Public Funding for Knowledge Capital Ltd

"Small Businesses, Large Corporates and Public sector organisations in the UK spend over £22B a year on 'generic' consulting activities. This figure, while large, does not include the type of work covered by top end strategy houses and work offered from firms such as McKinsey, or technically oriented service delivery from the likes of IBM. The 'bulky middle' of management consulting includes a wide range of domain expertise and topics delivered in the portfolio, from cost reduction initiatives or revenue increasing advice, delivered across a number of functions (operations, HR, Finance, Technology and Supply Chain) and to the entire breadth of British industry. However, the consumers of such consulting services suffer from what many authors and scholars call 'information asymmetry'; knowing that a problem needs to be solved but lacking the data to be able to make decisions about how such a solution should be delivered. From our research, we know this leads to over specification, higher costs and a less satisfied customer as a result. Leveraging the insights from the Design Foundations grant awarded to us in August 2017, we are building a data led platform to bring transparency to the consulting industry; using big data and a remarkable human centred design interface to support SME's, public bodies and corporates to be empowered to make better decisions. Collectively, a data driven platform that supports customers to author their own work, leveraging bleeding edge technology in Machine Learning and A.I. means that everyone has the same easy access to high quality information. We can save small business (in particular) billions per year in lost revenues and higher costs, ensure targeted and efficient use of taxpayer money in the public sector, and limit wastage by corporate organisations."

The way that UK business recruit and select staff is outdated and inefficient. By using technology to dramatically improve the process, we can solve the structural problems that contribute to an unequal system. Current recruitment practices, amongst other things, (i) discriminate against regional hiring by favouring geographic centralisation (in major cities) at a time when remote working is widely accepted, (ii) favours traditional working hours when flexible working should provide opportunities to skilled individuals requiring a different arrangement (disabled people, professional mothers) (iii) perpetuates biases built into the system leading to less diverse teams (unconscious bias), (iv) for SME’s, lessen the cost of wrong hiring decisions - improved hiring and reduction in attrition benefits small businesses. The purpose of this project is to create a new solution driven by emerging technology (AI & chat bot) that is proven to be more effective at selection (structured assessments, online behavioural tests) but unless it retains a human element underpinned by good design, hiring managers are not going to be reluctant to “outsource” human judgment to a machine.