Ebbon Group launches Innovation think tank to develop new products

Technology solutions provider Ebbon Group is launching a new think tank and product incubator, Ebbon Innovation (EI), to develop innovative new products and solutions to tackle issues facing the fleet community now and in the future.

EI is Oxford-based Ebbon Group’s new vehicle for research, experimentation and innovation in the fleet market that seeks to address the next real-world problems and turn them quickly into open-market solutions.

With its own seed capital investment, the new unit will be able to draw on the expertise of the business and developments teams across the Ebbon Group, which also includes Derby-based licence checking and driver risk management specialist, Licence Check.

EI Product Manager, Charles Isles, commented: “The EI team consists of a group of individuals with years of experience in the automotive and software market both in the UK and international markets.”

Although still in its infancy, the unit, which was initially unveiled at the Group’s annual user conference earlier in the year, has begun work on evaluating future potential products and technologies.
One of the areas the company has started to research is where state-of-the-art ‘machine learning’ techniques could potentially be applied within the wider industry.

This has also included looking at what new start-ups are working on in fields outside the automotive sector and evaluating if, and where, such capabilities could be used in the automotive space.

EI’s Chief Product Officer, Sarah Alexander added that the new unit would not be selling consultancy. “Our remit is to develop commercially viable products that allow users to tackle a specific set of problems and issues,” she said.

“Behind the scenes we will have a validation process in place that assesses whether a product or solution might be commercially viable and successful going forward.

“We are interested in having conversations with people, be they existing clients or not, regarding problems they can’t readily find a solution to, or processes they can’t make fit, with a degree of open-mindedness,” she said.

Isles added: “While we’re developing an idea into a product, we’ll keep our committed customers very close to the design process, so that the first public version of the product delivers.”