Case Study: Supporting Thames Freeport to Create an Innovation Strategy to Drive Inward Investment
Matt Lawson
Emerging as a hub for innovation, Thames Freeport is a unique initiative designed to stimulate trade and transform the lives of people in its region. Leveraging global connectivity and occupying a strategic position with intermodal capabilities across river, rail, and road, Thames Freeport has recognised its opportunity to drive economic regeneration for the local area.
Thames Freeport engaged Cambridge Management Consulting to design a clear strategy for innovation over the next three to five years. Key considerations for this innovation strategy included objectives and KPIs, the future of the business ecosystem in the region, physical clusters and assets such as innovation hubs, and opportunities and challenges on the way.
The Solution
Working with our innovation partner, L Marks, Cambridge MC conducted an innovation strategy
project which involved the following:
- Engaging with a range of stakeholders and partners from local authorities to corporate partners across the Thames Freeport area, leveraging interviews with key individuals to build a common picture of innovation aspirations, opportunities, and challenges.
- Conducting a series of workshops for the Thames Freeport team to consider visions and objectives, themes and focus areas, physical hubs and overall programme structure, and a three-year roadmap plan.
- Building a comprehensive innovation strategy which internalised all of the above questions. This was then presented to their board and formed the basis of the public tenders for innovation programmes that were then made public.
Having completed the innovation strategy project, Cambridge MC and L Marks subsequently designed the 5G Innovation Programme (one of the first to be prioritised in our work). This involved the following:
- Engaging with three commercial sites (Ford, Tilbury Port, London Gateway – DP World) to understand the potential pain-points and opportunities for private 5G network innovation.
- Conducting category-identified workshops to pull out specific themes and challenges that would form the basis of a scouting brief to identify potential companies globally to participate in the programme.
- Designing a challenge-based open innovation programme to attract companies globally to address the challenges and opportunities, and collaborate with the Thames Freeport partners on solutions.
- Conducting a global research exercise to identify example case studies and use cases for 5G private networks in the logistics and manufacturing sectors.
Outcomes & Results
- Roadmap to Success: We clearly articulated a five-year innovation vision and ecosystem map with broad stakeholder buy-in. This included a three-year innovation programme design covering specific projects and interventions to deliver the strategy and objectives.
- Transparent Progress & Goals: We provided clear objectives for innovation with associated KPIs, including a target to create five new £1Bn+ investments, engaging with 350 global hightech companies, implementing 50 new innovative solutions, and building four operational innovation hubs.
- Regional Improvement: Our programme demonstrated how innovation can create multiple highly-skilled jobs in the area, and improve quality of life for local residents.
- Long-Term Benefit: We clearly defined the themes and focus areas for innovation that the Thames Freeport should prioritise, aligned with regional strengths and capabilities.
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We were approached by a global networking systems, services, and software company that specialises in optical and routing solutions. Their technology helps carriers, enterprises, and governments build more efficient and scalable networks, particularly for high-bandwidth applications like 5G, cloud computing, and AI-driven networking. Africa is a key strategic market for this client. They are also playing an active role in advancing outlined 5G technology on the continent, emphasising a focus on routing and switching aggregation components, network slicing, and monetisation. The Opportunity The client engaged Cambridge MC to provide external insight and support to augment and accelerate the progress of their Go-to-Market plans for Africa. We proposed our in-house rapid Strategy Stress Test that delivers key insights across areas of your strategy using a 1–5 health-scoring matrix. The client's aim is to grow market share in the region with a precisely focussed strategy that targets their market with key propositions and solutions. We were engaged to review this strategy and their plans for the region, identifying critical opportunities and gaps with a quick turnaround. Approach We used our Rapid Strategy Stress Test methodology which provides: Target geographies, opportunities, and partners for resource effectiveness and success maximisation Assessment of client's Go-to-Market Strategy including identification and testing of key assumptions Identification of new opportunities and any gaps in the strategy Recommendations on how best to capitalise on the market and accelerate their route to success This included carrying out target addressable and client-addressable market sizing by country for the Optical, Data Centre Interconnect, Routing and Switching portfolios; competitor market share analysis; analysis of current and planned data centre build in the target countries; future trend analysis, including Political, Economic, Social, Technological, Legal and Environmental trends by country. We put their GtM strategy and plans through our Stress Test framework, scoring capabilities against best-in-class – across 11 parameters such as Market Potential, Adaptability to Local Needs, Pricing and Marketing & Demand Generation. Recommendations were made against each of the 11 areas relating to opportunities to accelerate their GtM strategy. In order to support effective targeting of resources into key countries, we developed a country prioritisation framework across 15 parameters, such as GDP growth, energy supply, stability of regulatory environment, and ease of doing business. This quantitative assessment was supplemented with the real world experience of our Africa experts.
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