Episode Transcript
[00:00:06] Tamlyn Shimizu: Welcome to Smart in the city, the BABLE podcast, where we bring together top actors in the smart city arena, sparking dialogues and interactions around the stakeholders and themes most prevalent for today's citizens and tomorrow's generations.
[00:00:21] Tamlyn Shimizu: I am your host, Tamlyn Shimizu, and I hope you will enjoy this episode and gain knowledge and connections to accelerate the change for a better urban life.
[00:00:31] Tamlyn Shimizu: Smart in the City is brought to you by BABLE Smart cities we enable processes from research and strategy development to co creation and implementation. To learn more about us, please visit the BABLE platform at BABLE Smartcities EU.
[00:00:46] Tamlyn Shimizu: So welcome back to another episode of Smart in the City. We are diving today into a city called Milton Keynes, a medium sized city in England that is working as a testbed for innovation and quote unquote, doing things a bit differently. Excited today to speak to one of the stakeholders involved in that whole ecosystem. In Milton Keynes, as we know, universities play an important role in a city's ecosystem, from leading research to leading projects, fostering innovation and more. So with me today is a perfect person to talk all about that. His name is Kevin Shakesheff. He's the pro vice chancellor for research and innovation at the Open University in Milton Keynes. Welcome, Kevin.
[00:01:30] Kevin Shakesheff: Hi. Thanks very much.
[00:01:32] Tamlyn Shimizu: Thanks so much for coming on. To get us warmed up, I always like to start us off with a little teaser. The question today is, if you could have any superpower to help with your research, what would it be and why?
[00:01:47] Kevin Shakesheff: Okay, so I'm gonna go for quite a boring one, I think, which I would like to have infinite patience. So I'd like to be able to recover from any setback. And I was thinking about this and thinking, well, do I want a superpower that makes research easy? And I actually thought, no, the whole point of it is it's meant to be hard. And actually, because it's hard, you learn a lot. So I think the ability to bounce back and keep going when things don't work out, I'm going to go with that.
[00:02:14] Tamlyn Shimizu: That's quite a superpower. I'm working on that superpower in life as well, so let me know when you obtain it properly.
Good. So I'd love to get into a little bit more on who are you? What is your background? What led you to your position today?
[00:02:35] Kevin Shakesheff: So I started my career as a pharmacist. So I trained as a pharmacist in a city called Nottingham, which is right in the center of the UK, practiced as a pharmacist in the UK, and then decided what I really wanted to do was make new medicines for people, and so went off and did a PhD. So I did a postgraduate degree and then worked at MIT in the States in one of the labs that was really developing the first wave of what are called regenerative medicines, which is medicines that get parts of the body to regrow if they've been damaged. So this was, back in the 1990s, really exciting to be part of a new, entirely new area of medicine.
Came back and basically have had a really enjoyable career developing new medicines, particularly for people that have got problems with their spine. So disc degeneration, where you lose the shock absorbency in your spine.
So we are currently in clinical trials with a new medicine to help patients there.
And then I started to think about what I really enjoyed, and I really enjoy the journey from having a really interesting idea in research and then seeing it right the way through to helping people.
And in your career, you don't get that many opportunities to do that as an individual, but I really enjoy bringing people together and trying to do that. So I moved more into sort of the senior leadership of universities, really, with the aim of helping people tackle the really big dreams that they've got. What are the really big research challenges that you want to tackle?
And that led me to the open university, which is in the city of Milton Keynes, which is. It's a fantastic city, it's a great, great place to do innovation. And so I head up all of the research and innovation for the university and get to work with lots of businesses around the city and actually around the UK and around Europe.
[00:04:42] Tamlyn Shimizu: Wow. Lovely background and really interesting pathway that led you to your position today. So thanks so much for sharing.
What do you think? So you kind of this unique perspective coming into Milton Keynes from the university.
What do you think are really the biggest challenges that Milton Keynes is tackling today?
[00:05:02] Kevin Shakesheff: So Milton Keynes has got quite a special place in the UK. It's really not very much like the rest of the UK at all.
When people come and visit it, it's quite surprising.
It's what's called a new town. So we set these up back in the 1960s to cope with population expansion. And when people think of visiting England, you'll either think of something like London, huge, busy or nice sort of countryside, perhaps. Milton Keynes, I often say it looks a little bit like you've arrived in China. It's like, hyper organized for an english town. It's arranged on a grid system and everything's new. So it's sort of starting from scratch.
