Fincoda – Innovation Measured
Oliver Caunt, MD of JCS, has been a contributing partner in the European consortium Fincoda, established to develop a toolkit to measure innovative capacity.
Fincoda is an online psychometric survey that has been designed for students, graduates, employees and employers to use as a tool for identifying, measuring and demonstrating innovative capacity in people. This is also an incredibly powerful tool for recruitment and development within organisations.
Contributing to the development of this toolkit has been a rewarding experience. At JCS, Innovation is at the core of our operating culture, not only in the products and services that we supply, but also in how we operate as a business and collaborate with our partners and customers.
For JCS, 2015 marked 40 years of developing and supplying nuclear radiation sensing and shielding solutions in a wide variety of sectors. We have remained at the forefront of our industry, as a vibrant and independent family business, by adopting innovative working practices. These give us the agility we need, as an SME, to take on the interesting and unusual projects, which in turn, as with Fincoda, feed back into our product design and evolution as a company.
We are our proud of our approach to a partner-driven business model, where we identify symbiotic strengths in key partners to combine with our skill set and solve complex measurement and shielding solutions.
This approach allows us to remain a lean yet combine with our partners to supplement our core skills in whichever direction a project needs. Being a lean and agile team, is key to our success and underpins our ability to adapt to the ever-changing and always-challenging sectors that we serve.
Operating this model has helped JCS establish as a strategic integrator for complex solutions in defence, nuclear, medical, research and industrial applications.
Recently, JCS was nominated alongside the University of Liverpool, as the lead-partner in an Innovate UK grant funded project to develop a highly technical instrument designed to measure the fissile content of live reactor cores, from a distance.
Our reactor monitor, housed in a shipping container and located up to 80m from the reactor itself, will give operators and regulators real-time and accurate measurements of the fuel and related processes. This is a first of class development, combines existing technology used in particle physics experiments with cutting edge detector technologies allowing us to measure and process the data from anti-neutrinos, and thousands of related detector signals. Project Vidarr is full-steam ahead and has considerable promise.
We are proud to be solving complex POCO (post operative clean out) and decommissioning challenges at Sellafield and beyond with innovative yet simple technology, providing inspectors with accurate gamma measurements in hard-to-reach and highly radioactive locations.
Innovation permeates through our entire operating culture, is fundamental to our approach in all operations and underpins how we, as a team, approach any challenge.
The Fincoda project will be coming to end in December 2017 and its success will be marked as we launch the tool to the world.
Read more about the Fincoda assessment tool here
Read more about reactor monitoring with project Vidarr here
Learn about JCS Sensing and Shielding solutions here
