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Background

Creative Carbon Scotland (CCS) believes that arts and culture organisations have an essential role in achieving transformational change to a sustainable future.  Their vision is of a Scotland where this role is recognised, developed, and utilised by both the cultural world and others interested in sustainability.

Creative Carbon Scotland provide training and support for arts organisations to reduce their carbon footprint and help nearly 120 key organisations in mandatory carbon reporting to Creative Scotland. Their culture/SHIFT programme builds connections and collaborations between arts and sustainability practitioners to apply their different skills, practices and working methods to address challenging and complex climate change-related issues. 

Challenge

It is widely recognised that artists across all artforms can offer new insights and alternative perspectives to bring about change in wider society. Creative Carbon Scotland are among several organisations who have worked on projects with embedded artists to address environmental sustainability and climate change. The artists have worked over extended periods, using cultural approaches to address these complex issues within organisations in the private, public and third sectors. Creative Carbon Scotland were keen to promote this type of collaboration, and the development of a library of case studies was a key step in the process of disseminating this approach. It aims to enable new users to discover a range of new ways of working with artists to address sustainability challenges.

The organisation recognised that for the case study library to deliver maximum impact, the evidence from a very wide and diverse range of ’embedded artist’ projects needed to be presented in a unique and engaging way.  Consequently, they sought to collaborate with an academic team to co-design an innovative categorisation and tagging framework to enable rapid and effective searching within the Library.

Solution

Funded by a Scottish Funding Council Innovation Voucher, Creative Carbon Scotland collaborated with Gray’s School of Art at Robert Gordon University to prototype the Library of Creative Sustainability hosted on the CCS website: a new digital resource showcasing best practice examples of collaborations between sustainability partners and artists seeking to make the world a better place. The framework was co-designed with end users to ensure that it met the needs of managers and decision makers within the sustainability and regeneration sectors.

Benefits

The Library of Creative Sustainability has allowed Creative Carbon Scotland to support advocacy and engagement with sustainability leaders in private, public and third sector organisations; presenting an opportunity for artists, designers, and other creative practitioners to share their skills, knowledge, and perspectives to not only address environmental sustainability, but also change the way we interact in society – thus re-imagining culture and embedding sustainability within it.

The prototyping of the Library web page benefitted Creative Carbon Scotland by further positioning it as a vital partner for leaders in the private, public and third sectors at the intersection of arts and culture with sustainability. The research work provided CCS with further examples on which to base new work and the resource itself will help introduce and persuade new partners to take up these opportunities.

The academic partner at RGU benefitted by having their research utilised, specifically through the creation of a suite of user-focused case studies. Both parties will benefit from the development of the framework for categorisation and tagging, generating new ways of engaging users.

Additional Activity

Following the successful delivery of the partnership with RGU, CCS received further support from Dr. Siobhán Jordan, Director, Interface who matched the company with University of Strathclyde Department of Management Science.  Iain Phillips, a student at the Department collaborated with CCS to review the key outcomes of several years of mandatory carbon reporting and reduction across artists, designers and other creative practitioners funded by Creative Scotland.  CCS have a long-standing track record of undertaking research and are also collaborating with University of Stirling Management School.

Background

CogniHealth is an Edinburgh-based health-tech company that creates digital solutions for long-term conditions. With a current focus on dementia, their aim is to improve the quality of lives of families affected by dementia.

Their flagship solution, CogniCare, is a digital companion for dementia carers. The CogniCare app empowers carers with an array of resources and activities that cover all aspects of dementia care in one place. It uses artificial intelligence (AI) to drive personalised dementia care support with the aim to reduce the affected family’s financial, physical and psychological burden.

This healthcare app also allows carers to monitor and track disease progression and gain comprehensive insights through the reports generated; enabling them to communicate better and more accurately with healthcare professionals.

Challenge

Pooja Jain, a neuroscientist and co-founder of CogniHealth, was referred by Business Gateway to Louise Arnold at Interface.  CogniHealth was seeking to strengthen the monitor-and-track functionality and add interactive features to the CogniCare app.  

While the resources available through CogniCare were successful in informing carers about dementia, delivering care and self-care, the way in which carers could document dementia symptoms through the app was tedious at times and not aligned to medical standards. This made it difficult to provide personalised care.