And that means Milton Keynes is in a really interesting position to test out new technologies, to think about what the future of living in a city could be.
And we've got quite a lot of space here, so we still got room to develop and try new things.
So we're working as a city on all the sort of societal challenges that we're all coping with across Europe.
How do we adjust post pandemic to more of a hybrid living, where we're spending more time looking at screens, working remotely, but we still want to have social lives, we still want to have arts, how do we bring that critical mass together? And how do we use things like AI in a positive way that help people live better lives, whether that's thinking about healthcare, education, how we move around. So, yeah, it's a really interesting place to be testing out some of these new ideas.
[00:06:49] Tamlyn Shimizu: Yeah. And I, from everything I've been learning about Milton Keynes, I've never visited, as I mentioned to you earlier, but I've heard that it's just what you've been mentioning. The openness to innovation is quite a special landscape.
Can you elaborate a little bit more on the role of open University in promoting that growth and innovation within the city?
[00:07:13] Kevin Shakesheff: We're a really big university, so we were set up to train people remotely way before the Internet had started. We were teaching students all across the UK and in fact across lots of Europe, by sending them textbooks and then having summer schools where people came and visited the university post Internet. A lot of this is now done online and it means that we're a huge university that gives us the opportunity to do lots of research. So we've got more than 1000 people working at the university.
We're looking, particularly at the areas around artificial intelligence, looking at how data, science and sensors can work together.
And so really, with a thousand people, I'm still uncovering every day really interesting new projects. And what we're trying to do is link that in with the growing economy in Milton Keynes. There's lots of young companies because Milton Keynes is a new town, there isn't a vast amount of history, so everyone's quite pioneering and entrepreneurial. So it's a great place to sort of test out some of the research that we're doing.
[00:08:29] Tamlyn Shimizu: Yeah. And so you kind of have this dual focus, right, as a university, on trying to benefit the local community, but also balancing your international reach as well. Maybe you can elaborate a little bit more on how this dual focus benefits both the local community and broader business landscape.
[00:08:51] Kevin Shakesheff: So the Open university has got an interesting position because the way in which we teach is largely online, and it means that our students come from everywhere. So our students aren't typically. Our students don't live in Milton Keynes, they live all across the United Kingdom, in Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland. We have students from across Europe and across the world.
So that teaching core continues to be excellent.
But what we're then able to do also is to take advantage of the fact that we're located in some really interesting places. So one of our. We have four sites. One of the four sites is in Milton Keynes.
And increasingly we're thinking about how our research applies to the challenges and the opportunities that the local community have.
[00:09:42] Tamlyn Shimizu: Yeah, really interesting and also interesting approach and very international approach.
I want to deep dive a little bit now into a couple, couple projects that will give kind of the audience a little bit more perspective and context to what types of things you're doing and innovation that you're exploring. You mentioned this MK project. Do you want to first mention what it is and tell us a little bit more about the approach?
[00:10:11] Kevin Shakesheff: Yeah, I mean, our approach is all about collaboration. So everything I'm going to mention today is not just the OU, not just the Open university, it's us working with the local government, with local businesses.
So lots of really exciting projects have been going on. I'll give you a few examples.
We've been working on what we call intelligent mobility. So how do we move people around the city in a way that's sustainable? So using less energy, and in particular the ability to use data from intelligent cameras that allow us to monitor traffic flow across the city.
Look at parking is always a big issue in every city. Look at the way in which we can use parking more effectively.
And basically predicting the flow of transport around the city has been one example. Lots of work on energy efficiency. So the opportunity to look at the city's ability to generate energy, so using drone technology and again, using artificial intelligence to interrogate pictures that you can get from drones, so that you can optimize sites for domestic power generation, whether that's solar panels or heat pumps.
We're also working on some of the negatives, I think, that society faces and trying to tackle them. So we've recently launched a new center called the Online Violence against women and girls centre, which is, I think we all benefit in many ways from the Internet. We all benefit from being able to contact people easily. We enjoy social media, but the negative sides of that is something that we're also really concerned about. So thinking about the ways in which we can make the online spaces that we all encounter as safe as possible for everybody. I think across the portfolio, it's a mixture of really positive opportunities to go for green energy, positive ways of helping people in education, but just also thinking about some of the negative sides that technology brings and trying to anticipate those. And again, just working with the community, because I think the solutions aren't going to come from a university alone. It's going to be us working with the businesses and the citizens of Milton Keynes.
