On November 4 and 5 2014, more than 400 senior executives from the UK’s leading organisations descended on The Worx venue in Parson’s Green, London, for Nimbus Ninety’s third IGNITE digital disruption, business transformation and innovation summit.

The programme - the most expansive and far-reaching that Nimbus Ninety had produced to date - featured a wealth of thought leadership and case study presentations, demonstrations of cutting edge technology, networking sessions, product launches and more.

Under the theme of ‘powerful strategies for monetising disruptive innovation in a customer first world’, a huge range of enterprise technologies and the ways to bring them into business operations were displayed and discussed. These included various wearables and contextuals, big data analytics and visualisation, the Internet of Things, smart cities, mobile engagement, strategies for digital transformation, clean tech, electric cars, cloud computing and more.

This article is a round-up of the key highlights across all of the different streams at IGNITE, as well as some of the early feedback received.

Check back soon for a full report featuring links to the presentation slides, a photo gallery, videos and more.

Thanks to all of the delegates, presenters, exhibitors and partners that contributed to making this IGNITE a huge success. We’ll be running it all again in May 2015 – if you’d like to be involved please contact editorial@nimbusninety.com.

IGNITE Round Up

The delegates

With over 400 delegates over the two days, the venue was packed with senior executives from a broad range of industries and functions, blue chip to SME

Organisations in attendance included: Sony Computer Entertainment Europe, Twentieth Century Fox Film Co Ltd, ITV, Virgin Atlantic Airways, Ministry of Defence, Marks & Spencer, Time Out, MasterCard, Sainsbury's, Just-Eat, British Gas, John Lewis, npower, NBC Universal, First Boston Capital, Coca-Cola Enterprises, BBC, GlaxoSmithKline, Lastminute.com, Rolls-Royce, Panasonic, Apple, Vodafone, Financial Times, BSkyB, EDF Energy and many more.

The sponsors

We offer a HUGE thank you to all of our IGNITE sponsors and research partners without whom none of this would have been possible: Splunk, Kcom, Smart421, Amazon Web Services, HP, Mvine, SoftServe, AppDynamics, Teradata, Thunderhead.com, Apigee, Sungard, Atos, Stibo Systems, Salesforce, OutSystems, IBM, IC Tomorrow and London and Partners.

The IGNITE presentations programme

The November 2014 IGNITE summit featured an eclectic mix of technology thought leaders, futurists, practising executives, solutions providers and academics, who were delivering keynotes, case studies and breakout discussions.

Among the fantastic keynote presentations on day one, the tech guru Rudy De Waele, standing in the advertised session of Starbucks, led us through the opportunities, both now and in the future, in the wearables space. Following the session, the ever-popular Jeremy Waite described Salesforce’s standing on digital transformation to a great reception.

At the end of day one, Unilever’s Global SVP of Marketing, Marc Mathieu took delegates on a tour through the Unilever Foundry, which incubates new technologies and start-ups for use across the Unilever portfolio of brands.

The highlights on day two included the opening keynote from futurist Ray Hammond, who discussed not only the way that we are likely to see technologies evolve over the next five to ten years, but also the possible effects on our economy and society. One particularly poignant point he made is that as robots become increasingly pervasive, we will need to tax them to compensate for the wide scale middle class job losses they’ll entail.

We also had a fascinating insight into the culture that breeds the world-leading innovation at Tesla Motors from UK Country Director, Georg Ell, as well as a case study on Virgin Atlantic’s wearables projects with smart watches and Google Glass by Director of Technology David Bulman.

Also speaking across in the two days in the keynote sessions were the likes of HP, Association of Train Operating Companies, Capgemini, Splunk and EDF Energy .

There were four breakout streams at this IGNITE:

Strategy, leadership & culture: featuring HP, Specsavers and Samsung

Customer insight & experience: featuring Asda, Monsoon Accessorize, Thunderhead, Teradata and Barclays

Redesigning for business transformation: featuring Ministry of Justice, Amazon Web Services, Jaguar Land Rover and ParkJockey

Innovation Uncovered: featuring the Big Innovation Centre, IBM, BBC Worldwide, Localz and Holition (read more below)

Finally, we were treated to two fantastic panel debates. On day one, hosted by Daily Mirror technology correspondent Olivia Solon and featuring Google, IBM, InnovateUK and BuyaPowa, explored the future platforms of innovation. It was a great way to wind up the day, with lots of speculation but plenty of learnings form lessons past helping delegates to understand how they might identify what the next big opportunities will be and how they should take advantage.

