By focusing first on creating a stable platform, New IDEAS has opened the door to rapidly creating a wide range of digital tools. Our platform takes care of all the data which is produced, making sure it is always saved securely and synchronised across as many devices as needed. This has cut down greatly on the work required to make a digital tool, allowing us (and other) make more tools.
We are now in a very exciting phase of the project as we are now developing real digital tools which run on our platform. The first of these are very simple, for example allowing a group of people to feed words and pictures onto a shared display and then group them. To this we will add layers of additional digital tools, allowing both depth and bredth to be added.
One of our rules about digital tools is that we only use them when they offer something not possible with paper. Merging and dividing data is one of these capabilities, along with creating real-time visualisations during events. Digital tools also offer economies of scale which can allow them to be used when physical tools could not: interacting with hundreds of people using paper could be pretty expensive in pens and paper, but with digital tools in place it could be cost-free if everyone had a mobile phone in their pocket.
Over the next months we will be developing a range of tools and putting them to the test in real KE processes. Our goal is produce a suite of flexible, low-cost digital tools which will open up a new way to design and implement KE processes using digital technologies.
Roger Whitham
Sam Birchall
Leon Cruickshank