systems and platforms. We achieve that by ensuring standards are the same across the board in the health and care service. So, even if my hospital uses a different system to another hospital, we can share data because it conforms to the same standards as all other hospitals.

But we’re not there yet.

Vendors aren’t all using the same standards, and true interoperability isn’t achievable until they do. So there must be a mindset shift for the apex of interoperability to suddenly become a reality; that’s when we complete what I call Maslow’s Hierarchy of Digital Needs.

In the Maslow triangle, the most fundamental and important layer is the one at the bottom, which supports the growth of everything above it. In healthcare, that bottom layer is infrastructure, which in our world means good data quality.

Good data quality is when you’re using a standard messaging format, whether you’re using on-prem, cloud or hybrid. So if you’ve got that in place at the bottom of the triangle, you’re all good. You

can improve patient care, and you can innovate at greater speed. But the key is ensuring our data quality is good, and easily shared. We’re much closer to that than we have ever been.

Another crucial factor in getting to an interoperability utopia is trust.

We absolutely have to move from a place where the public doesn’t trust datasharing, to a place where the benefits of doing so are obvious to them every day.

Their experience will be vastly improved once they are placed at the centre of a joined-up system where their health data is a single, secure source of truth that enables much more efficient patient care across all clinical touchpoints.

To achieve the necessary level of trust, we have to ensure the public understands their data will only ever be seen by the people who are treating or caring for them.

It’s down to us, the professionals working on behalf of patients across the system – both technical and clinical - to work tirelessly towards that goal. It’s an undertaking we are absolutely committed to.

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INNOVATION IS POSSIBLE, AND I CAN PROVE IT

By Dr Wieland Sommer, Professor in Radiology and CEO of Smart Reporting GmbH Innovation in healthcare has always been challenging and in some ways that is perfectly understandable. Large, complicated systems like the NHS are naturally very risk averse, and they breed risk aversity in the people working under pressure within them.

The task facing innovators both inside and outside health systems has always been to overcome both systemic and often quite personal barriers to achieve the huge amount of benefits we all know sit just on the horizon, especially with digitalisation.

The good news is there are signs this is improving. We are seeing policy makers at a political level put their arms around innovation as an important strategic concept. They are providing more incentives, and introducing new innovation programmes all the time. We have seen during the pandemic how fast health systems can move when they need to, and there is certainly a desire to see that momentum maintained.

The barriers are still there: large incumbent vendors closing off their APIs and protecting their territory; a jigsaw 12

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of systems with poor interoperability; onerous tendering policies that exclude smaller, more dynamic companies; hard-working practitioners fearful that ‘new’ will also mean ‘more’.

But I can speak now from personal experience when I say it is possible for innovators to successfully overcome these challenges. The trick is to work hard every day to prove the value of

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innovative solutions to both the system and especially to the people in it.

I started my career training as a medical doctor and became a radiologist, before then becoming a professor of oncological imaging. Then I completed a Masters in Public Health at Harvard. I added research and academic perspectives to my clinical experience, and the combined viewpoints led me to realise there was a large challenge that needed to be met.

People have been talking about big data and medicine for the last 15 years, but if you look at projects in this area nearly all of them have failed at scale. The root problem is not the clever analytical technologies themselves, but in how the data

Dr Wieland Sommer that feeds them is being is acquired in hospitals. I helped create Smart Reporting in 2014 to help solve this problem.

Diagnostic imaging and how analysis is reported is a critical component of the patient pathway. How this data is managed directly impacts how well clinicians and administrators can do their jobs, and then of course it impacts patient outcomes. Right now, almost everywhere, this reporting is digitised without being ‘data’. Clinical reporting may use speech recognition for inputs and computers for outputs, but those outputs can remain as varied as the radiologists or pathologists themselves. We make PDFs, but we don’t make useful data.

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time go further but, because the output is clean and structured data, it becomes far more actionable. With it processes can be automated, saving even more time for both practitioners and patients, and be used to unlock the opportunities of advanced analytics to improve treatments and train AI for medical imaging.

Structured data like this also helps bridge the gaps between the data silos that exist even within individual hospitals, but especially beyond them as the NHS seeks ways to improve data sharing between locations. Our SmartWorX interoperability system acts to bridge these silos.

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By addressing a problem at the source, and working every day to prove the real-world value of innovation to the technical and medical community that is using it, we have managed to overcome the usual barriers to positive change.

After just seven years we are now serving more than 10,000 physicians in over 90 countries.

While I know it is always difficult, our experience at Smart Reporting tells us that the innovation agenda is always worth pursuing, and I’m optimistic that the momentum can only increase further in the NHS with the right mix of policy and leadership.

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SWAPPING BUREAUCRACY FOR TRUST

By Dr Rizwan Malik, Consultant Radiologist and Divisional Medical Director of the Bolton NHS Foundation Trust

A perceived failure to innovate is one of the sticks with which the NHS is most regularly beaten. How many times have we seen, heard or read stories and opinions to that end?

One of the biggest paradoxes here, though, is that the NHS harbours some of the most innovative thinkers in the medical profession. There are huge numbers of very capable people with great ideas across the service, whether that be in research, healthcare, technology, administration or anywhere else.

The key to NHS innovation is trusting and tapping into that talent.

For too long the link between NHS decision-makers and its people on the ground simply hasn’t been there. There have been too many “gatekeepers” who have tinkered around the edges for too long in the name of transformation. They have ignored the vast experiences of the individuals and teams that use NHS systems every day and who can see where change could make a genuine difference for both staff and patients.

I have been a Consultant Radiologist in the NHS for nearly 15 years. I am also

Managing Director of South Manchester Radiology, a company which provides innovation and transformation services to both the public and private sector.

These roles have given me a helicopter view of the issues we have and, in my opinion, building trust across the healthcare spectrum is the only way to drive true innovation.

COVID-19 has given us a taste of what could be achieved, and I can share a really simple example of this. Radiologists such as myself, in collaboration with innovative CTOs and technologists, have

Dr Rizwan Malik

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spent the last decade proposing platforms and systems to allow radiology to be performed remotely if required. It was generally rejected.

When lockdown happened, however, those proposals were rapidly dusted off and it was quickly decided it was something we should do. Then suddenly the problem became time - you had hospitals who had staff everywhere needing expensive monitors, and we were held up with a supply chain issue. But within three months we went from the first discussions to having kits in place for radiologists to work from different locations.

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That is just one example, but learning lessons from the pandemic will be essential going forward. Change is possible if all stakeholders are determined and focused on the same thing - too often any improvements have been ‘Heath Robinson’ fixes not sustainable for the future, or more ambitious change is rejected completely because other things haven’t been fixed or updated. On that point, one shouldn’t predicate the other.

We shouldn’t stop progress because the stuff that we’ve got could be replaced.

In radiology specifically, talk of digital and data transformation is rife, including

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in the area of imaging and reporting.

There is a shift towards adopting tools which facilitate more guidelines and structure around how a clinician reports, and I am generally in favour of standardised imaging and reporting.

What’s crucial, though, is that these tools benefit clinicians and patients, not just data scientists. As a radiologist, this approach needs to make me more efficient, while it also needs to be advanced enough to gather the right information and not revert to templated inputs.

Again, it’s all about collaborating and taking the lead from those in the field.

In that example, if we can get to a point where reporting outputs are in a standard format then we can be more robust about how cases are followed up and patients get the best service.

Ultimately I yearn for the day where we have better connected systems across the board, both domestically and globally, and - even though there are pockets of excellence today - the data we collect and generate is used to radically improve healthcare provision at scale.