The second panel, on day two, allowed us an opportunity to question some of the winners nominees from our IGNITE Awards the previous evening on the best practice and innovation that helped them to their success. Featuring on the panel were SalesGossip, Macmillan Cancer Support and GlaxoSmithKline.

The Nimbus Ninety IGNITE Awards

We were thrilled to host our inaugural IGNITE Awards ceremony at the summit, having established the awards to celebrate the UK’s most disruptive innovators. 

The evening was hosted by Will Hutton, Chair of the Big Innovation Centre and Principle of Hertford College at Oxford University, who chaired our exceptional judging panel and kept everyone entertained throughout the evening. He was joined in this endeavour by the coemdian Dominick Holland, and the two spent much of the evening locked in a jovial spar.

The headline award - The UK’s Most Disruptive Innovator - was won by Uber, with Mark Ridley from reed.co.uk winning the disruptive leader award. Under Ridley’s leadership reed.co.uk won the Agile IT award too.

Special mention goes to SalesGossip, up against some fierce competition, who won both the disruptive start-up and enterprise disruptor awards – a fantastic achievement from this fast growing start up.

Click here for a full list of the winners from the evening, and congratulations to all of the winners and the finalists.

Innovation Uncovered

This IGNITE saw a reworked and expanded installment of our ‘Innovation Uncovered’ tech demonstration stream, which we first introduced at our May 2014 IGNITE. This time around, as well as the Innovation Uncovered breakout stream we also had a dedicated lounge for our delegates to pop in and immerse themselves in live demonstrations of tech innovation.

In the breakout stream, BBC Worldwide and tech start-up CrowdEmotion delivered an engaging presentation on the application of CrowdEmotion’s intelligent facial recognition tool, used to gain viewer insight to help improve content at the BBC Worldwide. CrowdEmotion were also on hand in the lounge for our delegates to have their emotions read as they learnt about the business application of this bleeding-edge tech innovation.

The stream also featured great sessions from IBM on the Internet of Things, Holition on augmented retail, The Big innovation Centre on smart cities, and Localz on iBeacons.

In the lounge, delegates were also able to get in the front seat of a Jaguar Land Rover Sport and interact with the latest connected car technology. iBeacon technology from Localz was also showcased,

The Nimbus Ninety Enterprise Digital Trends Report

At IGNITE we released our 2014 Digital Trends Report featuring results and analysis from a survey of 250+ senior executives on their attitudes and activities to customer-centric digital transformation alongside case studies from Virgin Atlantic Airways, Tesla Motors and Monsoon Accessorise. The report also features a roundup of the results and thought leadership advice from Kcom our research partner who guided us in the creation of this report. 

Our survey found that although 88% of organisations are undertaking or preparing to undertake digital transformation, only 41% have a clear strategey for doing so.

Read more about our findings and download the report here.

And the rest…

• Fast growing digital start-up ParkJockey, which is disrupting the parking industry on both sides of the Atlantic launched its new valet service, PlumValet, at IGNITE, offering the service free to delegates across the two days.
• Delegates engaged in a huge number of business introductions facilitated by Nimbus Ninety, between each other and with the solutions providers present on the day.
• Capgemini treated delegates to a free copy of its new book, authored in partnership with The MIT Center for Digital Business: ‘Leading Digital – Turning Technology into Business Transformation’( if you didn’t get one, let us know and we’ll see what we can do!)
• IGNITE Award winner UBER offered free taxi services to and from the summit over the course of the two days

Emma Taylor, Founder and Managing Director, said:

“I am thrilled with the success of this IGNITE programme – the knowledge-sharing, thought leadership and engagement across the two days was truly inspiring.

“We had some world leading digital disruptors here today, both in the audioe3nce and on stage, representing some of the most exciting new companies in the business world, and some of the most successful, seasoned enterprise too, whose names are synonymous with innovation, breaking the mould and excellence in customer experience.

“My heartfelt thanks go to everybody that contributed to this IGNITE summit. We can’t wait to get started on the next one.”

The next IGNITE event takes place in May 2015, dates tbc. Between now and then we’ll be hosting our members Xmas drinks on December 2^nd and our usual monthly dinners and masterclasses. If you’d like to come along to any of our events, please get in touch.

We’ll also be working on an exciting new benchmarking venture which will allow our members to measure their key qualitative and quantitative KPIs against indexes that they choose, with fully customisable, interactive visualisations and dashboards.

2015 will be an exciting year for Nimbus Ninety – we hope you come along for the ride.

Check back soon for pictures, videos and links to the slides form the November 2014 Nimbus Ninety IGNITE summit.