Three years ago, leadership set us a challenge: innovate the future of teaching learning and assessment.
And as we set out to deliver against this ambitious goal, the world shifted under our feet: LLMs and other AI became commoditised in force. And with that, not only technical opportunities arose, but also market demand shifted, and over night we had the opportunity to deploy our MVP that had served some 10ths of thousands of users, into markets where we would serve millions!

This talk outlines the challenges my team faced, and the solutions we put in place, to successfully run fast paced hi-tech innovation in a landscape of radical technology change, shifting global demand and the context of an 80 year old non digital organisation.

I will demonstrate how we enabled a team to do 'whatever' was necessary to innovate and deliver at break neck speed, within a traditionally much slower paced, academically focused organisational environment.

I will describe how defined, then shaped, the future and deliberately allowed my team to transition into the chaotic Cynefin quadrant to enable extreme innovation, but also how we managed to keep ethical and compliance standards high and eventually shifted relevant parts of our value proposition into more manageable problem spaces to enable scaling.

I will touch on all three, culture, process and technology and illustrate how we used each to form a conducive environment.

However, not all things are rosy, and I will highlight the challenges an organisation, engaged in innovation in general but also this sector phases, and how we managed them, where we succeeded and where we failed.

I expect participants of this talk to find inspiration and useful tools and techniques in enabling innovation and delivery within their organisational context and understand how one can go about delivering technically complex products rapidly towards and MVP, keep them in a state of constant innovation while at the same time support scaling and broad rollout, and be highly compliant in terms of ethics, safeguarding and privacy.