[00:12:44] Tamlyn Shimizu: Yeah, absolutely. I love that approach. And also that you're addressing so many of the counterbalance, counterbalancing these challenges that come with digitalization, et cetera.
How does it work with the role that you play in these collaborations with businesses, with local government?
How does Ou bring this collaboration together? How do you define the roles? How do you bring in businesses? Can you elaborate a little bit more on this collaboration model that you have?
[00:13:16] Kevin Shakesheff: Yeah, and we were trying something quite new. So we've got a program that's called Open Societal challenges.
And what we're trying to do is start at the end of the story and ask people, what do you really want to change about the world?
And we've opened that up to anybody. So we started with academics here at the university telling us, but then we've gone out and we've asked local charities, we've asked local businesses to set the challenges for the future, and then we're building collaborative teams around those challenges.
The whole approach, though, is to accept that this is a long term goal. So none of these challenges are going to be solved in a three year cycle.
So we're really pleased with how that's developed. People have responded really well to us going out and saying, tell us what the biggest challenges are. And there's so much talent. I think in every city with a big university, you find so many people that want to work on these big challenges, but don't quite know how to meet the right people.
So open societal challenges has just been a really different way of doing it, and it's all about finding people through networking and then making commitments to the long term.
[00:14:38] Tamlyn Shimizu: Have those ideas or those challenges that different people in the community have presented, have those triggered any new ideas for innovation?
[00:14:47] Kevin Shakesheff: Yeah, I mean, lots of. Lots of areas where it's triggering new ideas, I think around the ability to use data in healthcare thinking. Also, housing is a big issue for the UK at the moment. How do we create affordable housing for people? And although Milton Keynes is a thriving city, it's one of the fastest growing economically. There's still lots of people that are left behind and unable to find high quality housing. So one of the projects that's coming together in this space is working with local charities that work with people who are homeless or young people who are struggling to get stability in their sort of domestic arrangement, and trying to think about how we can work together.
And what really interests me in that is the solution isn't just to, say, work with engineers or just to work with people who work on sort of social care. You've got to bring these groups together and for the first time, in some cases, really sort of integrate the thinking around the challenges.
[00:15:59] Tamlyn Shimizu: Yeah, really, really interesting perspective that you have there, I'm wondering. So from our audience, there are innovative companies that are listening and they're looking for new opportunities and they're looking to explore and meet some of these challenges in different cities across Europe. So for those businesses looking to maybe do business in Milton Keynes and help with some of these challenges with their innovative approaches, how would ou facilitate these kind of partnerships? What specific support can they expect?
Can you give them some reassurance or advice?
[00:16:41] Kevin Shakesheff: Yeah, you know, it's a really welcoming environment. So, you know, what I can say is if anybody's moving or thinking of moving to MK, we would be absolutely delighted to have an introductory meeting. Tell them all about the Open University.
We're running a competition every year to allow people to generate new open societal challenges. So everybody moving in gets the opportunity to, to tell us about those challenges.
But there's a really vibrant sort of business support community in Milton Keynes. So, you know, I'd say come and visit, meet some of the people who are business leaders and, yeah, it's a really supportive environment, I should say as well, we've got direct support that we can offer. So we have government funding that allows us to fund research within businesses. So particularly for sort of smaller businesses, we have these vouchers that we can spend. So if they've got particular research problems, then we can contribute financially to kickstart new collaborations.
[00:17:44] Tamlyn Shimizu: Yeah, really, really interesting. And I think so important to be able to support those businesses in those ways.
One more question on really the university and how you're set up. I guess some more traditionalists might argue that universities are supposed to educate, right? How much budget should you really be? Or like energy and time, should you be investing in innovation and in technological advancement?
How do you ensure that this drive for innovation complements, rather than detracts from that university's core educational values?
[00:18:22] Kevin Shakesheff: I've always thought that the educational values of the university are enhanced by research so certainly when the open university was set up in 1969, and right from day one, it wanted to be a university that both is working on the major problems of the world. So doing research and then translating that research into its teaching. So the teaching is staying up to date and modern.
So I think it's, to me, it's only by universities rolling their sleeves up and actually getting involved in the societal challenges that we face that you actually keep your teaching current. So I very much see it as a win win. By doing research, we are helping make our teaching more relevant. And of course, the students that do our courses, they're going out into the world, they're going to face these challenges, they're going to hopefully be solving some of these challenges. So I think it's really important that what they're learning is close to the research that we do.
[00:19:25] Tamlyn Shimizu: Yeah. And close to the heart of innovation. Right. To really accelerate that.