Solution

Louise and CogniHealth agreed that working with academic experts who understand how dementia is detected, and how it is monitored in its progression, would help CogniHealth develop a better understanding of the parameters healthcare professionals would find informative.  This would ensure they capture the right type of information, confirm its accuracy, and help deliver an effective personalised care treatment plan. After a project outline was scoped up and issued to various universities in Scotland, Louise was able to identify relevant expertise at the University of the Highlands & Islands (UHI).  UHI have unique expertise in the care of older adults and the dementia care sector with a deep understanding of the various aspects of care provision for people affected by dementia.

CogniHealth and UHI worked together to capture relevant clinical, cognitive, functional and behavioural parameters within CogniCare that could provide key information to both family carers and healthcare professionals. Family carers would be able to track the most relevant symptoms over time in an accurate and interactive manner.

The project was funded by a Scottish Funding Council Innovation Voucher.

Benefits  

Both parties have benefitted from the exchange of knowledge as well as the co-production of an enhanced product that will have a tangible impact on dementia care. 

Company – One of the significant outputs from this project was the development of a framework for practical day-to-day assessments and monitoring on symptom escalation by family carers of people living with dementia at home. This feature of the app could enhance carers’ competence and confidence in early identification of relevant symptoms; enabling professionals to provide early intervention to prevent unnecessary hospitalisation.  There are currently no tools that enable this kind of interaction with all those involved within the dementia care triad (the PwD, the carer and the professional).

CogniHealth aims to build partnerships with organisations across the UK, and this project provided a unique opportunity to develop such a partnership with the University of Highlands and Islands.

University – The project added value to two Dementia PhD students with learning opportunities around academic – industry partnership working and project management skills.  Outputs from this project included a virtual conference presentation at the Alzheimer’s Disease International Conference in December 2020 and the following publication in the Journal of Working with Older people:

Macaden, L., Muirhead, K., Melchiorre, G., Mantle, R., Ditta, G. and Giangreco, A., 2020. Relationship-centred CogniCare: an academic–digital–dementia care experts’ interface. Working with Older People.

Scottish Economy – The societal and economic costs of dementia are detrimental to society. The Scottish economy is not only impacted by the health and social care costs of dementia, but also the loss of a valuable workforce who may become full or part-time carers for a family member with dementia. Enabling the delivery of improved care, prevention and early intervention can reduce costs, while also keeping potential carers in the workforce for longer.

Follow-On Activity

In April 2020, Louise connected CogniHealth to the University of Edinburgh Advanced Care Research Centre.  The project was funded via the Data-Driven Innovation Programme* to apply data-driven-innovation ideas in support of communities, services and businesses, in response to the COVID pandemic.  An award of £15k was made to the University of Edinburgh Medical School to build a ‘soothing’ feature within the CogniCare app. The new feature enables users to access and view soothing images. These images will be sourced from an existing database of 800 images that have been collected from the public and have previously been shown to help improve people’s mood and help fight mental health issues exacerbated by the COVID-19 lock down. Users will be able to personalise the images based on their preferences (e.g. themes, colours) and tell CogniCare how they feel and the impact the imagery has had to their mental health.

* The Data-Driven Innovation initiative aims to help organisations and all our citizens benefit from the data revolution.  Working together to deliver the 15-year programme are the University of Edinburgh and Heriot-Watt University, whose researchers will collaborate with industry on data partnerships in the public, private and third sectors. This is part of the Edinburgh & South-East Scotland City Regional Deal.

Background

Every year our planet uses more than 27 million tonnes of natural and synthetic rubber, making more than a billion tyres and more than 50,000 other rubber products that we use every day. Much rubber is simply burned after use and the rest scattered far and wide as a filler in other products. The scale of the waste is vast. However, as demand for rubber grows each year, we continue to plant more rubber trees and use more oil to make more rubber, wasting our planet’s valuable resources, causing deforestation and unnecessary damage around the world.

Edinburgh based Recircle, has created a breakthrough technology that allows rubber to be effectively recycled into high-quality applications. It’s a world first, which combines patented innovation, protection of our environment and economic viability. The Recircle technology relies on effective surface devulcanisation of rubber powders (the breaking of cross-linking sulphur bonds) derived from waste rubber.

