Final Flagship Conference

On 17th March 2021 the NextGenPSF project held its final Flagship Conference associated with the core project to share and disseminate insights from the project. The event brought together leading practitioners and professionals from across legal and accounting firms and other stakeholders engaged with the professions. The event centred on the value of design sprints (derived from design thinking) as a very useful and practical way to re-think and resolve business challenges. A central aim of out multi-disciplinary research project funded under the Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund was to discover the extent that innovation and AI readiness could be unlocked using design thinking, in particular design sprints.

The event was hosted by Richard Chaplin, Founder & Chief Executive Managing Partners' Forum and Co-Investigator of NextGenPSF, and showcased the outputs of the project. The research 'deep dives' have provided insight into the sector, and working with firms the project team has co-created a series of design sprints and futures workshops to support professional services firms on the journey to enable firms to explore current and future business challenges in a very practical way. The journey combines business model innovation, futures and scenarios, story boards and model-making, with an innovation roadmap as the primary output. Hence Fast-track Innovation™ is the Conference and Campaign theme.