170 – Marketing IDEMS: From R&D to Products

George: [00:00:00] Hello and welcome to the IDEMS podcast. I am George Simmons and I’m here today with Kate Fleming, one of our directors. Hi Kate.

Kate: Hi George. How are you?

George: I’m very good. How are you?

Kate: Good, thanks.

George: So today we’re talking about, I guess, a problem that we’ve been trying to deal with the past few weeks, which is really how do we come up with or, kind of, turn our deep R&D [Research & Development] focus into something more tangible, like a product that we can actually try and sell or get investment for.

Kate: Yes, and I would say our particular challenge is that products often skew towards simplicity and reduction and kind of artificial boundaries. So we’re quite conscious of how do we both create something that’s tangible and does feel bounded in some way, but also [00:01:00] still retains what we often believe is the value proposition, which is it’s much more open, it’s interoperable, it’s held loosely so that it might take different shapes and we want it to do that.

Especially when we’re building things out where it might be somewhat amorphous and take shapes in different directions to meet a particular need. I think we always are working toward a long-term vision that is very product like, but is so ambitious often that the idea that we’re just going to fundraise for what that ambitious end goal is, is very unrealistic, I guess I would say. 

George: Yeah. And I suppose one of our, not issues, but the way we think is even if we think we know what that end goal is, normally we get one step towards it and realise, oh, we could actually push this even further. A lot of our day to day is not really moving towards a product, it’s just pushing the envelope.

One of my [00:02:00] thoughts on this was about, one thing we do and do well is make tools specific for people or certain uses, but in a way that is substantially different from coming up with a product, which is not necessarily targeted to any particular person. It’s there for someone to come and seek out. 

Kate: Okay, so, maybe to set up where this conversation came from. So you obviously have been working now for a couple of years with CASAS on this Physiologically Based Demographic Models. And, you know, there’s 40 years of research, there are all these reasons it works. But it has been a paper research offering that definitely is very validated, but doesn’t translate to scale, can’t start to be usable by people, just requires this very small group of experts to make it happen.

So your work has been developing the software language, developing the models, all of [00:03:00] this underlying, and you could explain it better than I will, that will make this much more accessible to a general user. So there’s already product thinking there because it’s the idea that you want to present something that’s interactive, that creates applications for this information that someone else would find value in.

So there’s that side of it. But then the other piece of it is we are not a research organisation, we are a social enterprise. And so we are often this like frontline between very deep research teams and what would look like a more traditional technology. And so we are kind of navigating in this way, and often not just navigating trying to solve the problem, but really navigating the fact that this is still heavily R&D, that there is this big research team. We still need the research team involved, it’s not just like a knowledge transfer to commercialisation, [00:04:00] take it, run with it, develop your business model. It’s still very formative.

And so how do you start to structure activities where there are signals out in the world of the value of the work we’re doing? If we just lived in an ideal world where we could just get funding for the R&D and there was just endless grant funding, then that would be one way to make this work.

But I think part of the problem that we’re seeing is if we want to raise other kinds of funding for our work, which is private investment, we need to show more tangible impact sooner. We need to show an artifact of the work, or, I don’t know that’s quite the right word, this instance of how this actually works because it’s quite hard to wrap your head around the research. It’s very abstract, it’s very big, it’s very complex, it quickly spins out of control.

So it’s how do you bring it into something that’s bounded that people can start to [00:05:00] see, that creates the pathway for them to interact with, to see that it works, to validate. And then, yes, we’re continuing to do research and development, but we’re also starting to get a early version of the product out into the market.

And in some way that’s not different from just commercial tech. It’s that we’re trying to hold on to the space for complexity and evolution and, exactly as you’re describing, that the focus often changes.

So is that a good framing of where we’re coming to this from? 

George: Oh, absolutely. You’ve absolutely summarised kind of the problem, or how we’ve worked really well, which is if you’re building towards a product, something specific, even if it is, as you said, some kind of demonstrator, then it changes the order in which you do things, the priorities in which you have in [00:06:00] working, the people you work with at different points.

And, left to your own devices, this being an R&D exercise, and certainly the way I naturally work, is to just build up pieces bit by bit. And often as you say, like each of those pieces has its own complexity and sometimes it’s difficult to explain that I spent a month on this thing incrementally, to actually explain what that does for an overall product vision is very difficult.

