Episode 2: Built to Innovate

I recently attended my son’s graduation ceremony at Aberystwyth University as a proud parent – it was a wonderful day. I had the pleasure of hearing the deep ocean explorer, Rob McCallum’s speech that day. As an Honorary Doctorate, he defined exploration as ‘curiosity that is acted upon’ – a simple but very insightful thought.

Rob offered four tips that helped him along his way, I would heartily encourage you to listen to the recording or read the article. https://www.aber.ac.uk/en/news/archive/2025/07/title-282373-en.html

One of his tips, I recently offered to a group of visiting STEM students – always ‘take the opportunity’. In life there are so many reasons to not do something. Hesitation and procrastination are easy traps to fall into or even justify, but without jumping in, and, most importantly, committing to something, we will never know what we could have achieved. The spirit of innovation is the life blood of any business, and we can often get caught up in worries of insufficient data or a voiced concern; however, the success in strategy comes from the actual execution not the slide deck of ideas. The key is to trust your experience. It is built up from years of successes and failures. So, even when the indicators are a little weaker than we would like to see, do your final checks and then either commit to go or make the decision to really stop, avoiding all the constant reviews that are time-consuming and hinder progress.

At PCS, we have brilliant people and we try to harness that collective thinking to consider all options. We may not always agree but we inherently have a good discussion and then get moving. Our HSD is a good example of this; We had some early indicators from customers on the specifications that would be needed in the future which came from discussions and presentations at conferences, research papers and other customer enquiries. A critical element was that our R&D team were committed to the concept; we knew that we could do it and roughly how long it would take and were excited about the challenge. After a few iterations and plenty of hard work, a new product was born. We are very proud of what we have created and expect our customers to love it too. There is another exciting development to the business just around the corner, but I am not ready to talk about that quite yet so please keep an eye out, I will let you know when I can!

On the subject of development and innovation, I was recently asked how we built a culture of innovation in the business; the quick answer is that it was created at the formation of the company with two truly inspired engineers. It was a great start, but the truth is that inspiration is tough to replicate or maintain – success comes from the people and the official and unofficial rules of the business they work within and whether innovation is valued or just expected.

We try our best to avoid stifling our creativity, inspiration and innovation with too many checks and balances at the front-end of an idea. Those checks tend to come later in the process when we will benefit from a structured approach. As our business continues to grow, we will need to find a way to maintain that balance between innovation and structure. There is less of an easy answer for this and we will need to remind one another to resist some measures and embrace others in order to keep those early PCS values true – the passion for tribology, the excitement of doing something that really pushes us and helping add value to our customers as they themselves try to do something new and challenging. But, the overriding approach is to, as we say on our podcast – ‘stay curious’!