While there is that constant and very real battle between the now and the future in the NHS, we can be at the forefront of that change. The vital thing is to work closer with those who link strategy to patient care, and in the end replace bureaucracy with trust.

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EMBRACING THE FORCES OF CHANGE

By Jane Rendall, Managing Director at Sectra There’s a real desire within the NHS to improve patient outcomes, and yet it struggles with creating change.

As an organisation, the NHS is full of potential and people wanting to make a difference. However, it needs an overarching strategy; a vision of what the future will look like - no matter how unachievable it might seem - that will bring all of its stakeholders together.

In my experience, the NHS seems to undergo periods of dramatic change followed by long phases of stagnation.

When I first began working as a radiographer for the NHS, making structural changes seemed almost impossible.

Years later, when I returned to the organisation in a different capacity, there had been some dramatic innovation around digitisation. It was night and day, but that quickly slowed to business-asusual for a long time.

In that case, as so often, the motivator for change was an external force. That force can be in the form of new funding, the innovative influence of the private sector, legislative actions, or a crisis.

A crisis like COVID-19 proved that when there’s motivation, change 18

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Jane Rendall

happens swiftly within the NHS. Over the past year, I have seen projects that would have otherwise taken months and even years to implement being approved almost instantaneously to address the pandemic’s challenges. The IT efforts around the Florence Nightingale hospitals, in which we were involved in a small way, is a perfect example. But it also begs the question: Why doesn’t change happen more swiftly in the business-asusual scenario?

In the private sector, businesses are always looking at their own workforce and thinking about how to best utilise

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the talent they have to drive growth.

In contrast, the NHS’ lack of adaptability can often become a very limiting factor.

One fundamental learning from the pandemic has been the importance of failing fast. In order to drive innovation, people have to feel they can take risks, make mistakes, and learn from them. Instead of hiding mistakes or placing blame, implementing the learnings that come from them can be incredibly powerful to the overall growth of an organisation.

The vaccination campaign has shown that the NHS is capable of moving fast and making healthcare accessible to all.

Once the pandemic is over, that impetus shouldn’t be allowed to wane. Instead, it should be used to create connections with patients, to progress the establishment of shared data and systems, and to encourage patients to take control of their own health.

The NHS has historically prioritised treatment over prevention. If you have a heart attack or a major illness, the care you’ll receive will be fantastic. But the question now being asked is could

this be accurately predicted? Could the patient’s underlying condition have been treated and other measures put in place to avoid the acute situation? Prevention and wellness initiatives address health issues before they happen, reducing costs and saving lives.

Our vision is to use technology to help the NHS deliver care where it’s needed and at the best time, as opposed to it being solely available in acute settings.

In the future, I would love to see a technically unified NHS working collaboratively with industry as an external motivating source of innovation, and doing so in constant contact with the communities they serve. I would love to see diagnostic centres where people could go to get X-rays and other diagnostic tests on their way to work and strategies that focus on wellness and illness prevention so that citizens become actively responsible for their own health.

By empowering citizens to take control of their care, and using technologies to improve its provision, the NHS will be able to alleviate suffering for the individual and the whole healthcare ecosystem.

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BREAKING

DIGITAL

BARRIERS Around 10% of children in the UK don’t have access to the internet. Nikki Labrum, Tech and Product Director at The Brilliant Club and Freddie Quek, Times Higher Education’s CTO, discuss the impact of the digital divide and the importance of projects that bring together companies, organisations and public bodies to make sure that no child is ever left behind

AUTHOR: Beatriz Valero de Urquía

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or a long time, internet access was considered a luxury, especially when it relates to children.

However, as education has become more and more digitised and lockdowns have forced schools to transition to online teaching, the digital divide has become a chasm that can greatly harm the future of the next generation.

Currently, two-thirds of the world’s schoolchildren do not have an internet connection in their homes, according to a 2020 UNICEF report. In the UK, almost 10% of households do not have digital equipment or broadband access, a situation that affects 1.78 million children.

Once one of those children, Nikki Labrum is now the Tech and Product Director at The Brilliant Club, an education-focused UK charity. The Brilliant Club’s mission is to support children from less advantaged backgrounds and provide them with the educational support they need to access universities and succeed academically, through tutoring schemes and mentorship.

“We exist to help support pupils from underrepresented backgrounds go to highly selective universities,” she says.

“And we do that through mobilising the PhD community. We’ve got an army of PhDs that are subject experts, and they go out into schools and share that knowledge with kids.”

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Historically, the digital divide has been something that we looked at from a lens of the households that have internet access.

But what we haven’t really seen before is how many kids don’t have access to devices that they can actually use to learn at home” Nikki Labrum

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By providing children with mentors that they can look up to and ask questions about higher education, The Brilliant Club is able to motivate children to consider pursuing careers that they might not have otherwise thought of as a possibility, as Labrum herself never did.

“I was the state kid who was on free school meals,” she says. “So I wouldn’t have had a computer when I was a kid.

But my children are fortunate now that if they took an interest in Scratch when they’re doing it at school, and they’re learning how to programme, they could then go on and develop their interest further.”

And so can all of the students who take part in The Brilliant Club. Through its programmes, children get access

to mentoring and advice so that they can access higher education, and also succeed through it, by building communities that they can lean on when they need support, at school and also beyond.

“It has changed my life completely,” says a student from Parkview Primary School. “I was not expecting this, but my tutor is the best and she has kept me going all the way. I have loved The Scholars Programme and I am more likely to go to university now.”

However, all changed when COVID-19 began. In March 2020, The Brilliant Club was forced to move its programmes online, using platforms such as Zoom and Microsoft Teams. And that’s when the organisation had to face a new ISSUE 16

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barrier: many of the children that they serve did not have access to a laptop or an internet connection at home.

“Historically, the digital divide has been something that we looked at from a lens of the households that have internet access,” Labrum says. “But what we haven’t really seen is how many kids don’t have access to devices that they can actually use to learn at home, particularly the disadvantaged kids that we work with.

That gap is huge. And it’s going to only exacerbate the disadvantage gap.

“It was a really difficult time because we had to pivot to online, but also we knew that some of the people that we were working with were struggling to get access to devices.”

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In order to better understand the extent of the problem, The Brilliant Club received funding from Nesta to conduct research into the reality of digital poverty. Its results showed that 57% of the teachers had had to loan a device or data to a pupil just so that they could get into the programme. In addition, only 5% of teachers in state schools said that their students have a device compared to 54% of private school teachers.

The UK government is aware of this gap, and has taken steps to address it; the most notable being the introduction of a scheme to provide 1.1 million devices to students across the country. Although very positive, this initiative falls short of its goal. Currently, there are 1.7 million

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students on free school meals in the UK, and perhaps even more who have fallen through the cracks, as there is no detailed data on the extent of digital poverty.

“It pains me to think that there’s a kid out there that’s trying to get onto our programme who’s struggling with access to the platform,” Labrum says.

“I know people that don’t receive free school meals but they are on the borderline. They can afford to feed their children but not spend hundreds of pounds on the latest tech.

“According to government statistics, you have internet access if, for example, you are a child whose mother has a mobile phone. But that’s not going to help you if you want to write an essay to be part of our programme, or if you want to learn how to code in JavaScript. You can’t do that on a phone.”

The lack of understanding of digital access and the awareness of the digital divide shocked Freddie Quek, Chief Technology Officer at Times Higher Education.

Determined to learn more about the problem, Quek set out on a mission to speak to over 60 technology leaders in under six weeks. His findings showed that during COVID-19, around one in five children lacked consistent access to a suitable device for online education.

