Digital
As a think tank, we will provide independent and strategic thought leadership to provide regional and national policymakers with insight and policy proposals to help shape an even better West Midlands.
Our Approach
The Core Problem: A Deficit of Digital Curiosity
Across the Board’s work on skills, procurement, cyber resilience, and innovation, a common barrier emerges:
- Leaders hesitate to experiment without guaranteed ROI.
- Organisations avoid risk and fear small-scale failure.
- Procurement systems reward compliance, not innovation.
- Businesses struggle to identify the “unknown unknowns” where digital tools could help.
- Government interventions often fail because recipients lack the mindset needed to make use of them.
This culture of caution stifles innovation, undermines resilience, and slows the region’s digital adoption—despite ample resources.
The Strategic Response: A Play-Based, Curiosity-First Approach
The CNM strategy proposes three integrated pillars that target mindset change as the primary enabler of digital progress:
- Cultivating a Curious Mindset ((Shifting the Regional Conversation Reframing digital transformation as a cultural and behavioural challenge.
- Championing the Power of Play (Experiential Methodology to Unlock Insight – Embedding experiential learning to help leaders “lean forward,” collaborate, and rapidly prototype ideas.
- Advocating for Curiosity in Policy (Influencing Structural Change) Applying the curiosity-first lens to unlock progress in procurement, cyber resilience, and skills policy. This includes driving adoption of the Procurement Act’s “highest value” mandate, promoting Minimum Viable Recovery (MVR) planning post-JLR, and addressing fragmentation in digital skills provision.
Why This Matters: Validating the Pivot
The curiosity thesis explains persistent failures across key policy areas:
- Procurement still prioritises lowest cost over highest value due to institutional risk aversion.
- Cyber resilience remains weak because prevention is prioritised over preparing for inevitable human error and recovery.
- Skills programmes underperform because leaders lack the mindset to experiment with new talent pipelines.
- Digital assets (e.g., regional sensor networks) remain unused due to lack of imaginative application.
By viewing these problems as cultural rather than technical, CNM can address the root cause.
Our Digital Leadership Board
Our work is guided by a team of experts who voluntarily share their time and expertise to support our research agenda. Our experts are drawn from across the region, across both the private and public sector but have the common goal of helping us to help shape an even ‘better’ West Midlands region.
