Developing new services - Creativity in business

In the first part of this blog I explored how we all start life with a creative ability and can, if we really want to, rediscover that ability to use in our businesses. In this second part of the blog, I look at how I used my own experience to create a unique new business – Iskild Imaging. I firmly believe that by using our talents, passions and experience we can create new businesses or new ways of working.

I have been passionate about photography since I was a child but my education took me down an engineering path. I became a Chartered Engineer and Member of the Institution of Civil Engineers working in the Water Industry in the UK and overseas. I was always involved with the high technology aspect of the Water Industry and so it was a natural progression for me to move from engineering into Information Technology.

In the last 12 years or so I have been involved in several IT projects for Local and Central Government that included a high level of security because of the sensitive nature of the information held; data which if stolen could have resulted in significant financial loss, not to mention severe embarrassment for the clients.

While living in the South East of England in the 1990’s my house was burgled just before Christmas. All my wife’s jewellery and many other valuables and Christmas presents were stolen. We of course made a large claim in the tens of thousands of pounds on our household insurance. We attempted to itemise what had been stolen to the best of our ability but, like many others, we had not kept records so it was difficult to be specific about the value of many items. We were visited by a loss adjuster who went through the detail of our claim. The visit was clearly designed to test our honesty but this was done in a gentlemanly way – perhaps partly because we didn’t attempt to exaggerate the claim.  Our claim ended up being limited by our inability to prove the number and value of items that had been lost.

That was the 1990’s. I understand that the loss adjustment process is much tougher now because of the greater level of insurance fraud these days.

While planning how to build my photography business, I realised that I have a unique combination of skills in photography and IT Security which could be put together to form a new type of photography business. So many people have so many valuable possessions these days. If these valuables were lost or stolen it would be difficult to prove their true value and, indeed, that we possessed them at all. Our experience in the 1990’s had been traumatic enough but would have been much worse in the present situation of much more detailed and sceptical investigations of insurance claims.

I determined to launch Iskild Imaging to address this situation by providing my customers with a way of recording what they own to a quality that clearly shows the value of the items.

In summary, three parts of my experience and abilities came together to create Iskild Imaging - my love of making images, my IT Security experience and my experience of the insurance claim process. I still needed to do all the business things like getting a website etc. but the creative spark was putting these three things together and realising that there was a business need.