Our Expertise

ICT & Innovation

ICT plays an increasingly integral part of all our lives – for individuals, learners, businesses, and society as a whole.  Innovation is essential to the UK's future prosperity and the ability to tackle major challenges, such as climate change. ICT is central to the government’s aim of making the UK the best place in the world to run an innovative business or public service.

ICT can enable individuals to work more flexibly, provide new ways of communicating with customers or service users, reduce costs, and increase profitability and turnover. Both businesses and the public sector can achieve greater efficiency and effectiveness if they fully exploit ICT and identify and address potential barriers to its adoption and use.

Our research has helped previous clients to: 

• measure the impact of ICT on businesses and the public sector in their area;
• investigate the role of tutoring and assessment in an online environment;
• understand how decisions on ICT adoption are made at the senior levels of organisations;
• identify the barriers to ICT adoption and exploitation;
• understand the reasons for low ICT take-up in particular sectors;
• explore the role of ICT as an enabler in increasing profitability and turnover;
• find out the impact of ICT on the environment;
• evaluate the economic impact of the ICT sector and subsectors;
• use ICT to facilitate flexible working.

Examples of our work include:

• conducting the 2008 South West ICT Benchmarking Research, identifying the levels of adoption and exploitation among SMEs across all sectors and sub-regions.
  
  
• carrying out qualitative research to explore ICT issues, implementation and intentions among large organisations in the South West. The report contains recommendations for collaboration and networking among partners to both increase efficiencies and improve productivity.
  
  
• developing an innovative ICT toolkit for SWRDA to identify and quantify users’ information needs and the cost-benefit ratio of their current IT investments.
  
  
• providing detailed and robust pictures of the current and future workforce development needs of the ICT sector in order to facilitate employer engagement in the future development of skills strategies.
  
  
• investigating he potential economic impact of the digital media sector on the Sussex economy, together with the sector’s skills and support needs.

 

If you are interested in finding out more about our work in this area, please contact:

Nigel Tremlett: 01392 433381
nigel.tremlett@stepaheadresearch.co.uk

Jonathan Pratt: 01795 438875
jonathan.pratt@stepaheadresearch.co.uk