How to build an internal start‐up to sell new ideas in a new market
Who says radical innovation has to come from start-ups? Fluxx worked with Atkins to get a novel aircraft safety idea off the ground.
Atkins is part of the world-leading engineering consultancy SNC, with 18,000 staff working in 150 countries. Like other industries, engineering is changing at an unprecedented pace. A huge range of technologies are impacting how Atkins works, from drones and Internet-connected powertools to machine learning and blockchain-powered building information systems.
The challenge isn’t just technical. The entire business model of a engineering consultancy — one that has been in place since 1938 — is changing. If your consultant is an algorithm, can you still charge for time and materials?
Over the last three years, Fluxx have been helping Atkins develop a new vision of digital engineering. Together we’ve developed new ways of working, in order to unlock the extraordinary potential and skills within the company.
In one example, we equipped a team at Atkins with the creative confidence to free their ideas and develop them, at pace, into a viable digital service that could be sold to new customers alongside their traditional engineering services. This approach of ‘learning by doing’ has given people within the organisation the belief to aim higher, fail fast and persevere with their ideas.
Engineers within Atkins are creative, imaginative people who often come up with solutions that stretch beyond the normal activities of the company. One of these ideas had the potential to transform the way that aerospace engineers capture, report and repair damage on aircraft.
It was inspired by the development of consumer- grade 3D scanning technology. The engineer worked out a method that could improve both accuracy and efficiency of aircraft damage repairs, and was able to create a very simple prototype as a proof of concept.
Ideas like this can be a challenge for established businesses. It doesn’t fit neatly into any of their established services. A novel mixture of hardware, software, subscription and consulting is difficult to develop, tricky to validate and hard to price.
So, working with Fluxx, Atkins created a small, independent team to develop the idea, challenged to build out the prototype technology and prove the business model in just a few months.
The multifunction team worked just like a start-up, launching with a one-week ‘design sprint’ that set the project off at a remarkable pace.
They spent time in a secure aircraft hangar in Cambridgeshire, working alongside Hercules bombers, getting close enough to aircraft engineers to really understand the process — which is currently distinctly analogue; paper forms, steel depth gauges and bits of string.
After the initial design print, the idea was incubated. They worked with two of the biggest airlines operating in the UK as initial partners, and were able to calculate that this new digital service could deliver savings to the global aviation market worth approximately £733 million.
Together, we worked like a start-up and ran experiments to test the desirability, feasibility and viability of the proposition.
Within 12 weeks we had designed a blueprint for the business, built relationships with two new customers, and had tested the tech inside the hangars of commercial airlines. It’s been a good start.
The Problem: How can a vast and traditionally organised company work more like a start-up to develop ideas that stretch their business model into new areas?
What we did: Fluxx and Atkins created a Super Start-up; the speed and agility of a start-up combined with the expertise, scale and connections of a multinational.
The outcome: By experimenting at pace we demonstrated that Atkins could design and sell digital products alongside traditional engineering and design services.
Fluxx is a company that uses experiments to understand customers, helping clients to build better products. We do product and service design at such a pace we transform the way organisations work.
Tricky is the Creative Director at Fluxx. He loves getting the best out of people, designing new experiences and making sure that the customer is at the heart of anything we create. If you’re trying to break the back of a design challenge, or building a new business, you can contact him directly at tricky@fluxx.uk.com.
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