“When you then look at all the initiatives that already exist, I don’t think they are anywhere close to solving this problem,”

This is a solvable problem. The UK is the world’s fifthlargest economy, and there’s a lot of tech leaders who have the know-how and the network to do something about it” Freddie Quek

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I think broadband should be a basic human right” Nikki Labrum

Quek says. “They are not holistic enough, they’re not strategic enough, they’re not sustainable enough.”

Quek was determined to help solve this problem, and that is how #JoiningTheDots was born. Since January 2021, he has been connecting CIOs, businesses, professional bodies, and other stakeholders to offer a coordinated plan against digital exclusion.

The desire to help is there, and so is the expertise. The only thing missing is someone to coordinate these efforts.

“Freddie is bringing together IT leaders to understand that it’s not just about the 26

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device, not just about the data, it’s about the support and all of the other stuff that comes with that,” Labrum says.

After researching the causes of digital poverty, and the existing projects that try to solve it, Quek identified six main areas that are key to closing this gap: equipment provisioning, technical support, digital skills, technical career opportunities, communication and governance.

“This is a solvable problem,” Quek says. “The UK is the world’s fifth-largest economy, and there’s a lot of tech leaders who have the know-how and the network to do something about it.

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“No single person or organisation can solve this on their own, not even the government. The idea of #JoiningTheDots is to make sure that we can all use our connections and the power of networks to solve this problem. This way, we will get there sooner and we’ll get there faster.”

The first problem that the initiative set out to solve was the lack of devices. To do so, Quek is collaborating with the Digital Poverty Alliance, an organisation that brings together government departments, private companies, nonprofits and grassroots communities to develop solutions

to bridge the digital divide. The Alliance’s main goal is to ensure that every person has a device that allows them to fully participate in the digital world. A device of their own, not one owned by their employer, school or local library.

However, devices aren’t the be-allend-all solution. Quek defends the need for a government policy that ensures that the device donations are done transparently and are accompanied by programmes that teach students and parents how to use the devices they’re given, and a plan to replace these devices once they become outdated.

“We realised that the key to solving digital poverty is not about the device,” he says. “Currently, there are more than 85 initiatives about how to donate devices, but many of them are not sustainable or scalable. They may solve the problem right now, for one child for a few months.

But what happens when the devices are no longer working? What do we do then?”

The other barrier to the use of devices is data. After all, what use is having a phone without an internet connection?

To address this, Quek is working alongside the Good Things Foundation which has created the UK national databank, with the goal of solving data poverty by 2024. The idea is revolutionary: to allow for data donation.

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data,” he says. “The idea is to give the data that we don’t use to these national banks so that it can be given away to others who need it. It’s about gifting data, which everybody can do.”

Another way of helping address the lack of broadband is to make educational and informational websites zero-rated, allowing people to access them without being charged. Oak National Academy, whose Principal is a The Brilliant Club trustee, has already been able to do this, and Labrum believes that it could be key to providing people with the skills they need to close the digital gap.

“I think broadband should be a basic human right,” she says. “Even if we can’t make broadband free for all, we could have a policy that says that every domain that ends in ‘.edu,’ for example, is zero-rated. And then we’re

not excluding anyone. It doesn’t remove the issue about devices but it’s one way that we could widen access to education and important information.”

Bridging the digital divide can not only help children get into university but also close another gap that exists in the UK: the one that affects women in STEM. Currently, less than 15% of professional IT jobs are done by women.

And although this year the number of young women considering Computer Science careers increased by 5%, this is still not enough. Labrum, who was recently nominated in the Women in Tech Awards, believes the key to solving this issue lies in getting girls interested in STEM from a young age.

“There are a lot of initiatives shining a light on women who do technology, like mentorship programmes and

We are now all part of this digital world and we can’t afford to leave anyone behind” Freddie Quek 28

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awards,” she says. “But it is all about how do we get them younger?

“If you’re a young girl who’s interested in Computer Science, there are already so many barriers, like the view that it’s supposed to be for boys; but if you then add the fact that they don’t have a device at home [it adds another barrier]. Coding is not like other subjects, that you can explore at home or in a library. To do Computer Science you need a laptop, there’s no getting away from it. This is a barrier that we need to remove.”

There’s no doubt that the future is digital.

According to a government report, ​​82% of advertised openings already require some level of digital skills and overall roles requiring digital skills pay 29% more than roles that don’t. The UK is already facing a digital labour shortage, with over 70% of employers in the country facing a technology skills gap.

A survey conducted by Robert Walters showed that over half of employers find candidates lack the right technical skills necessary for technology positions. If children can’t access the equipment they need to develop these skills, the gap is only going to grow.

“We’re heading for a situation where we’re not going to have the skills in the workforce because we didn’t address the need early on,” Labrum says.

Initiatives like #JoiningTheDots and programmes such as the ones provided

by The Brilliant Club aim to address this need and empower children to reach their full potential. Over the next five years, The Brilliant Club wants to work with 100,000 pupils and support them as they pursue their dreams, through higher education programmes and beyond. In the process, the organisation also plans to make its platforms more accessible and inclusive, so that anyone can take advantage of their support.

Looking even further ahead, by 2030 Quek wants the digital divide to be a thing of the past.

“We are now all part of this digital world and we can’t afford to leave anyone behind,” Quek says. “Because these days everything is online and children are our future. We need to join the dots so that we are able to achieve that vision of providing digital access for all.”

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REINVENTING TALENT DEVELOPMENT Irish IT multinational Version 1 is revolutionising how a company manages its talent and ensures employees have a pathway to succeed in their careers. We find out how.

AUTHOR: Stuart Hodge

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VERSION 1

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F

ormer General Electric CEO Jack Welch once famously remarked: “An organisation’s ability to learn, and translate that learning into action rapidly, is the ultimate competitive advantage.”

An organisation, by definition, is only as good as its component parts: its people. Whether or not an organisation can achieve its ultimate advantage depends on whether its people can achieve theirs, too. What if you were able to build career development platform that reliably allowed every single one of your employees to do exactly that?

The Pathways professional development model at Version 1, a multinational IT services organisation headquartered 32

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in Dublin, Ireland, is a striking example of what that can look like, and it has won the awards to prove it.

Pathways is Version 1’s radical career development model that supports employees to take control of their own professional futures. It functions bottom up, rather than top down, and is centred around the conversations employees have with their managers, allowing them to progress their careers as they best see fit. That may be taking a step up the ladder or moving laterally into a different discipline, but either direction leads to tangible benefits for employees, the company, and its customers.

Alan Reilly, Organisation Learning & Development Manager at Version 1, says: “If you’re coaching someone,

VERSION 1

or if you’re training a bunch of people and you see the moment the penny drops, that instance where the ‘Eureka’ moment comes, that is what makes it all worthwhile.”

For Reilly, who says his passion for talent development is a result of how his mother brought him up, the building of the Pathways model was an “epic” journey, which culminated in the programme winning the Excellence in Talent Development award at the 2019 Technology Ireland Industry Awards and the Best Talent Development Initiative award at the 2021 IITD National Training Awards.

Getting to that point was not easy, however. Through speaking to employees, and during exit interviews, the company recognised that its previous Continuing Professional Development (CPD) framework failed to really connect the various development strands at play within the Version 1 workforce together well enough. It served a purpose, and did help people achieve promotions, but it didn’t go far enough.

“We were getting lots of feedback over the years and people loved the idea of what it was trying to do but they found it very difficult to navigate and to peel it back to themselves in their own role,” says Reilly.

“Because the CPD framework was more generic and being applied compa-

JAMIE’S STORY Jamie Gaynor started at Version 1 in 2016, via the company’s graduate programme. He worked as an ERP Functional Consultant for two years before taking a sabbatical to move to Toronto.

