The Innovation Life Cycle is Ten Years in Liverpool
Yesterday I went to a keynote event that was part of the Liverpool University’s “award-winning flagship event… of transformative live and self-directed activities that promise to inspire and engage you with knowledge exchange and research impact.”
The reason I went to this particular presentation was to pursue my civic duty to break the Innovation Regeneration Cycle in which property developers and craven university managers are seamlessly transitioning from Sensor City to (2015-2022 RIP) to Hemisphere One (don’t forget the viability gap) with the deliberate intention of ignoring all lessons learnt.
The presentation was a talk between Professor Anthony Hollander, Pro-Vice Chancellor for Research and Impact and Colin Sinclair, CEO of Sciontec / Knowledge Quarter Liverpool, and was mostly comprised of the same waffle about innovation and office space that I heard from these sorts of success-oriented failure-incurious figure-fiddling managers who brought us Sensor City ten years ago.
And it was a success: they scammed a modest sum of government money that had been earmarked for tech innovation and used it to build a useless building and wasted a lot of people’s precious time. What more do you want from a property developer?
I was there for the Q&A.
One questioner before me asked about the future of Sensor City.
Although Sciontec (a company joint owned by Liverpool City Council, LJMU and Liverpool University) has had big plans to refit and reopen Sensor City since it closed two years ago, they’ve encountered some insurmountable difficulties in transferring it from its current joint owners (Liverpool City Council, LJMU and Liverpool University). The reasons are apparently too complicated to explain. I’m just not smart enough to imagine why selling a building owned by your family to a company owned by your family should take more than a minute.
Then I got to ask my question:
There’s a saying in the innovation space (which you purport to know about): “Fail fast.” What this actually means is “Learn fast”, because we learn only from failures. Success doesn’t teach you anything. Also, in Engineering when there is a failure, like a bridge falls down, the event doesn’t go to waste because we use it as a case study to learn things we didn’t know before so that the same thing doesn’t happen again. So here we have a complete failure called Sensor City by exactly the same organizations who promoted it with exactly the same justifications put forward in this presentation. So where is the review or study or presentation in this series of events about the lessons that we can learn from this debacle?
Colin Sinclair waffled about circumstances changing at the site over the years, from the building being surrounded by empty space to now a new LJMU campus area springing up next to it [shouldn’t that make success easier?], before he concluded with:
When we get this building re-opened I’m going to look forward to getting it packed out with innovative companies all full of activity. When it becomes that sort of success, that will the best time to do a review about the whole project from the start.
I’d like to know: How did we get into this state where the people who run universities don’t want to learn anything? Luckily when Sensor City was originally funded ten years ago the government promised that there was going to be an evaluation of the program. I have made an FOI request so they don’t leave its publication too late.
Postscript:
For those with sharp memories of Liverpool University's mass sacking event of 2021, Professor Anthony Hollander (Pro-Vice Chancellor for Research and Impact) is known for being an accomplished expert of rapidly commercializing his high-flying research (see retracted paper) into a cushy appointment in a different University before it blows up into a scandal.
For an antidote to this story, kick back and read Richard Feynman’s 1974 Commencement Address called Cargo Cult Science.
Praise the Lord we have a system of university governance that ensures that no seriously intelligent, curious person with integrity ever gets appointed to a position of authority where they could make a difference to how things run!