Also off of that point, with the work that we do at BABLE, we're really looking at why is innovation moving too slowly in this B 2g market, in public innovation? And we're seeing that it takes public sector 22 months to procure a new innovation. For example, we're seeing all these numbers that we're moving much too slowly with innovation to be able to meet our targets for smart and climate neutral cities and places. So from your perspective, what do you think are the key factors in accelerating innovation, particularly in Milton Keynes?
[00:20:13] Kevin Shakesheff: So I think there's a lot of different things that need to come together to accelerate.
The biggest thing that I really believe is you've got to spend time early on clearly defining the problem that you're trying to solve.
And I think too often, you know, you hear about great technologies, but people quite, can't quite explain the full impact that they're going to have. You know, they instinctively sound great, but actually, when you break it down, you know, does this really make the difference that you hope? I think coming from my medical background, you always start your problem with the patient, you always say, what is the clinical need that's not been met, and then work back to the technology.
So that's the approach that I think needs to be taken around smart cities is really investing the time in understanding and diagnosing the problem that needs to be solved.
And then I think it's about bringing together the right teams of people.
Again, a lesson I've learned throughout my career is the person that has the brilliant idea is not necessarily the right person to scale that up and out broadly.
And certainly the mistakes and problems I've had in my career in medical development have always been solved by other people that had a different perspective to me.
And so, again, that's something I think the open university is really good at. We've got lots of people with different backgrounds, and by being open and collaborating, I think you get the right teams together.
[00:21:53] Tamlyn Shimizu: Really, really good answer. I have to say, I totally agree with your points there. With that, we go into our fun segment of the show, and for today, we have a favorite hot take of the day.
Hot take of the day.
We want to hear an opinion of yours that may be slightly controversial or debated.
Do you have a hot take for us?
[00:22:29] Kevin Shakesheff: So my suggestion to Milton Keynes is that it should become the first city in the world to go fully autonomous in terms of transportation.
You must come and visit us. As I said earlier, it's a really unusual city set up in a very logical grid system, and it absolutely lends itself to autonomous vehicles.
And I think it would be a really bold statement and would really get Milton Keynes noticed if people thought of it as being the city that went first in being fully autonomous. And that means no other vehicles. Nobody's allowed to drive a car in the city. You have to get into to an autonomous vehicle.
[00:23:15] Tamlyn Shimizu: Yeah, really good, hot take.
Also, that helps solve a lot of those parking issues that you spoke about, right?
[00:23:23] Kevin Shakesheff: Absolutely. Yeah, it does, yeah. And, you know, sustainability, I think autonomous vehicles have the ability to be more electrified.
You can program them in so that they're taking the most efficient routes.
Yeah. So I think there's a lot to be said for it.
[00:23:40] Tamlyn Shimizu: Sounds wonderful. So now we are going to ask you the question that we ask every single guest that comes on to the show, and it's to you, what is a smart city or place?
[00:23:56] Kevin Shakesheff: A smart city to me is about the personal journey that you take, and it needs to be different for everybody that comes to the city.
I think a city, you know, as I walk around it, I have certain needs and certain things that I want. I think the city should be able to respond to that.
You know, in 20 years time, my needs will be different, my accessibility will be different. And I think the city needs to be able to adjust to what? To what I need. And, you know, I can see a future not too far away where we're living in more of an augmented reality world. You know, I can actually define the city as I want to see it. I can get the information that I need.
And again, Milton Keynes is really well set up for this. It's just so logical in its design that I think it's a great place to personalize for each individual.
[00:24:53] Tamlyn Shimizu: Great answer as well. So really an agile and responsive city to individual needs.
Yeah, I love that it's such an interesting question because there's so many various varied responses and I've heard variations of it, but it takes a different and very logical approach. So yeah, thank you so much.
That's all she wrote. That's all I have for you today. I really, really enjoyed learning more about Milton Keynes. I definitely have to come visit. I really loved hearing all about Ou and about your initiatives and the way you collaborate. So thank you so much, Kevin, for coming on. I really appreciate it.
[00:25:34] Kevin Shakesheff: Thank you very much.
[00:25:36] Tamlyn Shimizu: And to all of our listeners, don't forget you can always create a free account on bable-smartcities.eu. You can find out more about project solutions implementations. So thank you very much.
[00:25:47] Tamlyn Shimizu: Thank you all for listening.
[00:25:49] Tamlyn Shimizu: I'll see you at the next stop on the journey to a better urban life.