Challenge

Recircle were looking to develop rapid testing techniques suitable for high throughput screening in industrial application for the vulcanised and devulcanised rubber powders in order to assess the effectiveness of the devulcanisation process. The company was seeking universities with appropriate facilities to do this, with the aim of conducting long-term research on the optimisation of a biotechnological devulcanization process.

This would be essential for improving the company’s quality control procedures, as well as for application testing with new waste feedstocks provided by customers.  The new standards would help the company provide higher levels of quality assurance to all customers, regardless of the materials being processed for them, and further cement its reputation as the provider of the highest quality materials in the market.

Solution

Louise Arnold from Interface successfully partnered Professor Nick Christofi, Chief Scientific Officer at Recircle, with Professor David Bucknall, Chair in Materials Chemistry at Heriot-Watt University. Together, they successfully applied to Innovate UK for KTP (Knowledge Transfer Partnership) funding and were subsequently awarded £125k to fund a two-year project utilising the services of a post-graduate associate to develop rapid testing methods for the assessment of surface chemistry on polymer surfaces. 

Benefits

By providing the company with an innovative quality control process, the KTP will underpin the professionalisation and worldwide expansion of its current process capabilities; opening up a large opportunity for growth for the business in terms of materials they can process and global expansion of the customer base.

Impacts

This collaboration has directly resulted in an increase in turnover as well as additional employment within the company.

Follow-on Activity

An additional project to come out of the partnership was a consultancy with Zero Waste Scotland under a Circular Economy programme that aims to stimulate innovation amongst Scottish businesses to help them adopt more circular business practices, which treat all resources as assets – keeping them in use for as long as possible to extract the maximum value from them. Making available European Regional Development Funds, Zero Waste Scotland (ZWS) is aiming to stimulate new business activity to identify, develop and bring to market new circular economy products and services.  Through Professor Bucknall, Recircle received consultancy funding to examine the recycling of waste water from the Recircle devulcanization process and to generate new products from its waste streams.

If you would like to find out more about partnering with a university or college, please contact us.

Background

Floco (formerly Lilypads Group Ltd) is a mission driven company that manufactures and sells reusable sanitary pads and provides menstrual health education. Founder and CEO of Floco, Alison Wood, strives to end period poverty and stigma by providing affordable reusable sanitary pads and education to communities around the world.  They currently work in Malaysia and Kenya, with preparations to start working in Cambodia and Nigeria.

There is a growing market opportunity for natural, sustainable, durable, and reusable sanitary products in the UK and current reusable sanitary pads are limited by several factors including leakage, lack of absorbency and the very high price point.

The company aim to develop a product suitable for the UK market, with the long-term aim that profit from this product can subsidise the cost of their international pads, ensuring they are affordable to all.

Challenge

During the product development phase, Floco trialled their product and learnt that the consumers found it more comfortable than their conventional sanitary pad. However, for these women the pad’s thickness was imperative; ideally the women could wear the pad all day and it be no thicker than standard disposable pads. With the current materials available on the market this looked unlikely and therefore the pad would need to be much thicker, limiting its attractiveness.

The company were also keen to look at ways to make reusable pads more affordable and environmentally friendly.  They recognise that absorbent textiles are key to this development along with being able to ensure the current attributes of pads are maintained. 

Floco approached Interface in the hope of undertaking a feasibility study with a research team to establish initial options and the key design principles for absorbent textiles that would offer the following attributes:

Solution

Following a search of Interface’s academic partners, Dr Danmei Sun, Associate Professor of Textile Materials & Engineering at Heriot-Watt University was introduced to Floco and undertook the initial feasibility project funded by a Scottish Funding Council Innovation Voucher. The results identified two materials – a quick drying fabric that was soft and felt like underwear and an absorbent middle layer than holds the moisture so even when pressure is applied it does not leak. The constructed pad is discrete, easy to use and wash and fits the user needs perfectly.

Benefits

Floco tested the product and identified a manufacturer. The pad was launched to the market in July 2020 by Crowdfunder with sales in the UK subsidising Floco’s work internationally to ensure no one is limited by their period.