“Everything is so transparent in Version 1,” he says. “I can ask questions and have a conversation with anyone in our managerial hierarchy. I’ve never had the feeling that I can’t approach someone.

“I have had short stints in a couple of other companies. I felt like a cog in the wheel there; there wasn’t as much of a chance for personalities to shine through and interacting with your seniors was almost forbidden. Version 1 knows how to operate effectively for their people, customers and the company.”

In January 2020, Gaynor returned to Version 1, working in a variety of roles before moving to the Talent Development Team in 2021, when he joined the Pathways programme.

“The Pathways programme has allowed me to identify where my skill gaps are and understand how to fill them through learning and experience as I work towards the next level in my development,” he says.

“It puts the ball in my court for how fast I want to develop.”

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PATHWAYS TECHNOLOGIES TalentGuard

talent-management system with a focus A on career development and the process to manage it.

Brainier

A learning management system

Online Learning • O’Reilly

An online learning resource platform with access to books, videos, live training courses, expert playlists, and interactive learning scenarios.

• Pluralsight An internationally recognised online learning resource platform.

ny-wide, when I was talking about competencies and what people had to do to apply them within their role, I think they struggled. There’s was too much ambiguity in there for them at that point.

“In real terms, we had two strands: we had the learning development world, 34

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and then the technology capability world, both existing on their own and not really connected. We decided that we had to fix it up and join the dots. Ultimately, I wanted to have the employee at the centre of everything, to have a holistic view of our employees, and with that deeper goal in mind to help drive a career forward so they could do whatever they wanted. If they wished to move into a different department, for example - we would ensure they had all the tools in place to look to do that.

“I think we’ve managed to achieve that, which is very satisfying.”

Implementation of Pathways has seen some 93% of employees who have gone forward for promotions become successful and has partly contributed to a spike in employee engagement rates within a company that is already recognised as a great place to work on pretty much an annual basis.

For an IT consultancy such as Version 1, maintaining those cultural standards is of critical importance given the continuous need to hire and retain the very best candidates in what is a hugely competitive sector.

The Pathways model, as well as offering employees a tangible means of plotting their route to promotion by plugging their skill gaps with effective learning, also challenges them to ensure they are applying those skills effectively.

VERSION 1

It’s this attention to detail that ensures Version 1’s staff are suitably armed to go out there and deliver excellence for customers. Increasingly, as the use of the platform becomes more integrated into their day-to-day workflow, employees are being encouraged to be self-analytical. This is a particular point of emphasis for Reilly.

“With Pathways it’s not about lip-service. It’s not about ticking a box. With technically-minded workers, it’s not just about acquiring skills and then saying ‘I’m ready’. It’s more about looking at what you’ve done to apply it,” he says.

“I’m not just going to give you a promotion because you’ve said you’ve acquired a skill, you’ve read a book or got a certification. Tell me what you’ve done that’s made a difference to someone else, be it your peers, or a customer, then come back and talk to me.

“The Pathways model captures that.

It’s bite-sized, it’s manageable, and that’s super important in this day and age. People have small chunks of time to do certain things, so bite-sized learning is vital, and that’s where I think Pathways comes into its own.”

As the tech sector continues to evolve, roles and workforces have to match the pace of change to remain relevant.

Pathways was built with this in mind, focusing not only on the necessary and the technical, but also the human.

Importantly, it also makes the entire process completely transparent.

For Hayley Murphy, Organisational Development Consultant at Version 1, far from being a retroactive performance-assessment system, the platform is now often the actual conversation starter.

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VERSION 1

roles, skills and development options.

That’s not something that every company has, and it makes for a very good starting point.

“But the fact that it also incorporates learning as well means it’s not just a competency framework that just stores the skills that you have. It also links to the practical piece of ‘these are the learnings’ and it can guide you in the right direction of what you should do to learn a new skill, for example.

“In your day-to-day work, you’ll be building in and recording your skill acquisition as well, so I think the fact that it brings everything together - and that it’s just so objective - makes it beneficial for managers and employees, especially when it comes to having these key conversations.”

Pathways was built on the ethos of 70-20-10, recognising how we learn in our professional environment: 70% of learning is on the job; 20% is informal learning done socially or from your peers; and 10% is formal learning, such as in a classroom setting.

The collective intelligence built up within the organisation can now be measured, and learnings from peer groups recorded and stored for the future on the platform, ensuring the system itself remains up-todate and wholly fit-for-purpose.

“In the world of technology, skills change, roles change, and development

options become outdated very quickly,” Murphy says. “Across the business, the different subject matter experts were involved in helping define the rules.

“That was a massive project. We needed that input and commitment from everyone across the business and that remains vital now both in terms of the upkeep of the Pathways platform and in terms of peer learning, for example.

“In each job family, they will share lessons learned. By one project

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manager explaining lessons learned on a project, another project manager is then able to implement these into their projects immediately. By everyone ensuring they do things in that way, then we can all learn from each other.”

A key motivation for Version 1’s conscientious overhaul of its CPD framework has been the rapid growth of the company over the past five or six years. It has a key strategic objective of growing to 10 times its current size and the previous CPD platform would not have been scalable for an organisation expanding at such a fast pace.

Pathways is now a vital tool in its armoury, but as far as Reilly is concerned this is just the start. For him, it’s now about continuing to evolve the platform by looking at it both from a top-down basis and from the bottom up.

He also believes the platform can be massively beneficial for the company as a source of data insights and in terms of attracting and retaining talent.

As the platform becomes more established, more and more internal talent will rise to take up managerial roles within the company. Murphy is a case in point - a rising star in her first job out of university.

“From the top down, there’s a big emphasis on numbers and targets,” Reilly says. “We’re doing really well as a 38

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KEVIN NYATORO’S STORY Kevin Kyatoro joined Version 1 from Microsoft as a PowerBI developer and soon flagged his desire to move into engineering. Version 1 allowed him to work with engineers who coached him in producing the visualisation elements for projects.

“My experience within Version 1 is that I have been able to request support and time to train and have always felt empowered to deliver,” he says. “We have a community of people with different skills that are happy to help and transfer knowledge.”

Nyatoro moved on to support further engineering efforts and it wasn’t long before he became a Lead Engineer on a project in the East of England and a provider of visualisation support for their reporting teams. He has been part of Pathways since October 2020.

“I find Pathways to be transparent. It sets out a clear list of development goals and challenges so you can track your progress and evaluate yourself. My route for learning was largely self-taught and Pathways has gone a long way to plug holes in my development that I may not have known I had.”

VERSION 1

Kevin Nyatoro

Hayley Murphy

company - the sales team are winning loads of business and some of the projects are huge. So any given morning before you get up, there could be a request saying that because of a new project you now need to get 20 software developers ready in the next eight weeks.

“And the war for talent is phenomenal at the moment in our sector, like in many other sectors, and it’s only going to get more difficult. We have 150-160 open roles right now, just to emphasise the point, but my challenge is going to be to get us to look at bringing through more of

Alan Reilly

Jamie Gaynor

our own internally-grown juniors. They’ll come forward in the next couple of years but they will make a big difference.

“For us, if we can get them into the company, we can engage them, we can show them the company’s willingness to invest in them, and then that clear progression is what drives people forward. That means the platform is working.

“All the feedback we’ve had is great but it’s these kinds of things which really matter to individuals and the company as a whole.”

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GOOD OR BAD?

GOOD OR

BAD? Great power comes with great responsibility, and that is particularly true of new technologies. Each month, Tech For Good discusses the potential benefits and dangers of technological advances that are coming to market. This month we ask: Can solar geoengineering stop climate change?

