Here, there and everywhere – summer 2026

Here, there and everywhere – SUMMER 2026

When we published the first edition of Here, there and everywhere in early November 2025, we thought it might be popular: who doesn’t like to know about what’s happening behind the scenes? But what we didn’t expect was just how enduring the interest would be! So, without further delay, here’s what we can share of life at Innovia Technology recently.

We finished 2025 strong. In late November, Hannah Richards, Ben Rose, and Greg Dickens attended GIF London. They returned to the office full of interesting stories about everything going on in the world of innovation. We ended the year attending Boehringer Ingelheim’s Making More Health initiative and it was simply brilliant: we’re still talking about what we learnt there, many months later.

Some teams ease gently into a new year. Not us. Dr Kate Oliver began January at Cambridge Judge Business School, speaking to the 18th EnterpriseTECH cohort about why the planet needs entrepreneurship more than ever. Drawing on their experience of working on complex sustainability challenges, Kate helped the cohort think about how to grow and scale businesses in ways that are both profitable and planet friendly.

Also starting strong, Katharin Holtzmann and Jonathan Shaw attended the Society of Chemical Industry’s Formulation Forum on all things from nano to macro. Elsewhere, Marie Wong began her travel for the year by representing Innovia at the Royal Society of Chemistry’s Distinguished Guest Lecture, where Professor Nazia Habib spoke on green and future transport fuels.

From there, many others also hit the road. Alex Hellawell headed to Basel for the Global Innovation Summit. Patrick Capel and Katharin Holtzmann attended an Innovation Roundtable digital transformation conference – part one took place in London and then, a few weeks later, part two took place in Switzerland so Alex Hellawell joined them there too!

We hear that there was no shortage of dinner-table conversation about where digital and AI transformation in pharma is actually heading: the consensus in the room was that most companies are choosing consortia over going it alone, partnering with the likes of Microsoft and Nvidia rather than trying to build cutting-edge AI capability from scratch. Patrick made the point that AI might speed up thinking, but it hasn’t yet figured out how to prototype brand new things in the real world with a soldering ion. Katharin, meanwhile, found herself deep in conversation about ISO standards for what makes a good lab, and the perennial challenge of getting legacy lab kit to talk to modern, open data interfaces.

Closer to home, Molly Ghinn went to the The Cambridge University Behavioural Insights Student Society (CUBISS) to talk about her career to date. The feedback afterwards was some of the best we’ve had in years: attendees said they were struck by “how ‘human’ our seemingly ‘career related’ discussion was.” Several people said they left feeling motivated to work in behavioural science in the future, which is about the best review a careers talk can hope for.

April saw Molly Ghinn back on the road again, this time to Sheffield Hallam University for the UK Society for Behavioural Medicine’s 21st Annual Scientific Meeting, on the theme of Building Health Equity Together. Amidst all the learning, she also found time to take somewhat niche photos for colleagues who are snooker fans – and yes, they were disproportionately excited to receive them.

Stuart Keppie was further south, attending the MedTech Expo in London. He returned to the office with fresh insights on the impact of modelling on device development, how AI is influencing regulation development, and the pressure businesses are facing to move away from single-use materials.

May and June took our recruitment activities to another level. Jonathan Shaw and Rich Bown represented Innovia at the University of Warwick’s careers fair. Stuart Keppie and Anna Broughton flew the flag at the Oxford Summer Graduate and Internship Fair, before Stuart teamed up with Lawrence Schofield to end June at the Cambridge Graduate Jobs Fair. Together, they handed out so many recruitment flyers that we had to do an unscheduled reprint! Thank you to everyone who talked with our team at those events. We’re looking forward to meeting many of you in our next round of recruitment interviews.

July opened with Dr Gareth Steed joining a careers panel at Cambridge Botanicon – the conference for anyone studying or researching plant and crop science across the University, the Sainsbury Laboratory, NIAB and the Crop Science Centre. We hear he even managed to tease the imminent release of a case study, which went live just as we were writing this piece. Also in July, Dr Guen Bradbury returned to the University of Cambridge Vet School to share her experiences as a vet-turned-innovation-consultant. Guen’s talk was incredibly popular and we hear people were queuing to follow up with her long after the Q&A had finished.

While all that was going on closer to home, Alex Massey and Patrick Capel were in Chicago for IFT FIRST, the Institute of Food Technologists’ flagship conference. Both were particularly looking forward to a keynote from food scientist and writer J. Kenji López-Alt on the science of flavour. They shared photos on our Slack channels of them looking excited about eating what looked like a Chicago deep-dish pizza. We’re looking forward to hearing more – about the conference, and the pizza, shortly.

This year also brought a record number of internship applications. The standard of applications was higher than ever and has resulted in our largest cohort to date. We’re currently hosting a brilliant group of interns bringing expertise from design, biochemistry and behavioural science to aerospace engineering, with backgrounds stretching from Oxford and Cambridge to LSE, Nottingham Trent, and clinical practice in Uganda and Trinidad. We’ll properly introduce them all shortly, once we’ve given them some time to settle in.

On the client side, our new Corteva case study has gone live, alongside an anonymous case study. More are in the pipeline, which is a relief, because it’s hard sitting on all the great work we’re not quite ready to talk about yet.

So. That brings us pretty much up to date. As we write, Dan Ward is at the SRS Annual Meeting talking all things surgery and robotics. The baton then passes to Andy Milton and Morris Ma, who are heading to London in early September for the Ophthalmology Futures Forums. Shreyas Mukund and Katharin Holtzmann will represent Innovia as we sponsor the Innovation Roundtable at Google – we’re looking forward to hearing their thoughts on the new building. Towards the end of September, we’ll also have Arron Rodrigues at the Future of Food conference in London.

And just when you’d think we might be planning for some downtime, November will take Ben Rose, Hanako Kawasaki and Gareth Steed to GIF London 2026. This year’s theme is #WeirdIsGood so we can’t wait to hear about what they learn there.

2026 has gotten off to a strong start and continued at pace. The team has visited a record number of US states, five European countries, and taken trips to other parts of the world that we can’t tell you about just yet. But our favourite recent moments haven’t involved leaving Cambridge at all. They’ve been found through the stream of clients visiting our offices. Great lunches, great people, and real enthusiasm for complex innovation challenges make Innovia a place people want to spend time. When clients visit and ask to stay for far longer than they planned to, we don’t take it for granted. Their trust is built on decades of partnership, and we’re grateful for it.

And, speaking of not taking things for granted, it’s important that we finish this update with recognition for the people who haven’t been mentioned so far. Our teams in Business Support, HR, Recruitment, Learning & Development, Finance, IT, Graphics, Facilities, and Marketing are the glue that enables our business to do what it does, and to do it so very well. When things haven’t gone to plan it’s those teams that have kept things moving. Yes, our collective consumption of ice cream has gone up exponentially in recent weeks along with the temperatures, but so too has our gratitude for all they do to ensure everyone is in the right place, at the right time, with all they need. Thank you to everyone in those roles, for everything.