But yeah I think you’re right, that kind of having a focus on creating an artifact perhaps could help frame some of our thinking. One thing you said at the start was, yeah, absolutely, we like to hold this vision of interoperability, this different product or interface for different user, kind of thing. But it takes a long time to [00:07:00] actually get down to, okay, now we’re actually going to make this interface for this user.

And yeah, maybe it’s a mindset of saying let’s actually choose the user, let’s do some market research, get some interviews and actually have a focus on building towards that. 

Kate: Yeah, it’s interesting ’cause even listening to you talk, I would say my fellow director, David Stern, definitely skews toward he wants to stay in the complexity space, and anytime you’re going to product market in that direction, you are simplifying. You just have to simplify.

And so something gets lost in some sense. But as you’re saying, you’re also gaining, you’re learning things, you are starting to build credibility. Like Andrew Gutierrez, who’s the mind behind PBDMs has been asking, I think he’s quite eager to get something out in the world that is an [00:08:00] interactive experience of PBDMs. Because he has been working in the R&D space longer, I think he feels the frustration of when something is stuck in the research phase, it just can’t get traction in the same way, you’re constantly struggling to make the case that this is better, that this is a real leap forward.

If people can’t experience it, they can’t interact with it, they can’t actually validate for themselves, you just have to take someone’s word for it, or you have to read this very long paper, which probably, you know, 20 people who are experts on this topic are going to read. It necessarily marginalises and isolates the work. So there’s a real value in getting this out there and starting to have reactions, starting to get feedback, starting to see where people are getting that it’s something different.

Or if they’re not getting that it’s something different, why? How do we do that better? How does that inform how we push this in some new direction? How do we get people to begin [00:09:00] to imagine? This is a common thing with tech is the technologists understand the product specs and the foundational technology, but often they’re pretty limited in imagining what the use cases are.

It’s actually when it gets out in the world that some creative person, or often just some resourceful person with a problem they’ve really been unable to solve, suddenly stumbles on this and is oh my God, yes, I could use this this way, and I don’t quite have these other pieces, but if I added these, like I’m gonna cobble this together and suddenly I’m able to do this thing I was completely unable to do before. That’s transformational for me.

When we gain access to that insight, which we just can’t do when we’re in like a lab environment, it’s a great leap forward because it’s like really revealing about what the applied value of something that’s been purely R&D is.

But when you’re in this space that we’re in, which is kind of pre non-grant funding, [00:10:00] so looking for something that’s more commercial, there’s an element of faking it till you make it, I think, where it’s like you have to bring it together as if you do know more clearly. And we do have a lot of information. We do know a lot of things, but we know too much in some ways too, where it’s hard to narrow down.

So we’re trying to make these choices and this is the product piece, and this is what David Stern finds unsatisfying, is they are choices and they are constraining us. It’s just that they’re not permanent, it doesn’t mean we’re stuck in this forever. 

George: I suppose that the real trade off there is how to balance our credibility and ambition. Because we often have that long term product ambition, but people presented with big ideas, big information often start to question credibility. Whereas if you have a really nicely [00:11:00] focused product idea, user experience, workflow, that kind of thing, you actually gain credibility even if that is a very narrow thing in relation to your grand vision.

Kate: As you’re talking, I’m thinking about who’s allowed to hold what spaces. I was just on a different call where we were talking about ARIA, the UK agency that’s focused on innovation, and ARIA is set up where they have people who lead opportunity spaces, which is like some sort of moonshot idea. They’re involved in the research, but they’re actually funding people who are developing the products.

It’s interesting how who gets to sit in what space gets broken out to different people, where I think we’re in some sense trying to sit in a lot of spaces where we’re like a lot of what we’re leading with PBDMs is like this opportunity space of predictive ecosystem modelling and how do we get toward really what our moonshot is, which is this simulation of the [00:12:00] entire biological layer of earth, like a digital twin.

And that in ARIA’s framework would be an opportunity space. The idea that you have multiple people working on different pieces and they all kind of converge in some way, and that is what creates the space. But we’re sitting in all of these places and in that way, even though we have a consortium and there are all these different people, we’re working with casas, we’re working with ENEA, which is the Italian National… Agenzia. 