AUTHOR: Beatriz Valero de Urquía

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GEOENGINEERING

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hen will it be too late to stop the climate crisis?

Faced with this question, some researchers are turning to extreme solutions to global warming, including solar geoengineering.

Solar geoengineering is a term that encompasses several different technologies with a common goal: to reduce the amount of sunlight that hits the Earth.

This can be achieved by making coastal clouds more reflective, dissipating heat-trapping cirrus clouds, or scattering sunlight in the stratosphere by injecting aerosols, among other methods. It would be a planetary-scale technology, a drastic measure that could solve the problem of global warming forever.

Steps have already been taken to look into the potential of these technologies.

In 2018, the US National Academies launched a study into sunlight reflection technologies and, shortly after, scientists at Harvard University proposed what could be the next and most formal geoengineering experiment to date: a balloon equipped with propellers and sensors that would spray a tiny amount of calcium carbonate into the

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GOOD? stratosphere. What might first sound like science fiction could be the holy grail that will solve the climate crisis.

What the expert says: “ Time is no longer on our side. We need to think about climate restoration and climate repair. It’s certainly critically important to have deep and rapid emissions reductions, but there’s too much in the atmosphere today” Sir David King, UK Government’s former Chief Scientific Advisor

GEOENGINEERING

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f something sounds too good to be true, it often is. Conducting, researching or even discussing solar geoengineering is extremely controversial within the scientific community. Many researchers believe that even debating this technology will make people believe that there’s a way to “fix” climate change, undermining all the efforts that have been made to raise awareness about the need to reduce carbon emissions.

For many, the answer is simple: it doesn’t work. Popular solar engineering strategies such as injecting aerosols into the stratosphere do cool the planet, but in the wrong places and times to be an effective solution to global warming.

Solar geoengineering also does little to address other climate dangers including ocean acidification, or the damage that comes from extracting and burning finite fossil fuels. Moreover, the huge scale of these projects could have catastrophic consequences and lead to further destabilisation of weather and climate patterns.

Finally, there is the question of regulations. By definition, solar engineering is a technology without geographical boundaries. If countries do not agree over

BAD?

how to control these technologies, who knows what kind of conflicts, or even wars, solar engineering could provoke?

What the expert says: “ If you’re thinking solar geoengineering sounds a bit like using smoke and mirrors to address climate change, you’re not far off. It’s time to move away from fantasies and get back to the work of reducing emissions, supporting nature’s carbon sinks, and improving the condition of people around the world” Dr. Jonathan Foley, Climate and environmental scientist, writer, and speaker

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CLEAN RAVING

CLEAN RAVING Technology is paving the way to greener music events. We head to Berlin, Glasgow, and Bristol to find out how clubs are embracing sustainability AUTHOR: Martin Guttridge-Hewitt

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ny venue heats up quickly. I guess that’s part of the charm of a nightclub, the sweat dripping off the walls. Well, to an extent anyway,” says Andrew Fleming-Brown, painting a vivid picture of British nightlife. But this is no post-lockdown ode to strangers perspiring in dark rooms together again. Instead, our conversation is about a world-first energy solution being installed in his venue.

SWG3 is a sprawling multi-purpose arts, music and cultural hub in Glasgow’s West End. By late-2021 the address will run heating and cooling systems powered by BODYHEAT. As it sounds, 46

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the system uses dance floor heat to dramatically reduce carbon emissions.

“The design has been worked through for a while,” says Fleming-Brown, SWG3’s managing director.. “It started in summer 2019; we engaged with a geothermal engineering company, called TownRock Energy, to discuss alternative solutions for our building. We are an industrial building designed for storage, not people. So there are a lot of challenges there, from environmental performance to drainage. But with these buildings generally comes a lot of atmosphere, they make great venues.

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“From 2015 onwards we experienced large growth, in terms of our programme, the footprint of the venue, and in terms of turnover. So we started on a £6 million capital programme to develop underused parts of the site. We have three acres of land and buildings, and only use about 50% of that. Like any development, you want it to happen in an environmentally friendly, sustainable way. More than that, though, we were also looking at current operations.

“We were conscious that all the heat generated by people, all that energy, was just disappearing into the atmosphere. Our latest addition, and our largest space, called the Galvanisers, has a lot of volume. It has lots of height, and huge surface area with energy just disappearing. So we thought how can we harness that, reuse the energy?”

Originally intended to be ready for COP26 — the UN Climate Change Conference Glasgow will host in November — work has been delayed due to logistical issues, not technological hurdles. BODYHEAT is a familiar innovation, energy from event attendees channelled to a 17-strong array of boreholes, each between 150m and 200m in size, charging a thermal battery to redistribute power. The concept is unique because it has never met a music venue before.

We were conscious that all the heat generated by people, all that energy, was just disappearing into the atmosphere. So we thought how can we harness that, reuse the energy?”

Andrew Fleming-Brown

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I’ve been to plenty of events where the right equipment has been there, and there’s plenty of technical expertise, but it hasn’t been configured in the right way” Luke Howell

Phase one, currently being drilled, focuses on the ground floor, where the majority of events take place. This alone could save up to 70 tonnes of carbon waste each year. Plans to expand the 48

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project are already in place, too. An additional building within SWG3 opens to the public in 2022 and will also utilise the technology. Meanwhile, the site’s work, retail, and hospitality spaces are earmarked for inclusion in the future.

Costs for the initial stage are £350,000, far over budget for many venues, not least given the long road to recover losses after more than a year of cancelled events and locked doors as a result of the pandemic. To cover this investment, SWG3 received 50% of required funding through a grant from Scotland’s Low Carbon Infrastructure Transition Programme. The other half was borrowed from the government’s District Heating Loan Fund. Breaking even on the investment through energy savings will take around 12 years, emphasising this is a long-term undertaking, and it couldn’t have been announced at a more apt time.

June 2021 saw the Roadmap to Super Low Carbon Live Music published by the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change at the University of Manchester, in conjunction with award-winning electronic band and famed environmentalists, Massive Attack. Cutting to the chase, the report shows how festivals, gigs, and clubs can rebuild for the COVID-19 age with climate impact as a priority.

“A lot of venues aim to be carbon neutral by 2030, we want to beat that

CLEAN RAVING

and obviously this is a big part of our push,” Fleming-Brown says. “But we are also looking at other operational approaches to get there. This isn’t the only solution, but it is a starting point.

We ask how viable the system would be if financial backing had not been available. Without government support I don’t see that [the system is accessible] right now. What should be considered is match funding.”

At the other side of the UK, Bristol Beacon, formerly Colston Hall, is a Grade II listed building dating back to 1867 currently undergoing a £45 million transformation set for completion in 2023. Hope Solutions, also based in the English city, is working with the venue

on sustainability projects. The overall ambition is to hit net-zero carbon emissions by the turn of the next decade.

“With any building there is a finite mains power feed. Quite often this can be upgraded but that’s quite costly. So we’re looking at whether batteries could be used, possibly to facilitate peak shaving. The main power feed can cope with most things, but every so often you get a show coming through that needs more. Can the battery help power that?” says Luke Howell, founder and director of Hope Solutions, referencing companies like Konik, which have been marketing batteries as a replacement for generators or a National Grid connection for several years already.

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“There’s the potential to have a battery docking station, so you only put it in place when you actually need it.

There are a few companies developing decent-sized batteries — 300kwh up to around 1mw. A number of companies are developing batteries that are mobile, and have docking stations, so when it’s not needed the battery goes to the depot and can be plugged back into the grid.” Howell suggests it may also be possible to place docking stations inside venues.

A major issue is again expense.

