Having been bouldering for three years and counting, Lydia He has had her fair share of falls and repeat attempts as she works her way through different routes and readjusts her movements to reach the top. The most important lesson she has learnt from all this is this – there is no one “right" way to climb.
“Every climber approaches the same problem differently. People who are shorter but more flexible might find something easy, while those who are taller with longer limbs struggle in a tighter spot,” she explains, adding that it's this variability that makes the sport so interesting for her.
“I enjoy trying different methods and ways of approaching the route,” she explains. “At the end of every climb, I’m happy to learn something new about myself!”
(Photo: HTX)
Bringing lessons from the rock walls into the office
The same curiosity and openness to new ideas permeate into Lydia’s work at HTX. As a data scientist for the Optimisation, Decision Science, xData team, she adopts a similar exploratory mindset as she sifts through mountains of data to help Home Team officers make sense of the numbers.
Just like bouldering, setbacks are not seen as failures, but as opportunities to learn. So when she hits an unavoidable dead end or obstacle, she quickly pivots and tries a new technique – walking away with new knowledge and insights about the data instead.
For Lydia, not being afraid of failure, and being open to new ideas is crucial to doing good work at HTX. “I believe that we will always achieve more if we do not let ourselves be limited by the boundaries of what we think is possible,” she declares.
Making innovation accessible
In her second role as Open Innovation Manager for HTX’s innovation hub, Hatch, Lydia runs Dimension X – an open innovation challenge – with the Hatch team twice a year. Through this, she hopes to help others push boundaries on their own journey of discovery.
She explains that for the challenge, she and her team work with different end users at HTX and Home Team Departments (HTDs) to understand the difficulties they face and develop these in the form of challenge statements. The Hatch team will then crowdsource solutions from industry partners and offer funding to select start-ups to develop a proof-of-concept within four months.
This format sums up what Lydia understands by innovation: an opportunity to work iteratively and explore new possibilities.
“We are not expected to develop a full product at the end of the challenge – after all, the teams only have four months,” she emphasises. The focus is therefore not on success, but on finding and testing the potential of new ideas.
Lydia believes that the challenge is particularly useful as it also breaks down the barriers to innovation within HTX. For example, she shares how there are end users who believe they are “not tech savvy” and therefore are resistant to exploring new technology.
“With Hatch’s innovation programmes, all they have to do is come with their problem. The Hatch team can do the matching to find relevant experts who can help them and give them the opportunity to try out technologies they may not have known existed,” she says.
She also notes that there are start-ups with good ideas but who struggle with the lengthy process of funding. “By the time they manage to embark on the project, the technology may no longer be relevant,” says Lydia. For companies in this situation, Dimension X is the perfect platform to experiment on a smaller scale before deciding whether they want to pursue their ideas further.
Advice for innovators
Looking back on the many start-ups she has worked with – some of which have been surprising and others disappointing – Lydia reaffirms her belief that it is important to work iteratively, to find opportunities in the midst of challenges and, above all, to be willing to learn and improve with new ideas.
As she has discovered, innovation is in many ways similar to bouldering. It is essential to be open to unchartered paths, and to dare to fall along the way. “Some routes look harder than they actually are, and others look easier than they present themselves. The only way to find out is to try,” she states.