George: Energy research.

Kate: Energy research. I know. Yeah. So we have this consortium, which does geospatial modelling. So, in some sense, we’ve created our own mini opportunity space by bringing in all of these people who are innovating in their space and pulling them together to work on this single thing.

But that’s, we’re not in a position to be funded that way. Like we need to fundraise for something that is much more tangible, where we can show a deliverable sooner, where it can be benchmarked, where particularly for a private investor, [00:13:00] they can start to see impact or value much more quickly. Governments fund moonshots, private investors fund, I think, near term impact…

I think there are exceptions, but you have to build credibility to access the funding that would believe we’re credible as a long-term moonshot, large amount of funding destination. 

George: You might have spoken about this on another podcast, but can you speak about the different types of funding? Because there’s, as you say, a lot of what we’re doing is our products are designed to be impact oriented rather than financial oriented. So can you speak about the different people who might actually be interested in funding?

Kate: Yeah, that’s a good, that’s a good question because it does inform what the product is and what we’re doing. So, obviously the way, not obviously, I guess that’s part of the issue, the [00:14:00] way so much tech innovation gets funded is through venture capital or private equity. When something is ready for some sort of commercialisation, the assumption it’s going to make exponential profits, the hope is it’s going to make exponential returns for shareholders. There is a very clear agenda in someone who’s giving you money. They might lose that money. But they’re betting on the risk.

Then there’s like government funding, which tends to be variable. The EU, for example, has like deep research and development. Those are usually for academic institutions, I think, in Luigi who’s one of our consortium in his research, pretty much everything that gets that kind of funding from the EU has a strong contingent of research or academic organisation behind it. So there’s that layer and then there’s the EU path that there are definitely grants toward commercialisation. Innovate UK has those kinds of grants where they are stepping you toward where your next round of funding should be some sort of venture funding.

But when it comes to social [00:15:00] impact and something that isn’t fully charitable, could conceivably have a sustainable business model in the future, but we’re quite wedded to it’s not just a pure for-profit entity, profit basically has to take backseat to impact, which means that the profits are going to, in some way not be maximized in a way that’s satisfying to venture capitalists.

So it is a very different kind of funding, I don’t think there are clear avenues for it in the same way. You have foundations give that money, you have family offices. I think there is increasing interest in ambitious impact innovation. So there’s a category that’s emerging of venture philanthropy. I think there’s catalytic investment, which is like very low expectation of returns, where you’re really trying to fund something in a way where it is patient capital for impact.

But if you think of all the avenues there are for accessing venture capital, not to say that it’s easy, but there are incubators and accelerators and all these different things, and you can [00:16:00] see where the venture capital funds are and there’s a very clear practice of how you pitch a fund. It doesn’t mean you’ll be successful, but it’s a well worn, trod path.

I think when it comes to impact and impact products, it is a much more chaotic, much less defined, much more kind of finding your match. Because I think impact is quite personal. What does someone care about? What is their tolerance for risk? Oh I would add in there, the other thing is also just like tax incentives, what’s happening to this money?

If you give to charity, that’s a very clear path. In the UK there’s EIS and SEIS, which are tax relief for investors in for-profit startups. But actually for social enterprises there is not, there is not tax relief that’s clear there. It’s an underserved, I would say that’s a policy failure. I think I’ve said this other places where it’s a, there should be I think a category of tax [00:17:00] relief or something that’s very specifically for sustainable impact social enterprises.

But because there isn’t, that’s something that we are having to navigate. In our thinking about product, so much of what we are trying to navigate is how do we hold onto the vision that’s impactful, show we have business sense, because I think we do have business sense or can, but it’s also, how do we, how do we try to raise some funding to get to deliverables that are out in the world that, that are validating this while we’re still getting to move toward that moonshot ambition and not being compromised on that.

George: And the world of impact funding, venture philanthropy, that being more of a wilderness or a, dunno how to describe it, but it does present us with slightly more opportunity to have our own identity in that. I know the product [00:18:00] thinking we’ve been doing behind PBDM, we’re kind of saying, well, a good first demonstrator or MVP, Minimum Viable Product, could actually just be something aimed at academics or at least researchers based in government institutions or so on.