Follow-On Activity

Following this initial project Floco returned to Interface to undertake a consultancy project around Strategy and Business growth. Working with a student at the University of Stirling, Floco have explored: the potential of targeting the pads at a specific demographic, behavioural attitudes towards buying sustainable products, analysing the sustainability of the whole business, not just the product, and optimising supply chain opportunities.

To learn more about Floco, please visit their website.

Background

Bright Light Relationship Counselling is a charity that provides counselling, family therapy support, sex therapy, life skills coaching to young people, and counselling in schools. They also support families in recovery after alcohol addiction.  

Challenge

Bright Light was facing challenges reaching as well as supporting young people as, typically, they were not found to be comfortable with face-to-face counselling.  Bright Light also have clients, such as carers and people with disabilities etc., where travelling to a venue is very difficult for them. Their services are crisis driven – they receive calls for help when issues have reached crisis point and relationships are near to or have broken down.  

To combat these challenges, Bright Light were looking to:

Solution

Bright Light approached Interface, looking for a university or further education student to compile a feasibility/business plan that would include:

Benefits

The feasibility study came just before the COVID-19 outbreak and the recommendations provided by the students allowed Bright Light to rapidly adapt their service model and set up digital counselling sessions. This enabled them to continue to help their most vulnerable clients, to keep in touch with them, as well as bringing in much needed income to the charity when many others were struggling.

Bright Light’s doors are wide open and welcomes people and families who feel they could benefit from counselling support in these strange and challenging times.

Contact askus@bright-light.org.uk and visit their website www.bright-light.org.uk.

Background

Go Upstream provides a practical training and design programme for transport providers, helping to make services more inclusive for people living with dementia. They bring people with dementia together with people who provide travel and transport services, putting their voice at the heart of future mobility service design.

Challenge

Travel connections can be challenging, potentially creating barriers to travel, and if the challenges lie in the spaces in between services, how do we discover them, how do we go about reducing barriers, and who is responsible for making improvements?

In 2018, Transport Scotland called for ideas for projects to address some of the challenges identified in Scotland’s Accessible Travel Framework.  This became the focus of a new project that brought together a broad group of partners, led by Go Upstream and funded by Transport Scotland*, called ‘Making Connections: the spaces in-between’. The project idea was to bring disabled people together with transport staff to explore connections from rail stations to ferry terminals and then collaboratively design solutions to these challenges. 

It was an ambitious proposal that required a partnership with many different skills. 

The project partners tapped into the expertise developing here in Scotland around improving environments and services for people with dementia. Making Connections has benefitted from the growing network of projects and organisations funded by the Life Changes Trust.  Partners include StudioLR who are working on improving signage, Paths for All who are changing the way that we think about inclusive outdoor environments and the British Deaf Association who will ensure that the views of deaf people who are affected by dementia are included.

Transport Scotland placed a large emphasis on evaluation and it was important for Go Upstream to bring in specialist expertise to ensure that they could track and describe the project’s impact. 

Solution

Referred by Business Gateway, Interface introduced Andy Hyde of Go Upstream to Catharine Ward Thompson, Professor of Landscape Architecture and director of the OPENspace Research Centre. 

OPENspace is an international research centre, based in the universities of Edinburgh and Heriot-Watt, which contributes evidence on why inclusive access to the outdoors matters.

It is a collaborative, multi-disciplinary team, bringing together experts in landscape architecture, environmental psychology, human geography and forestry.

Addressing the full spectrum of open space environments – from city parks and squares to remote rural landscapes – their work informs policy on health and wellbeing, social inclusion, countryside access and sustainable urban development.  They focus on the benefits to be gained from getting outdoors and the barriers currently experienced by different users, particularly those from disadvantaged groups.

It was OPENspace’s previous experience of working with people in different outdoor environments, as well as taking a qualitative approach, that was key to tracking the project’s impact.

Benefits

A key benefit of having the OPENspace team involved in the Making Connections project was the ability to use their monitoring and evaluation results to inform the design of the project approach and tools as the project progressed. By taking this reflective approach, Go Upstream ensured that they were able to keep aligned with their guiding document, Scotland’s Accessible Travel Framework. 

*The new fund provides support to projects which enable the central vision outlined in the Accessible Travel Framework – that all disabled people can travel with the same freedom, choice, dignity and opportunity as other citizens – with a particular focus in encouraging more sustainable active travel options.

