The Cambridge Grand Challenges is a unique initiative, designed to
accelerate innovation generate ideas and new ways of doing things. To support the long-term
goals including the UK becoming the most innovative country in the world,
we must become better at turning exciting ideas into strong commercial products and services
and of course, driving partnerships between the best minds and businesses. Having a student
come and join the team with a social science background was incredibly helpful. Their ability
to rapidly synthesize strategy commercial offers a similar project in the marketplace, was you know,
not only immensely helpful but really practical when they could generate tangible
insights for us to act upon. You have people that come with a fresh pair of eyes and they
see problems from a different angle, it helps you as well to start to see the problem also with a
different point of view. The academic expertise and a research methodology to the project,
this is something that we at Aviva and within my team don't have particular experience with so
that was an incredible advantage to the project. The colleagues from Cambridge were able to see
real-time tactical and strategic challenges, from those we were expecting through the reorganization
of the learning teams, right through to the critical challenges we were facing when it
came to Covid and how that turned our business on its head. Cambridge Grand Challenges has led to
new levels of engagements, by means of social sciences graduates post-doctoral researchers
with the support of tenured academics, working together with industrial managers and specialists
on defined projects in technology-intensive companies. The aim of my project at Heathrow was
to identify self-learning trends in the company and then the barriers and facilitators to improve
self-directed learning. We were expected to draw from these broad trends to identify and recommend
enablers, barriers, and strategies, for developing self-driving learning among employees at Heathrow.
I decided to partner with Aviva because of my keen interest in health factors, that might help us
explain individual differences for people's vulnerability to certain diseases and also
people's resilience to getting certain diseases. The main focus of my work is to try and build
predictive models in early Alzheimer’s disease. What we do is we try and collect markers from
neural imaging sites as well as some cognitive scores,
and we combine these all together using machine learning to make individualized predictions.
The title of the project that i worked on was, 'drive forward elements for the delivery of a
12-month multimodal mobility hub demonstrator in London', focused on proposing solutions in line
with the mayor of London’s transport strategy. The idea was to design a mobility hub that would
provide electric charging and other mobility and convenience offerings for its customers. I think
that for the right intern with the right kind of curiosity and general cross-functional skills,
I think this kind of program can do a lot to both further their growth, help them learn, but also
to help the company that is hosting the intern. I am incredibly grateful for the findings that have
been submitted, for the flexibility that students from Cambridge have shown us, and their patience.
This lasted longer and we took many detours on the journey but actually the output has been
wonderful and, I would highly recommend this again for any of my colleagues,
and hopefully for any students looking to do a similar exercise at a future point.
So our first experience with Cambridge grand challenges was a brilliant one, and one that we
would greatly recommend other partners embarking on, The programme was seen as a great way to
improve confidence in abilities and applicability of work and was recommended by all students and
partners participated. I'm proud to say that the aptitude in critical thinking and analysis,
the generic research skills, and the willingness to collaborate provided by social sciences
were all above company expectations.