High-powered batteries aren’t cheap, but newer, more affordable models could hit the market for 2022’s summer festival season, meaning uptake might be about to significantly increase. But

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as Howell explains, the ‘dry hire’ nature of batteries has led to a significant gap in awareness of just how powerful this established technology could be.

“A battery gets delivered and doesn’t work in the same way as a traditional generator,” Howell says. “So I’ve been to plenty of events where the right equipment has been there, and there’s plenty of technical expertise, but it hasn’t been configured in the right way. Some companies I know that are bringing this to market will be providing more than just hire; they will be configured in the right way.

“This next generation of batteries will be able to go out at a much more competitive price point, meaning people can pay for a technician to set them up.”

CLEAN RAVING

Our conversation moves to other innovations being explored right now.

We’re told about kinetic energy floors, with designs for ‘playground foyers’ so crowds can entertain themselves exploring a space while generating electricity for the event. Again, there are drawbacks — storage and capacity — but research is ongoing.

Then there’s ZAP Concepts, a zero-air pollution specialist with a web-based tool gauging power requirements more accurately than old methods, which centred on overall amperage of what is being plugged in. Already available to use, the firm is now working towards delivering a new iteration, which takes into account the exact audio and lighting plans for each event. The result

is less energy use, ultimately meaning lower impact.

Major interventions usually mean big investment, and that’s hardly par for the course with music venues, many of which are grassroots in nature. Nowhere more so than in Berlin. The German capital is known for its abundance of clubs, many occupying dilapidated buildings, from power stations to swimming pools, as a result of nightlife taking over spaces abandoned amid the economic devastation of both World War Two, and the Berlin Wall. Katrine Gregersen works for Friends of the Earth Germany (BUND) and is part of Club Liebe, which looks at how venues can become greener. She’s clear that high tech is only one part of the story, and

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Three hundred capacity venues in Berlin need around the same amount of energy for one weekend as a single household requires for the year. That’s a lot of energy” Katrine Gregersen

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more accessible solutions are needed to reach clubs with tight margins.

“We know how much energy a small club consumes over a weekend,” she says. “Three hundred capacity venues in Berlin need around the same amount of energy for one weekend as a single household requires for the year. That’s a lot of energy.

“In Berlin we have around 280 official clubs, and a lot of unofficial clubs, maybe even more. Scale it up for Germany — I believe Munich has more clubs per capita than Berlin. This is a big issue.”

In 2019 Club Liebe launched Clubtopia with support from BUND, Clubcommission, Livekomm, the University of Sustainable Development Eberswalde, and the Berlin senate. The project is committed to raising awareness of climate problems facing venues, and possible solutions. It also encourages clubs to sign up for a code of conduct, stipulating specific targets.

Gregersen namechecks Berlin’s famous Club SchwuZ as an example of big impact from small changes. An 80% emissions reduction was achieved by switching to a renewable energy provider. She also points to the significant effect LED lighting has, reassuring us this technology is so advanced it can now replicate the aesthetics of old energy-hungry bulbs. Water consumption is another Clubtopia target, with an overall

CLEAN RAVING

40% reduction asked for by the code of conduct. Lo-fi ideas like putting plastic bottles filled with stones in toilet cisterns limiting volume and length of flush prove every little helps.

“I think we are far from [carbon neutral club scenes],” she says, in part referring to the fact artist and audience travel are the biggest contributors to nightlife emissions. But, reassuringly given the challenge ahead, starting conversations is a significant step forward.

“When do clubs start to engage with sustainability? When do we reach the audience? It’s getting closer and closer.

We do think there is a much bigger interest within the culture and industry to become more sustainable.

“The impact of communication is huge. We see Club Liebe as a way to inspire other people to think about sustainability. It can have a very big impact on how other people see and experience sustainability.”

Gregersen finishes by reiterating what both Howell and Fleming-Brown have said. “When it comes to big investments, of course this cannot happen without funding or support.

Money is not there, especially after the pandemic. So for major changes there needs to be more funding. One of our aims is to give the venues a bigger voice and show politicians there is backing for sustainability in the industry and community.”

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EXPERT INSIGHT

EXPERT INSIGHT:

The Future Workforce

Blue Prism’s Senior Curriculum Developer, Alex Alcalde, on the effective education of the future workforce

T

he promise of transformational enterprise technologies has been well and truly fulfilled, as we see a growing number of businesses across all sectors take advantage of intelligent automation (IA) and other solutions like it to drive productivity and competitive advantage.

However, the fact is, demand for employees with the required digital skills to implement and manage technologies such as IA is quickly outstripping supply. It’s essential that academic institutions, technology providers and institutions work together to ensure that the digital skills gap is addressed, so that the full potential of transformational technologies can be achieved.

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ALEX ALCALDE

Why can’t current supply keep up with demand?

Firstly, the number of new emerging technologies and their respective capabilities has accelerated in recent years.

Naturally, with this rapid increase, businesses and institutions work doubly hard for training, resources, and career opportunities to reflect the immense growth.

The problem here, however, is that current education and learning systems are not equipped to address the upcoming revolution in skills demand.

Despite the gravity of the digital skills gap, there has been slow uptake from academic institutions to incorporate emerging technologies into curriculums.

The third major factor is the barriers faced by socio-economically disadvantaged individuals, who do not have access to learning opportunities. Addressing this holds huge potential in tackling the skills shortage and filling roles that would otherwise be vacant.

Bearing the brunt of all of this are business leaders, who are acutely aware of the advancement in technology and the consequential skills gap it presents. Almost 90% of executives said they were experiencing skill gaps in the workforce or expected them within a few years. Looking at the wider picture, it’s not just business leaders who will feel the effects of a missed opportunity, it’s entire economies. On

a macro level, if skill-building doesn’t catch up with the rate of technological progress, the G20 economies could lose up to $11.5 trillion in cumulative GDP growth in the next ten years.

There’s good news Technology providers and institutions are on the right path. More academic programmes are becoming available and are being utilised by a number of institutions and businesses to speed up the intake of in-demand employees. These learning ecosystems being built are only getting bigger and better and will become increasingly available across all regions.

A key aspect of this is forming partnerships. It’s essential that technology providers become the link between industry and higher education, partnering with institutions across the globe to help support their students with workforce-ready skills.

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The success of this approach can be exemplified by Blue Prism’s Academia Program which, to date, has enabled academic institutions to train over 32,000 students in Blue Prism technology by the programme’s second year, with 200% YoY growth of students trained and 135% of institutions onboarded. Figures like these are encouraging from one single provider, yet more is needed across the sector to address the gap.

What is being provided?

In Blue Prism’s case, the Academia programme provides free software, courseware and online training, combined with the opportunity for students to acquire industry-leading “gold standard” certification in one of the global leader’s innovative technologies.

Students will gain a deep understanding of the importance of a clear vision for Robotic Process Automation (RPA), a clear understanding of the different RPA Organisational Models, and a rich handson experience of how to design, develop, and deliver Blue Prism automations of standard business processes.

An important aspect of this is being able to offer courses in a variety of settings. Students should have the ability to carry out their certification via coursework, through a global network of colleges and universities, hands-on labs, or whichever works best for them.

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The more availability and ease at which students can engage with learning, the more chance they have of jump-starting their career in one of the most promising sectors in the world.

What about existing workforces?

Nurturing the workforce of the future through academic institutions and learning ecosystems is, of course, vital. However, businesses hold a huge amount of potential right at their fingertips. Existing employees are intrinsic to the successful deployment of emerging technologies and, in the case of intelligent automation, are crucial for a successful robotic operating model (ROM), a methodology by which a business can successfully implement and manage the rollout of intelligent automation at scale.