Background

Scotland accounts for 70 percent of the UK’s total gin production, which is being largely driven by the growth in craft distilleries, 35 of which have opened in Scotland in less than three years, offering over 100 gin variations. Many distillers produce gin while they wait for whisky to mature.

There is a vast array of botanicals that may be grown in Scotland and therefore a wide palette in terms of flavour and aroma that may be incorporated into Scotland’s distilled products such as gin.

Challenge

The use of local or novel botanicals has become a popular method to create gins with a unique selling point and several members of the Scottish Distillers Association, (SDA – previously called the Scottish Craft Distillers Association), have worked with Heriot-Watt’s International Centre for Brewing and Distilling (ICBD) on new product development experimenting with botanicals that may be sourced close to their distilling operations.

The recipe development process can be very complex, particularly when working with novel or large numbers of botanicals. To simplify the process, it is useful to distil individual botanicals to determine their flavour and aroma attributes to predict their contribution in the final recipe.

The Botanicals Library was created to address this challenge and reduce the time and cost of recipe development and widening the possible options for botanical choice.

Solution

Originally, Interface supported the partnership between Heriot-Watt University’s world-renowned International Centre for Brewing & Distilling with the Scottish Distillers Association that enabled the development of a unique library of over 40 botanicals grown in Scotland. The initial funding from Interface was supported by R&B Distillers, Strathearn Distillery and Glasgow Distillery Company, representing the Scottish Distillers Association.

Interface supported the further development of the Botanicals library by the ICBD and SDA partnership which allowed extension of the library to include a range of botanicals not cultivated in Scotland, but with significant importance in gin production. The extension to the library was supported by Ncn’ean Distillery (formerly Drimnin Distillery), together with Glenshee Distillers, Glasgow Distillery and Verdant Spirits, representing SDA.

Heriot-Watt’s International Centre for Brewing and Distilling has distilled each botanical individually, assessing the flavour and aroma profile as well as mouth feel. It now features 72 botanicals that can be grown in Scotland, including nettles, lavender, dandelion and chaga fungus, which grows on birch trees.

Today, the Botanicals Library is available for the members of the Scottish Distillers Association to utilise and exploit in their innovation and production of new recipes.

Business benefits

Matthew Pauley, Assistant Professor at the ICBD and a drinks industry consultant, who led on the distillation of all the botanicals, said:

“Our botanical library will help gin producers create Scottish gins with locally available botanicals that are available in dried form, from a sustainable source, to ensure consistency and availability.

“The library enables us to tell producers how a botanical will perform under the conditions used in gin production.

“Several members of the Scottish Distillers Association have already used the botanical library to create new gins. By coming to the lab, they can experiment and explore new flavour palates, with less ‘trial and error’.”

One business which benefited from using the Botanicals Library is Highland Boundary, a craft distillery based in Alyth. Co-founders Marian Bruce and Simon Montador identified a gap in the market for Scandinavian-inspired spirits with the botanicals sourced from local woodlands. Marian Bruce, said:

“By accessing the expertise at Heriot-Watt University we were able to try out different botanicals to produce new flavours of spirit with distinct Scottish flavours reflecting Perthshire’s “big tree country.”

“Now that we have launched our first product, Birch and Elderflower Wild Scottish Spirit, we want to build the company and create employment in an area where manufacturing jobs are few and far between.”

David Wilkinson, Edinburgh Gin’s Head Distiller, said:

“Seaside Gin was the first of our collaborations in partnership with Heriot-Watt University’s Brewing and Distilling MSc course. Such has been the success and popularity of Seaside Gin, we have had to transfer production from the small 150 litre still to our larger 1000 litre still at our second site. We will now be producing 1300 bottles per distillation, with at least 4 distillations per month. Testament to the success of developing and using a fantastic botanicals library resource for the benefit of the industry in Scotland.”

Professor Alan Wolstenholme, Chair of the Scottish Distillers Association, added:

“Over the last few years there have been a large number of Distillery start-ups in Scotland. Whilst several spirits are being successfully produced, the one which has been most prominent has been gin with many new brands achieving a well-regarded status amongst customers whilst raising the profile of the entire sector.”