And that is a user base that if you’re going down venture capital is not really something you could aim for. You’d really want to be looking at who has the money, what are they going to pay? How much they’re going to pay, what’s the cash flow? So it all comes down to financial, which I suppose actually limits your product. Whereas here we do have that flexibility to at least have our own identity around that.

Kate: I do think that part of what we’re trying to avoid is a rush, that pressure and rush to profit in a certain way, which I do see our future customers for this, which is insurance or pharmaceutical or like what are the spaces where people need this [00:19:00] information to mitigate risk, to identify new opportunities, to develop new products. I see all kinds of ways that could be of value, but if that is where we have to put our focus, we are ultimately developing something that’s quite different.

A lot of what we think about is how do we make this information accessible to the particularly vulnerable countries, communities, places where they often can’t advocate for themselves, where decisions are made about what the thing is that will help them in the face of climate change or will make farming more productive. And those decisions are often just informed by the business interests or, whatever the interests of some outside person is. And they can have very harmful effects, but a community can only advocate for itself after the fact.

Okay, all the harm is done. Now we’re like, yep, okay, that was bad. We have examples of where you can see the harmful consequences of something that [00:20:00] was allowed to go rogue because the claim was we can’t predict what will happen and the data that’s coming out of the company or whatever that has interests is compelling and you can’t argue with it. And guess what? They get the contract, they become the norm, they’re the thing that is.

And so we think a lot about a product that is accessible and giving some sort of power to people who are deeply affected by climate change and biodiversity and whatever the different issues are that are related to ecosystem change. But how do you enable them to advocate and make decisions for themselves?

Whereas if we have to go after big business, our enterprise SaaS [software-as-a-service] version of this, that is a very particular product. It’s also necessarily going to become probably less open. I think we could still have a business model around open source, but I think [00:21:00] we would be putting our resources toward a product that aggressively targeted, solving some problems and very inadequately focused on other audiences and problems. 

George: Yeah, I see that. I suppose the last topic I wanted to go into, I dunno if you have others, but actually comes back to us and the people at IDEMS. because I guess, the majority of people who work at IDEMS are very academically focused or at least from academic backgrounds, or people who are very software focused and software oriented. And very little there in the skillset is really about product. And it may turn out that some people have an affinity for thinking about what a good product or user experience is.

But I suppose my question is around how do we resource [00:22:00] that, what is good enough balanced against everything else that we do? I suppose it’s no secret that we often do a lot more than we’re paid for or we’re funded for, and then trying to integrate some kind of product thinking or building towards some intermediary goal is then just yet more. Do you have a sense of what a good balance is?

Kate: Yeah, I think we’re growing in that direction. Our strategy, and for good reason, has been to embed as the mathematical science, computer science, data scientists, whatever, partners in these collaborations where we are a co-equal in figuring out how to develop something that is for impact. And I think that has to see itself through in a way for something to even get to the point where you could start to think toward products.

And a lot of what the history of IDEMS has been proving out our collaboration, that model even works. [00:23:00] That yield innovation, which I think we’re really coming to the point where we’re starting to have the signals where it’s this works, this is like we’re seeing really interesting stuff emerging, we’re getting, results of studies. So I think it’s really just like everything where there’s always a risk period where you are underfunded while you do a lot of things to prove and make the case that something works and is a thing.

And then there’s the period where you fundraise for what the next evolution of that is and how you develop. And I think we are finally reaching the stage where we are starting to be ready to think toward products where we do have enough core underlying innovation that we see is really innovative and we’re seeing validated in multiple places.

So now it is how does this get out? And I think this is what we’re working through right now, how do we effectively pitch ourselves in that way? It’s the classic startup thing of everyone wears lots of hats. You become good at [00:24:00] something you’re not good at. Like I’m watching you do this product work and I think you’re really good at it.

You have helped my thinking so much. I have product thinking from a user experience. While I understand that somebody needs to use something a particular way where I think you’re really able to sit with the deep technology, but think about how that deep technology actually interacts with people in the world.

And so I do feel like in working with you, and even just concepts like about our CASAS work, you’ve come up with this like ecosystem sandbox as our early model. I think that framework, that makes sense and that is so much of what people need to understand, the work we’re doing, sometimes it is just words that land in a way where there’s enough precedent, where people have seen this happen before, where they can now layer on this bit of new information.

