In 2005, my first book Human Interactions was published. Astonishingly, at the time it was the first (and possibly may still be the only) formal theory of collaborative human work – a mathematical account of how people actually work together to get things done, and how to do it more effectively. Over many following years on the keynote circuit, I was repeatedly asked the same question: “Can you turn this into a product?”

Eventually, I made HumanEdj. Gartner recognised it with a Cool Vendor award in 2012, and its high point came when the NHS adopted it as the engine for NHS GATHER. This national Web platform for the UK gave healthcare innovators something new: a way to share validated success stories and give others a precise, executable plan for replicating them, automatically adapted to the stakeholder networks in which they worked.

In 2014, NHS GATHER won an NHS Innovation Award. Innovators loved it. Replicators loved it. And then in 2015 it disappeared in one of the many NHS restructurings of those years. Ten years on, nothing has replaced it – and the need for a system that can spread proven innovation across the NHS is, if anything, far more urgent.

So with the forthcoming release of Dedoctive Gen 2, I keep thinking the same thing: building NHS GATHER today would be so much easier.

Back then, managing the varied documents and data that explained an innovation was an organisational challenge, and workflow coding was a technical challenge. With Dedoctive Gen 2, both challenges are gone. You could build the equivalent knowledge model in minutes, into which innovators could simply drop in source materials – any format, any level of structure – and Dedoctive would handle the analysis. The workflow that helps potential adopters browse innovations then generate a customised replication plan? It would now be a matter of dragging a few boxes in a visual designer and describing, not programming, a couple of simple Web forms.

If anyone at NHS England Digital is reading this, I’d be delighted to talk.

More broadly: how about you? Do you have an idea for a transformative digital platform, and suspect AI could help, but don’t know where to begin? Dedoctive Gen 2 is designed for exactly that situation. You don’t need to be an AI expert, or have any AI knowledge at all. You just need to know what you want. The system does the rest.

Watch this space. Soon we will make available a Developer Edition of Dedoctive Gen 2, and in 2026 Peter Lawrence (creator of Dedoctive) and I will start a series of blogs and videos explaining how it works. To stay up to date, just follow Dedoctive on LinkedIn:

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