Academic Benefits

To date, over 30 distilling MSc projects have incorporated use of the library to create new gins and botanical liqueurs which will continue to increase with future projects.

The main impact of the MSc projects and the Botanicals Library has been a reduction in product and process development time so there is less “trial and error” for companies. It has also enabled greater understanding of both the production process and botanical behaviour, which is now included as part of their teaching.

Additional/Key outcomes

The Botanicals Library is a shared resource designed to benefit distillers across Scotland. The collaboration across distinct geographic areas in Scotland has been vital in identifying a broad range of potential botanicals.

Initially developed to help Scotland’s gin producers create unique, new products, the library is now being used to ensure Scottish gin meets the import standards of countries like the USA. Several members of the Scottish Distillers Association have already used the library to create new gins and botanical liqueurs and support export activity.

With 70 percent of the UK’s gin produced in Scotland, and sales expected to hit £1.5 billion by 2020 (according to Scotland Food and Drink), the library is good news for producers who are eyeing the domestic and international markets.

The Botanicals Library team won the Multiparty Collaboration category of the Scottish Knowledge Exchange Awards 2019 hosted by Interface.

“Sitting is more dangerous than smoking, kills more people than HIV and is more treacherous than parachuting. We are sitting ourselves to death.”  Dr James Levine, Director of the Mayo Clinic, Arizona State University

Company Background
Each year, significant numbers of workers suffer ill health as a result of poor ergonomics and unhealthy lifestyles at work. This has an impact on quality of life and results in tens of millions of lost sick days. With awareness growing of the adverse effects of sedentary, desk-bound, computer-centric work lifestyles, Welbot was founded in Edinburgh in 2017 with a primary goal of helping people take control of their wellbeing in the workplace by instigating positive behavioural modification through the use of smart, appropriate technologies.
 
The Welbot team comprises of Mykay Kamara (CEO), Sam Deere (CTO) and Pete Burns (CDO) who are a close-knit group of commercial, technology and marketing minds working alongside Creative Directors Ian Greenhill and Jordan Laird, with the business being chaired by Ian Smith ex-MD of Oracle UK.
 
Welbot is a cross-platform, digital intervention and productivity platform, tailored to each user, that helps employees stay physically and mentally well in the workplace by learning and adapting to the actions that they take. The wellness management software encourages activities such as stretching, screen breaks, nutrition, mindfulness, hydration, micro exercises and simple, rewarding brain training games and is designed and engineered for both individual and large-scale enterprise use.

Challenge 
The company initially wanted to collaborate with a university to understand how they could extract knowledge and insights from data and machine learning, especially around autonomous, self-teaching systems that can analyse data and provide insights to human behaviour. The aim of this project was to 1. investigate the use of predictive models of user response to screen-based notifications and prompts and 2. provide a path for future enhancement of the underlying Welbot AI framework.

Solution
Interface connected the team with the Department of Computing and Information Science at the University of Strathclyde, where they were successfully awarded a Scottish Funding Council Innovation Voucher to address the company’s challenge and to develop a proof of concept prototype to incorporate the findings into the application roadmap.

Follow-on Activity 
In addition, Interface saw the opportunity to provide additional support to the company by partnering them with marketing and business students at both the University of Strathclyde and the University of Edinburgh. Interface drew up a project outline and introduced the team to the academic supervisors at both universities. The projects were approved and the company now has a student team from Marketing at the University of Strathclyde researching, analysing and making recommendations to support their business strategy around corporate wellbeing programmes in the UK, as well as an Msc student from the University of Edinburgh, doing a company sponsored dissertation on evaluating the uptake and Return On Investment of wellbeing programmes.
 
Offering further support to the company, Interface issued another search across the universities to support their requirement of cross-disciplinary academic expertise in exercise physiology and computer science. They were ultimately partnered again with the University of Strathclyde who had the best fit to continue the project. Strathclyde were successfully awarded a Follow-On Innovation Voucher and they have drawn upon academic expertise from both the School of Psychological Sciences and Health (PSH) and Computer and Information Sciences (CIS).  This project will address analytics of user behavioural data and the psychological effects of prolonged sedentary behaviour on the body.
 