For example, we have a client that has achieved just that. A global insurance provider has implemented a fresh robotic operating model (ROM) to great effect, scaling intelligent automation (robotic process automation fueled with AI) and providing its people the right skills for an ever-changing workplace.

The changes have allowed the business to rapidly increase automation’s exposure across the business, using 68 Blue Prism robots to carry out 140 processes, supporting 85% of its UK functions.

ALEX ALCALDE

It’s vital that we all recognise the importance of providing the next generation of business automation professionals the tools and learning resources in order to fuel the future of work”

Business structures are changing because of the emergence of transformational technology like intelligent automation. However, this example of how companies are able to reskill and retrain their existing employees whilst simultaneously augmenting their capabilities highlights a clear path toward the future of work.

Professionals and businesses like this example can benefit from additional support along their journey. In Blue Prism’s case, we have the Blue Prism Community. This comprehensive platform enables users to share best practices, knowledge and insights around Blue Prism and RPA, and is available

to help individuals along every step of the way.

What lies next…

The road ahead is not a straightforward one but, if one thing is clear, it’s that those businesses, institutions and technology providers need to work harder and closer than ever to ensure the opportunity for optimum growth across business and the global economy isn’t squandered.

It’s vital that we all recognise the importance of providing the next generation of business automation professionals the tools and learning resources in order to fuel the future of work.

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WELCOMING THE

DERK ARTS Inspirational Castor CEO Derk Arts sat down with Tech For Good to discuss his vision for the future of the medical science industry, the huge impact the firm had at the peak of the COVID-19 outbreak and his plans for the $45 million in funding the company has recently raised

AUTHOR: Stuart Hodge

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WELCOMING THE DERK ARTS

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W

hen he was studying for his PhD, Derk Arts’ thesis cover was a graphic showing a human head and a computer brain beginning to fuse.

This is indicative of where the man’s passions lie – medicine and technology – and as CEO of Castor, he is the visionary behind the one of the world’s leading decentralised clinical trial platforms.

The other thing he is truly passionate about is making a difference in the world and to people’s health. Castor is growing rapidly, which is allowing Arts to fulfill his ambition on an ever-increasing basis.

The company has raised $65 million in funding, including $45 million in Series B funding in July this year. It has 60

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supported over 7,000 clinical trials, and the employee count is set to tick up to 180 people by the end of the year.

The growth has been achieved to the backdrop the pandemic, and despite all of the obvious complications associated with the outbreak of COVID-19, Arts saw it as the perfect opportunity for the platform to have a positive impact.

“There are over 100 COVID-related scientific papers that cite Castor, because when the pandemic hit, we actually decided to give our technology away for free,” says Arts. “Because we wanted to support and a lot of research was needed.

“We had over 300 trials using our technology, and to really also be able to see and read through the scientific impact our initiative had is extremely fulfilling. At

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the same time as all of that was going on, we were also working with the World Health Organization [WHO used Castor for its Solidarity Trial, which included over 10,000 patients across 553 sites in 30 countries] and we also decided to make our platform available pro bono to them, to ensure that they could run some of the most important trials of the century.

“And I really love that. As a founder, I recognise we need to build the biggest and baddest commercial engine to rule the world of e-clinical but I also see doing what we did as the way to get to maximum impact. And so, for me, they go hand in hand. That’s really what it comes down to: I wouldn’t want to run a business that doesn’t try to make an impact.”

And that impact extends beyond what Castor did during the pandemic. The company has planted beehives on the roof of its Amsterdam office, because bees are vital to the global ecosystem and our survival as human beings. In a similar vein, Castor plants trees for every single study that goes live, paid or unpaid, of which there are now over 500.

“I think we need to think about the impact we’re having on the planet by giving humans more longevity and so that’s why I try to have a pretty holistic view on everything,” Arts says.

But the story of the Castor platform actually begins while Arts was still a student almost 10 years ago. He

As a founder, I recognise we need to build the biggest and baddest commercial engine to rule the world of e-clinical but I also see doing what we did as the way to get to maximum impact. I wouldn’t want to run a business that doesn’t try to make an impact” Derk Arts

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comes from a long line of doctors and was excited about the career path of becoming a practising physician.

His passion for technology meant he had the skillset to work as a freelance developer as a means of paying his way through medical school. He built numerous websites and applications and he also began to explore ideas from an entrepreneurial standpoint, a side of him which has been part of his makeup since he was a boy.

Towards the end of his medical career, Arts was involved in some research and he found that there weren’t any platforms that were easy to use or readily affordable for academic researchers. His experience during that time cemented the vision for Castor, a company built to solve the biggest issues in clinical research: a lack of inclusivity, patient focus and impact of data.

With that in mind, Arts built the Castor platform for his own projects and began working towards his PhD, for which the thesis focused on ‘computerised decision support systems and improving medical decision making’. That same technology now enables sponsors worldwide to run patient-centric trials on a unified platform, helping them maximise the impact of research data on patient lives.

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“It started as a one-day-a-week, a sort of a side gig, that I worked on Castor,” he says. “It quickly gained a lot of traction in the Netherlands. In 2016, I defended my thesis and after having three jobs for the past four years – Castor, my PhD and another data management job – I wanted to focus on the single thing so I jumped on the opportunity to become a fulltime CEO of Castor.

“We started in academia and of course, we were supporting researchers with their research, often with very little or no budget. Quite honestly, that really made me feel like we were making an impact and also that I could have a bigger impact as a CEO of this company than I could as an individual medical doctor, because then you can only see so many patients in a week.

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IMPACTING THE FUTURE LIVE STREAMING DATA INTO PATIENT PREDICTION MODELS Arts says: “The impact of data isn’t restricted to a single trial and a single project can actually extend far beyond us. So that you really reduce the time it takes for a clinical trial to impact patient lives. A long-term vision for me is that we will be streaming machine-readable research data straight into prediction models that can make better individualised and biased predictions for patients over time.”

FURTHERING IMPACT OF NEWLY-APPROVED DRUGS Arts says: “It should be about maximising the impact of research data beyond the initial approval, so it’s great that you got a new drug to market with, say, a million data points. But now let’s see how we can combine that million data points with 500 million or one billion data points to actually learn a lot more about how these patients are affected by the treatment and what else we could do to modulate the disease effect. I think that needs to be Castor’s exponential impact, showing the world that there’s a lot more than just getting your medical device or your new drug

to the market and actually really leveraging all that information.”

SIMULATING SYNTHETIC PATIENTS FOR TRIALS Arts says: “The more data we can easily gather through these methods – and with more digital sources we can also gather more data – the easier it becomes to create synthetic cohorts. So that’s really starting to simulate patients. We’re basically trying to create a data copy; not an actual copy but it’s something that’s very similar to real patient. You can imagine if you have 100 data points on a single subject, and you have 100 subjects, then you have a pretty significant data set and you can use that to try to predict what a new patient would look like. Then you start creating synthetic patients.”

NO MORE NEED FOR PLACEBO PATIENTS? Arts says: “Ultimately, the biggest impact of all of this could be that you don’t need patients at all anymore. Now that’s pushing very far, but you can start to think about replacing placebo patients who don’t even get the treatment – which is always an ethical debate – and suddenly, you only need only, say, half your placebo patients. It would greatly reduce impact and greatly reduce burden on patients and, at the same time, we would accelerate trial timelines.”

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The long-term vision for me is that we will be streaming machine-readable research data straight into prediction models that can make better individualised and biased predictions for patients over time” “And so we continue on that journey, and we’ve been successful to an extent.”

The qualifier added at the end of that last comment shows the scope of ambition Arts has for Castor. He wants his company to help revolutionise his industry on a global scale and he believes one of the keys to that is for the medical community to use data more effectively.