Okay, this is for biology with this thing that’s familiar, a sandbox, I know what that is. It’s where you incubate, you have the core infrastructure to build [00:25:00] new startups, new things on top of which is what we’re trying to enable. That this is the interactive ground on which all of this, you know, climate resilient biodiversity protecting innovation can emerge from.

And everything from policy to startups to whatever it is. You could imagine all kinds of AI that starts to come out of this in some distant future or maybe not so distant future, I don’t know. But yeah, so I think sometimes it’s just, it’s all the same stuff under the hood. It’s just how do you pull it together in a way that makes sense, in a way that people would interact with, present the front that is usable. 

George: Yeah, can actually help us get to the next step. 

Kate: Yeah. And ultimately our goal at this particular moment is yes, to have users, but first we need some funding for that. So we need the early believers, the [00:26:00] incremental impact that we can have. And also, I think our investors, and we’re very comfortable with this, the idea that there will be some sort of modest return, a fair return on your investment, just not an exponential counter to impact return on your investment.

So I would say that I feel like you have, even though it’s uncomfortable, you have been so helpful to my thinking, places where I’ve been so stuck on like, David Stern, my fellow director will talk in these very abstract terms about something and he thinks it’s so obvious, and I’m like, it’s just, it’s not landing, like, it doesn’t land for somebody else, they’re not gonna get this.

And so I think so much of it is just like, how do we find the right language, the right frameworks, the right models where it just starts to make sense to people? 

George: There’s a lot of thoughts in my head, everyone’s head. And I guess, [00:27:00] without the experience or the context, you don’t know that that is actually the missing link to making this attractive, making it fundraisable, something like sandbox is not commonplace language in modelling, but it is definitely there. But to then, as soon as that comes out and then you can attach onto it because you’ve seen that in different places.

I guess it’s, yeah, just about talking, getting ideas together. It’s definitely a tricky process from my perspective, but I’m used to doing lots of things that I’m not good at. 

Kate: Well, and also I would say from having worked with so many tech companies, much more traditional tech companies, it is a universal problem. I can think of the number of times that I went into meet with someone who had a startup. You can see that it has potential, but they haven’t really figured out their product market fit, they haven’t totally figured out how to talk about what they’re doing yet.

And they will tell you, they will censor themselves thinking here’s what you need to hear. And you’re like [00:28:00] no, just tell me everything. Because you just never know what someone will say that they think is a very technical term or it’s too esoteric, that for somebody else is like that I can work with, that makes sense. And so I think you’re doing a lot of that, you know this very well, the variables, the use cases in at least the very direct way of what the applications of this are.

And so that, I think is a lot of what you are playing around with. I mean, I can see that in some of your notes when you’re writing them, you’re experimenting, so I think it is a collective exercise in moving toward that. And then at some point we have to make decisions and then it’s not collective.

And anyway, it’s just the two of us basically right now, so… 

George: Yeah, I can defer decisions to you. It’s fine. 

Kate: No, it’s very hard, but it’s very interesting and I think it is something that is consistently going to start to be a need for IDEMS to step into more where we’re going to have to develop this. And with funding, I think we can start to have that, but it is [00:29:00] training people to think about products for impact as opposed to products. You know, traditional thinking about mainstream tech, I can find those conversations frustratingly missing nuance in ways that are essential for us to actually realise the value proposition of what we’re trying to do. 

George: And I guess just for our listeners, we’ve spoken about PBDM and products there, but this is really starting to apply for everything we’re doing, app build, or our chatbot, or data services in R-Instat. So yeah it’s an exciting kind of thing to be a part of.

Kate: It’s so challenging all the time in ways that I think are really like it’s, you’re never bored, yes, I find it very interesting. But I’m very happy when you join me on it, not when I’m just in my own little isolated, my little pod trying to figure stuff out. Yeah. Thank you. 

George: Thank you [00:30:00] Kate. Unless you have any last thoughts I think this has been a really interesting conversation today.

Kate: Yeah, I do too. Thanks George. Watch this space. I’ll be curious to see how it all comes together.

George: Thank you Kate.