Discovery Day programme

Arrival, registration and refreshments

Welcome and setting the challenge

An introduction to the UK SCALE Centre’s innovation cycle, the three Discovery Day themes and how insights from the day will inform future roundtables, white papers, Symposium activity and the Centre’s research agenda.

Led by Professor Jan Godsell and Lennie Foster.

Supply chain optionality

Designing choices for a future you cannot predict without trading away responsibility.

Short provocations will introduce the theme before delegates work together to explore the key challenges, opportunities, research questions and industry priorities surrounding supply chain flexibility.

Refreshments and networking

Supply chain reinvention

Beyond optimisation: redesigning supply chains for a disrupted world.

Through short provocations and facilitated roundtable discussions, delegates will consider what genuine supply chain innovation looks like and where fundamentally new models could emerge.

Networking lunch

Decision capacity in the AI era

Machine-speed supply chains. Human-speed organisations.

Explore where the organisational bottleneck moves as AI capability increases, where human judgement adds value and how decision rights, governance and accountability may need to evolve.

Refreshments and networking

Convergence session – Shaping the theme of the year

Delegates will review insights from across the three challenges, identify common threads and highlight the ideas with the greatest relevance and urgency. Each table will then develop its proposal for the UK SCALE Centre’s Theme of the Year.

Table pitches

Hear each table present its proposed Theme of the Year and the opportunities it could create for industry, research and collaboration.

Closing reflections and next steps

The UK SCALE Centre will bring together the strongest ideas from across the room and explain how every contribution will help inform its future research and wider innovation cycle.

Event close