Centre for Digital Built Britain, Cambridge University.

Sector: Engineering & Design

Our brief: The Digital Twin Hub is a 3,000 strong online community of mainly built environment consultancies and digital entrepreneurs and academics, with others from Energy, Defence, Water, and Transport, wherever a digital twin of a dynamic real world environment is becoming essential. Our brief was to identify, classify and prioritise roadblocks that frustrate digital twin projects across all sectors.

What we did: Over the course of four months we facilitated the community and convened a series of three Online Jams with CDBB officers and community members from the DT Hub. We designed each of the three Jams using priming information from challenges set on the DT Hub, and followed up each Jam with further asks of the DT Hub community to validate or explore further the workshop decisions. The Jams featured the 100%Open toolkit and a unique 100%Open technique called Problem Prototyping in which candidate problems (in this DT case roadblocks) are tested for their ability to easily inspire and direct relevant solutions.

What happened: By analysing over 100 suggestions of blockers from the DT Hub community and Jam attendees, we discovered 5 key problem spaces. In order of importance, these were Vision and Value, Governance and Guidance, Data Issues, Need and Want and Readiness. Within these, blockers were prioritised by the second Jam participants leading to a top 20 list prioritised for action. The chief blockers were understanding and buy-in from potential clients, Strategy e.g. lack of collaborative problem definition, and interoperability or aggregation of data / available sensor equipment. The list was validated in the third Jam where in ‘Problem Prototyping’ we gathered 192 ideas from the attendees to help address the roadblocks.

The success of convening members of the DT Hub into Jams demonstrated that the membership is a powerful community with the means and motive to collaborate. As the DT Hub changed ownership to the Connected Places Catapult, our strategic recommendations were able to inform a new direction for digital twins in the UK, making it easier to achieve net zero as a nation.

‘By identifying common barriers and evaluating prototyping solutions, it [100%Open’s research] delivers a set of results and recommendations to galvanise engagement across industry to tackle the blockers. Its themes have also been used as the basis for a recent Catapult/government led cyber-physical infrastructure roundtable.’

– Catherine Condie, Communications Manager (Digital Twin Hub)