Welbot are also working with experts in behavioural sciences within the University of Strathclyde, University of Edinburgh and University of Aberdeen to look at psychological and behavioural sciences with a focus on occupational stress, behaviours relating to wellbeing in the workplace, and responses to stimuli to change behaviour in a technology setting.
 
These collaborations have all been achieved within just an eight-month time frame.

Background

Investment Solver Ltd was founded in 2014 by Manuel Peleteiro.  The company has developed a digital platform called Inbest, a data analytics platform that aims to democratise the access to wealth management. Inbest enables financial institutions to provide a holistic, personal and realistic financial planning service. This solution automates the financial planning process by gathering and analyzing customers’ financial data.

Challenge

The company approached Interface in 2015 with the concept around developing a platform that would help users learn and understand their finances, empowering them to make better financial decisions. At the time, investment providers were launching online investment propositions targeted at digital consumers, but a large majority of this market segment was not engaged with saving and investing.

Investment Solver was looking to collaborate with academics interested and researching the fields of:

• Cognitive science

• Information visualisation

• Computer interaction science

• User interface design

Enhanced Support in the Interim

Whilst the company was refining its business proposition and technical offering, Interface connected them with Edinburgh Napier University who supported them in applying for a RSE (Royal Society of Edinburgh) Fellowship, hosted by the University.  They were successful, and as an awardee, the company were able to focus solely on refining their business ideas, whilst receiving one year’s salary, expert training in entrepreneurship, and access to mentorship from business Fellows of the RSE and other successful entrepreneurs in the business community – all of which are vital for an early stage business.

Interface also connected them to Dr Roberto Rossi, Director of Post Graduate Programmes at University of Edinburgh Business School, as they were looking to develop a sound and innovative marketing strategy.

Dr Rossi’s Project Management students worked with the company to carry out focus groups to test the problems that first home buyers face and evaluate whether HouseUp, one of the company’s applications, would help them.

“I am very happy with the output of the project and I have used their insights for the product road map and in presentations with clients”, said Manuel.

Due to the success of the student project, the relationship developed between Interface, Investment Solver and Dr Rossi, resulting in another collaboration between the company and Dr Rossi’s students the following year.  This was a market-orientated project which would help the company guide decisions on one of their product features.  They provided the students with the working prototype of HouseUp, which they used in customer interviews. As a result of the study, Investment Solver gained a better understanding of the characteristics of potential customers and their needs.

“As the norm, the students have done a terrific job”, said Manuel.

Interface continued to keep in touch with Investment Solver to make them aware of additional opportunities that existed within the universities and possible research funding grants.

Solution

Connections with the company were enhanced when Dr Rossi drew upon the expertise of his colleague, Dr Raffaella Calabrese.  She was conducting research to investigate models that integrate socio economic indicators to model and estimate property valuations in a given area while Manuel was looking to build an application to automatically calculate a customer’s financial situation.  Together, they were awarded funding via The Data Lab to part fund an industrial doctorate to analyse data such as banking data and user data and preferences, to develop a system which will offer a long term financial plan for the user. This financial plan, which will include advice on savings and spending, will automatically be adapted to changes in markets and/or other user related data.  The PHD student is being supervised by both Dr Miguel Carvalho (School of Mathematics) and Dr Raffaella Calabrese (Business School) who quotes:

“It was great to see how this collaboration developed from student project to a research collaboration with the benefit of seeing how our research directly impacts the company, helping them to develop and enhance their offering. 

Together, this project helps address financial inclusion and financial well-being in society by developing an affordability model to help people to find out how much they can comfortably save.”

Follow-On Activity

As part of their response to the COVID-19 pandemic, over £11k was awarded by the Data-Driven Innovation Programme (DDI) to the University of Edinburgh Business School in collaboration with Investment Solver.  The aim of this project was to support vulnerable people to identify the benefits that they were entitled to and to provide short term affordable lending to bridge the gap that would be repaid once the individuals received their benefits. DDI would support lenders in making such decisions by providing a credit application check that would take into account the amount of benefits that the applicant was entitled to receive.

This would be achieved by developing and applying the Inbest Benefits calculator that uses individuals’ banking data to calculate the income benefits users can claim and monitors their entitlement according to changes in their financial situation.