The SimplyDo Platform is 10 Years Old. While the company's journey is being celebrated separately, we wanted to dedicate this post to our platform, itself a testament to innovation, adaptation, and our unwavering commitment to our users. Looking back, the platform and technology around its 10th birthday is a completely different platform to what it was a decade ago.
Our story began officially in the spring of 2016 with an early technology (EdTech) product. It catered to HE and FE institutions, providing enterprise education resources and a dedicated space for young people to create and refine business plan ideas, guided by our original “6 Cs” framework, and get feedback and support from experts and professionals.
The seeds of our current enterprise platform were sown when we made our first non-education foray: delivering innovation and idea management to local NHS trusts. This shift was pivotal. We recognised that the enterprise and entrepreneurship principles we applied in education were closely linked to intrapreneurship and innovation, which are natural drivers for continuous improvement within large organisations.
Suddenly, we were leading a product with two vastly different use-cases: students creating ideas and the much more rigorous requirements of the NHS, where security and operational excellence were paramount. This exposure to mission-critical environments forced a radical evolution in our platform's architecture. The need to support continuous improvement programmes at-scale across thousands of staff members demanded that we significantly raise our commitment to enterprise-readiness and consistently follow developing and ever-changing industry standards.
This commitment to meeting the rigorous demands of enterprise clients and public sector bodies became a core pillar of our product philosophy. We consistently invested in improving security and scaling enterprise-readiness. This journey culminated in achieving critical, industry-recognised certifications. To guarantee operational excellence and data integrity, we attained ISO27001 certification. Furthermore, our dedication to cyber hygiene and defence was validated by obtaining Cyber Essentials Plus. These certifications are not merely badges; they represent our total commitment to embedding security into every layer of the platform, ensuring we can serve sectors with the highest standards.
Our product innovation journey has never stopped, driven by swathes of ongoing technology advancements, new features, integrations, general updates, and never-ending user experience changes. Today, the SimplyDo Platform caters to a broad and demanding audience. We now provide innovation management and innovation grant-funding solutions to customers in Government, healthcare, and defence. Yet, we remain proud that our work in education also continues, through powering uni-SME relationships and academic networks.
Although it feels like no time ago at all, the evolution from an early EdTech tool to a secure, enterprise-grade platform used across highly-regulated sectors is a source of immense pride. The journey toward consistently improving security, meeting evolving industry standards, and ensuring enterprise-readiness has been a defining success of the last decade, and we are excited for what is to come.
.jpg)
