House of Commons: Productivity Innovation Award
nquiringminds was shortlisted for Innovate UK’s inaugural SME Innovation Awards in the category Innovation leading to Productivity Improvement — recognised company-wide as a Parliamentary / House of Commons Productivity Innovation Award nomination — with the ceremony held at the House of Commons on 13 October 2015.
nquiringminds, a Southampton-based IoT and smart-cities company, was shortlisted in the inaugural Innovate UK SME Innovation Awards for its Open City Data Platform (OCDP). The awards, run by the UK’s innovation agency Innovate UK, recognised cutting-edge growing companies among projects Innovate UK had co-funded. The shortlist of 22 companies was announced on 7 October 2015; winners were presented by Jo Johnson MP, then Minister of State for Universities and Science, at a showcase event in the House of Commons on 13 October 2015 (GOV.UK winners announcement).
nquiringminds was nominated in the category Innovation leading to Productivity Improvement — the recognition the company has since described as a Parliamentary nomination for innovation in productivity. Innovate UK’s own Celebrating Success brochure profiled the company under that productivity heading: following Future Cities Solutions SBRI wins, Southampton’s nquiringminds had been awarded around £1.1m to build an open data platform that brings together disparate local-authority datasets to improve productivity (Innovate UK — Celebrating Success PDF; local copy).
Dr Ruth McKernan, then chief executive of Innovate UK, said:
British companies, such as nquiringminds, are preparing for the future with their ground breaking innovations. They are building new industries, creating new jobs, and driving productivity. These awards celebrate the best of British innovation and I congratulate all the fantastic nominees.
A smart city is a productive city, and nquiringminds pointed to two recent OCDP successes with Southampton City Council, Liverpool City Council and Cambridge County Council.
The GP Pressure Map, developed for Wessex Academic Health Science Network, brought together five diverse open datasets with analytics and visualisation to show which areas of Hampshire would face the greatest strain on GP service provision — helping government invest resources more productively. Bronwen Vearncombe, Associate Director at Wessex AHSN, said: “The type of work NquiringMinds is doing is helping unlock the value from data already out there; this will lead to better decision making within the health service.” The same work later featured as a Cabinet Office Open Data Champion case study.
At the other end of the spectrum, nquiringminds deployed an IoT sensor platform with the University of Southampton’s Energy and Climate Change Division (ECCD) in domestic houses in Southampton. Funded by the EPSRC programme grant Transforming the Engineering of Cities, the collected data — combined with surveys — helped estimate building energy use and city-wide refurbishment strategies for energy savings and CO₂ reductions. Professor AbuBakr S. Bahaj, head of ECCD and Chief Scientific Officer for Southampton City Council, said: “NquiringMinds sensor suite and data analytics platform has been key in allowing us to estimate the energy saving that can be attained in buildings, assisted in the validation of our city-wide modelling approaches and the planning strategies for housing refurbishment.”
Dr Nick Allott, Founder and CEO of nquiringminds, said:
We want to be a British tech company that is making a real difference to people’s lives. We are developing IOT and SmartCities technologies using software and hardware that help a city capture, secure, and put data to work, so that they run smarter. We have a secure internet of things platform called the Open City Data Platform. This stretches from sensor data all the way up to high level data analytics which give real strategic insight.
