Interview with Arera Davies, Innovation Community Officer, British Antarctic Survey
Could you share your professional background and tell us briefly about your role?
I joined the Innovation Team at British Antarctic Survey in 2024 as the Innovation Community Officer. It’s an exciting role, especially as I’m early in my career. Being part of a small team at a world class organisation has given me fantastic opportunities to work on projects that connect our fantastic expertise with the world outside Antarctica!
Why did you apply to be part of the PRIMA programme?
When we found out about the Public Research Innovation Market Accelerator (PRIMA) from the Government Office for Technology Transfer (GOTT), it was an obvious fit for us. While the team has experience with commercialisation, actively managing our public Knowledge Assets (KAs) in the way we do now was newer to us. Something that would result in both a tangible outcome in terms of market discovery evidence about a potential commercial product and in skills for our team was clearly very attractive!
The timing also aligned for us – we were exploring commercialisation of a project that had generated multiple KAs at different stages of technological readiness. We had explored the more developed KA, but we had another that we thought had potential and we wanted to do some early-stage work on it anyway. We heard PRIMA was running and made the connection immediately.
Are there any experiences that stood out to you as part of the PRIMA programme?
The bootcamp was memorable! It brought up a lot of the feelings about this work that lots of us have – the nervousness and excitement that come from being in uncharted territory and looking at doing something completely different. I really enjoyed that we were encouraged to think creatively about what we could be doing. It’s often so easy to stick to thinking about existing customer segments, applications and relationships but, in such early discovery, it was so beneficial to have encouragement to consider things that we weren’t particularly sure would work. Being open to new avenues helped us a lot through the whole process.
Another experience that stands out is attending trade shows as part of our wider market discovery work. Even just travelling together helped us so much as we spent a lot of time talking about every aspect of the KA, the value proposition and the hypotheses we identified. We had lots of breakthrough moments on trains!
Clearly, though, we didn’t go to trade shows just to have a chance to talk to each other. We had dozens of incredibly valuable conversations with totally new people. I remember that one of our most informative conversations from the whole programme was with the representative at the first stand in the door of our first trade show. Although we had done some research before the event, the scale of it was almost overwhelming when we got there so I asked the first person I saw who he thought we should talk to. We ended up having an in-depth conversation about the whole industry, even getting down to the real detail of file formats and data structures. We would never have identified them as someone to talk to through digital research, but it taught us such a great deal.
What learning are you going to take away from the PRIMA programme into your day job?
Learning how to take a KA, identify potential customer segments, create a value proposition and then, from that, find testable hypotheses is unbelievably valuable. Finding the right questions to ask, a structure of who to ask them to and the type of evidence to collect is a difficult part of early market exploration so being able to do this ourselves will help us a great deal.
Further information about PRIMA, including how to apply: PRIMA: Public Research Innovation and Market Accelerator - GOV.UK
seen at 14:47, 16 July in Government Office for Technology Transfer.