Science of Business: Collaborating at the Frontier

Author - Stuart Woods

“We are at the frontier. We are at the edge of what we know. If you had a map of the universe, some of the coldest places in the universe would be right here in this building”. Tom Leonard, one of our Value Stream Managers at Oxford Instruments NanoScience said this in his interview with Hannah Prevett, a business journalist with The Times, who recently made a series of podcasts on the topic of the ‘science of business’. Tom and I were happy to represent Oxford Instruments NanoScience in the final instalment of the podcast, which I hope you will listen to using the link below.

Those eloquent words of Tom’s really stuck out to me - for two reasons, I think. Firstly, it puts into perspective how genuinely groundbreaking and exciting the work we do is. When you’re at our beautiful site in Oxfordshire every day, you forget about things like frontiers and the edge and the coldest places in the universe. But secondly, and I think more importantly, it points to the enthusiasm and the passion which is the life blood of our teams. I say it in the podcast, I have said it many times before and I’m sure I’ll continue to say it for many years to come, but creating an environment of intelligent, passionate teams who inspire each other and contribute to a bigger picture is, for me, the enduring, unchangeable science of business. Whatever way you look at it, I have always found this to be the key to technical and commercial success.

In the podcast, I talk a little bit about some of the differences between American and British attitudes to business, which comes down partly I think to things as elemental as national codes of etiquette, approaches to childhood and educational philosophies. However, something which unites all successful companies, here in the UK and across the pond, is that ability to foster a collaborative environment consisting of great teams. This is also increasingly recognised as the make or break factor for commercialising quantum – as we progress, internal collaboration and teamwork won’t be enough, we need to see like-minded countries coming together to drive the industry forward.

It was really interesting to talk to Hannah about Oxford Instruments’s journey from our founder Martin Wood’s idea to create superconducting magnets for scientific use, to the first MRI magnet in the 1970s, to the first MRI machine in 1980 and going public in 1983. For me, the next step in this journey has been to watch this excitement grow in our wider teams and in the wider industry. Martin was an engineer by heart and an inventor by DNA and I am proud to see that the beating heart of Oxford Instruments is still defined by passionate, intelligent, team-focused engineers and inventors.

Listen here to the full podcast here: https://omny.fm/shows/the-science-of-business/playlists

*First published by Stuart Woods on LinkedIn