According to research by Paul Glasziou and Iain Chalmers in 2009, and Arts still cites the figure, 85% of medical research data is never re-used. That staggering figure is due to poor data 64

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quality, a lack of standardisation and by the data being inaccessible to others.

With that in mind, Castor developed its Electronic Data Capture technology to enable researchers to capture highquality, standardised data at the source and make it available for re-use.

And this topic area is where Arts’ knowledge and passion for tech truly comes to the fore.

“I’m big on data centralisation,” he says. “I’m a very technical guy; ultimately, I love technology and I get very frustrated by inefficiencies. And one of the biggest sources of inefficiencies in life sciences and healthcare is a lack of standardisation, lack of interoperability. So I’ve always been pushing a machine-readable data agenda.

“When we had the COVID outbreak, I could already predict what was going to happen: everyone was going to scramble to run their own projects with their own sorts of data models, their own definitions of medical concepts for blood pressure, glucose, etc.

“What we tried to do, before everyone got started, was create a standard data model. Essentially, a number of forms you could download within three minutes, to launch your own observational study on COVID. We were taking definitions that the WHO had created and we turned them into an actionable piece of, let’s say, content in the form of

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forms that you can build, you could use to quickly launch a study on our platform, and you could build from that.

“It was very successful. We had a lot of studies using that. So that actually greatly enhanced interoperability between the datasets that came out of those projects.”

The most exciting of these became a huge national project in the Netherlands.

An Amsterdam neurologist seeking a means to put his skills to better use during the pandemic did a study and built a registry where physicians began dedicating their time to manually

process data from COVID patients and put it into a large database. Then, leveraging Castor’s publicly available API, they fired the data straight into a machine-learning model that tried to predict ICU occupancy.

Arts, an ever-keen technology collaborator, then made calls to Alteryx and Tableau to get them to donate their technology, which allowed the dashboards to be streamed live to hospitals across the country. This helped to estimate, in near real-time, what ICU occupancy would be in the coming days.

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“We have a whole case study available on that service, which is called ‘COVID predict study’,” Arts says. “Alteryx and Tableau actually did separate case studies on it and have done a whole marketing campaign around it because they thought it was so awesome.

“I think it is a great example for how our vision for data centralisation and our vision of donating our technology really made a difference.”

Arts is proud of what he’s built and always has his eyes on the future, how to grow Castor and how to further his and the company’s impact on the world.

He is establishing a social impact committee which aims to get together influential people from all across the globe to help support underserved and 66

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under-resourced countries and communities with the means to independently conduct high quality, publishable research.

Castor will donate its technology as well as provide training on how to use it and on how to do scientific writing and then hopes to find a partner which will allow grants to be awarded to the locations being served.

“With $15,000 in India and the technology and training available for free you can actually get a long way,” Arts says. “I think that’s beautiful, if you can continue to marry the commercial growth with increased impact, and find a way to integrate that into your business then your investors are also happy with that. I think it’s an interesting challenge, but also

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a great thing to do, because it does wonders for your brand.”

The recent $45 million of funding raised means it’s an exciting time for Castor, and Arts is clear about the immediate priorities for the company and that investment.

“First and foremost, on the commercial side, we need to really establish ourselves as a top player in the industry, also in the US, which is happening very rapidly,” he says. “We are continuing to build out our enterprise sales engine so we work with the biggest brands in the industry.

“As you can expect from a growth company, we’re going to allocate plenty of that money to our product and technology and we’re going to continue to

invest in our data capabilities to help make research data reusable so that more researchers and more patients can benefit from high-quality data.

“The long-term vision for me is that we will be streaming machine-readable research data straight into prediction models that can make better individualised and biased predictions for patients over time. That’s a pretty complex endeavour. So that’s where a lot of the money is going to go.

“But at the same time, we’re also launching the social impact committee and making sure that it is firmly embedded in the company. We’re all doing all of that, while growing and maintaining our culture, and continue to take care of our people.”

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TEENAGE TECH STORIES

Teenage tech stories Each month, Tech For Good speaks to one teenage entrepreneur about their incredible achievements in the world of tech, and how they’re contributing to making the world a better place

Name: Benyamin Ahmed

Age: 12 Born: London, UK Achievements: At only 12, Benyamin has already earned almost £290,000 from the sale of his NFT collection, Weird Whales. Benyamin has a YouTube channel where he teaches other children how to code and is currently working designing another NFT collection alongside a Marvel designer.

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BENYAMIN AHMED

I

‘ve been learning to code since the age of five. My dad is a programmer and he often would bring home his laptop and start coding.

My brother and I would sniff around and see what he was doing.

I first learned about NFTs around the beginning of this year. My dad’s friend was into Bitcoin from the start.

He bought an NFT for $27,000 and I instantly became fascinated about how someone was willing to spend this much money on a JPEG.

NFTs are growing in popularity over the last few months because ownership of an NFT can easily be verified over the blockchain. The initial use case has been digital art. However, this could eventually expand to a whole host of other assets including music, the ownership of cars, the ownership of houses and even replace signatures.

NFT stands for ‘non-fungible token’.

Everyone understands the “non” and the “token” parts but they struggle with the definition of “fungible”. “Fungible” means an item can be replaced. A good example of this is money. Money is fungible. If I give you £10, and I ask for it back in two weeks, you can give me any £10 back. However, if I give you an NFT and ask for it back in two weeks, you need to give me that exact NFT back.

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I have created two art collections so far: a small collection of Minecraft characters and a larger collection known as ‘Weird Whales’. For both collections, I was inspired by various internet memes and other crypto projects.

Weird Whales is a common pixelated whale meme that I created on a pixelated website. I then decorated them with various different assets. They were also inspired by CryptoPunks, the most valuable project in the NFT space.

Each weird whale is unique and is generated programmatically.

Creating a single NFT is quite simple as you can go to an NFT marketplace, connect your digital wallet and just upload your image. Creating a collection like Weird Whales is a little more complex, as you need to generate your collection, build a website and also build a smart contract.

In crypto, a “whale” is someone who has 1,000 Bitcoins so I chose whales because then I could kind of go with the catchline: “Everyone who has a whale is a whale.”

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Traditional art will always remain.

NFTs will make the art market bigger and stronger. In every industry, the digital format has massively outperformed the analogical format.

Digital assets can be programmed and transferred across a network at the speed of light. Their ownership and authenticity can be verified via the blockchain. Consider the example of Salvator Mundi by Leonardo da Vinci, which recently sold for $450 million, and later got questioned as being a fake.

This would never happen with an NFT.

I started my YouTube channel as my dad said that you only truly understand something when you try to teach someone. I would often share coding exercises I had been working on.

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I think it is important that young people learn to code because coding is like a superpower; it gives you such an advantage.

When you don’t have money, you want to buy lots of things. However, now that I have money, I don’t want to buy anything.

Instead, I want to keep it invested in crypto and hopefully see it grow in value.

I don’t want to become a one-hitwonder and be known as the “Weird Whales kid” for the rest of my life.

Currently, I am working on an NFT project called Non-Fungible Heroes about supervillains, heroes and gods. I

am working with a designer from Marvel so it’ll be interesting to see how it goes.

I might be the first person in history to tokenise my life and put it in the blockchain. It’s like I am constantly having a ruler next to me measuring my performance. If I do well in life, these Weird Whales will go up in value. If I don’t perform well, these Weird Whales will go down, so it’s quite scary when you think about it.

Longer-term, I want to try to build an infrastructure business in the digital assets space with my brother, who is also a really good coder.

Meet other incredible teenagers by listening to our new Teenage Tech Stories Podcast!

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