Weeknotes #8
Every week I do a quick update that explains what’s happened work wise, the past week or so.
One of my ‘kids’, Hometown Plus Limited (his sister is CounterCoin Community Club Limited) had a success this last week.
We were lucky enough to be selected by Innovate UK to advance a very important piece of place-based regeneration work that the National Lottery have already backed, and which is centred in North Staffordshire.
Innovate UK is the United Kingdom’s innovation agency, a non-departmental public body operating at arm’s length from the Government as part of the United Kingdom Research and Innovation organisation.
To Innovate in Stoke on Trent and North Staffs.
It’s big news for two reasons.
The first is that the vast majority of applications to Innovate UK fail. I can tell you that I’ve previously been successful with funding applications to Seedbed Trust, UnLtd , Adam from CryptoBatesGroup, The National Lottery and then Innovate Uk, which is by far the most rigorous and demanding process ever.
Luckily for us I didn’t write it. That was Andy Thomas.
The second is that funding is for work located in Stoke on Trent AND North Staffs, one of the most under-invested city regions in the whole of the UK. It’s most unusual for money to begin flowing into a place like Stoke on Trent, but that’s whats beginning to happen. Slowly but surely.
And we were — with our application — successful. Re-reading our application gave me a chance to reflect on how far we’ve come as an organisation. Our ability to articulate our aims and ambitions is so much better developed than when we first set foot on our journey to “show the world what good really looks like”. A vague but laudable ambition. Now though, we were able to commit to writing the following application….
Objectives
This experimental development project aims to create a prototype of the HT+ Tracker to test with 27 pilot customers.
Public Description
The significant lack of funding associated with the inability to predict the impact of frontline community organisations has led to many of these organisations becoming under threat. Community organisations are imperative to society and the COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted this while exacerbating the challenges surrounding these organisations. HT+, founded by entrepreneur, Mike Riddell, aims to develop an AI+SaaS platform — termed HT+ Tracker — which tracks and predicts the social impacts of community organisations. This tracker will deliver an innovative, affordable, and sustainable solution which will provide quick, trusted, and transparent data to make social value relevant again to the majority of frontline organisations helping unlock new funding opportunities.
SCOPE
Summary
HT+ will be the first company to produce an affordable AI+SaaS based platform which allows the measurement and visualisation of social value metrics to predict the impact of frontline community organisations. Current solutions are expensive and fail to accurately reflect the real impact of these organisations, making the platform invaluable in raising awareness and desire to create new sustainable funding models.
Innovation and EDI Considerations
HT+ Tracker will be the first to offer an affordable and accurate method to predict the impacts of community organisations by measuring and visualising key environmental, economic and person-centred metrics across three themes (health, wealth, and happiness), and three stakeholder groups (volunteers, beneficiaries, and internal).
This digital solution will allow customers to access a SaaS platform to set up and manage tracking goals and provide stakeholder interaction through an AI Chatbot app to track progress via self-provided data (hard outcomes + psychometric), plus natural language processing. Unlike any other solution, HT+ Tracker creates dashboards based on aggregated and anonymised data to provide a level of transparency and trust that’s not currently available. The dashboards enable funders, potential partners, and the public to view impact by organisation, by community, by indicator or theme. HT+ uses machine learning-based predictive models, such as the grouping of associated data points (clustering), to enable potential investors, grant-givers, and public/private sector partners the ability to analyse and predict the likely impact of their investment, saving time and resources, whilst lowering risk. Meanwhile, an API integration plugin provides scale through third party apps and websites.
There are no identified potential or inadvertent racial/ethnic/gender biases within our proposal that could negatively affect one gender or ethnic group. This will continue to be monitored throughout the project.
Market Opportunity and Sustainability
Current tech solutions are unaffordable and/or irrelevant to 80% of Community Organisations. HT+’s innovative and affordable digital SaaS platform reflects the customers’ strengths and fills a gap where the only competition is outside expertise and manual.
HT+ Tracker’s digitisation of a manual process consequently achieves social value reporting without the associated carbon footprint of travel and paper-based reporting.
The global and UK annual addressable/serviceable markets are £120m/month/£96m/month and £19m/month/£18m/month, respectively (CAGR: 6% 2021–2023; COVID-19 Recovery Report, 2020).
I’m beginning to become quite proud of my kids achievements, and winning big with Innovate UK is certainly one of them.
