Founded in 2021, Easol works on a variety of innovation, technology and AI projects with the overarching mission of helping companies transform ideas into viable outcomes.
It achieves this by turning strategy and innovation into functional steps, enabling customers to plot a pathway to success using a proprietary methodology called HeadStarts.
Five years after inception, Easol now has a team of eight worldwide working on a spectrum of projects, with a roughly equal split between governments and the private sector. Founder Mike Oliver has also co-hosted the “Strive and Thrive” podcast on entrepreneurship and innovation for the past year.
The Accelerated Capability Environment (ACE) was an early Easol client, with Oliver working on multiple commissions as part of the core team. Easol has also now worked as an ACE community supplier on four commissions.
Oliver explained “We look at a product from three angles business, customer and technology. What does a customer need, what’s the technology that they require and what’s the business model to achieve it?”
Easol, he says, focuses on building a pathway and designing strategy but is agnostic about solutions – the action element – so often partners with specialist providers to build those.
Realising the benefits of technology
One of the commissions Easol worked on for ACE was exploring how technology could improve and speed up the challenge of multimedia redaction for policing.
Here, Oliver said, part of what Easol was asked to do was evaluate what police actually needed alongside a market analysis of existing technology. The company also developed a plan for how to get the solution developed and into forces so they could use it. For this commission, Easol created business, benefits and funding justifications, designing the whole pathway.
Another notable project was for the Home Office’s One Big Thing 2025 innovation challenge. Working as part of a rainbow team of suppliers, Easol designed and developed a methodology to help the department improve how it thinks about entrepreneurship and exploitation, which was delivered along with a framework and tool set to bring this to life.
This has now sparked interest in other fields, including in universities and for defence, because, while the work was bespoke, the underlying principles are more widely applicable.
Other commission work for ACE includes proving the business case around using AI technology to review documents for another government department.
Oliver said “I’ve worked in innovation for many years and see the massive problem of people trying to build technologies but unable to realise the benefits of those.
“One of my strengths is not just seeing interesting ideas but pulling them through and exploiting them.”
Solving complex problems
Easol’s multi-disciplinary team, encompassing technology, product development and design, means “we can bring all that to bear on a project”.
Outside ACE, previous clients include the United Nations, as an example the World Food Programme in Africa and Asia, getting into very complex problems and working to understand how technology or process improvement can change or resolve them.
Speaking about the benefits of being an ACE supplier, Oliver said “I’m a person who likes to go after truly complex problems and try and fix them, to really have impact.
“Through ACE, I’ve developed an excellent network of interesting companies with interesting technologies that have been applied in different domains. This has enabled me to springboard Easol – it’s already grown a lot, and the potential now is huge.”