On Thursday 26th February 2026, Technology Scotland, through its Product Design Scotland Network, formally launched a new series of breakfast seminar workshops.

This event series has been created to connect and empower Scotland’s innovation ecosystem, bringing together designers, innovators and industry leaders to address key elements in the innovation to commercialisation journey.

Hosted in an informal, breakfast briefing format, each seminar will bring together practitioners from across disciplines to explore the ideas, tools, and best practices that are shaping successful commercialisation strategies.

The first seminar in the series focussed on the important challenge of managing innovation risk. This is about balancing the excitement of new ideas with the discipline needed to ensure they succeed. Whenever organizations pursue novel products, technologies, or business models, they enter territory filled with uncertainty—market reactions, technical feasibility, competitive moves, and regulatory shifts can all pose challenges. Effective innovation risk management doesn’t aim to eliminate this uncertainty; instead, it provides a structured way to identify potential pitfalls early, experiment safely, and make informed decisions.

The session was led by two guest presentations from Abi Hird, Founder and Director at Defankle Innovation and James Vale, Principal Designer at i4 Product Design.

Abi kicked things off with the observation that ‘Most innovation doesn’t fail because the science didn’t work. It fails because the business didn’t.’ Often the technical risk is the least of a companies worries, instead there needs to be greater focus on organisational capability, strategic misalignment, business model risk and market adoption.

Abi highlighted that while products are often well designed, indeed sometimes overdesigned (technical escalation does not mean differentiation!), organisations tend to be underdesigned. In this regard, Abi left us with three top tips:

  • Think about innovation beyond product.
  • Find out how aligned you are, and where the gaps are.
  • Consider your organisation as a system to be designed.

James Vale then provided the perspective of a product designer, highlighting the role of design in reducing uncertainty and emphasising that early learning (through solid design principles) protects time, cost and safety. James then provided a series of case studies showcasing good and bad design processes, noting failures relating to late decision making, false premises and inadequate testing.

The meeting finished with a group discussion and an opportunity for attendees to share their experiences of good and bad approaches to managing innovation risk.

This meeting is the first in a series of breakfast seminars. Look out for details on our second event to be scheduled in late May!