Welcome to Starling HQ

Bridge your innovation gap

We help you to achieve rapid results by driving innovation programmes in your organisation. Enabling the potential that already exists in your organisation to be realised.

Discover the potential that already exists in your staff, leadership and data.

We protect and promote innovation by creating highly effective spaces for research, prototyping, planning and implementation.

Our three stage approach delivers a fixed cost approach delivered against predictable timelines, respecting and valuing the time of your people, and delivering results that work.

Start with the idea hack to identify and explore opportunities. Attractive opportunities move forward to the data hack, where we prototype the new product / service and start testing. Only those ideas with genuine potential and broad buy-in move forward to a full test.

Are you ready for an idea hack?

There are a number of common situations that we find, all indicating that innovation has stalled in an organisation.

Review the list. If more than two of these ring true you sound like you are blocked. It's likely time to book in an idea hack.

  • Knowledgable team that is 'too busy with the day job' to deliver innovation projects
  • New projects are perceived to be risky so rarely get green-lit
  • New projects often stall through lack of resources (or worse, lack of confidence)
  • Indecision, indecision, indecision
  • A belief that data could be put to better use, but struggling to even get the basics in place

About Starling Projects

We’re a team of specialists that collaborate with organisations to develop new ideas and services. We innovate and prototype rapidly, solving problems with our clients quickly. We combine strategy, design and data science to help our clients identify and explore opportunities.

Our core team is based in Aberdeen, delivering our services primarily in Scotland. Our expertise covers local government, education and business.

Starling was founded in 2018 with a clear mission: to help unblock innovation in organisations. We help you solve significant problems, and improve services to your customers.

Why 'Starling'?

No. Not the bird. Although the alignment of forces associated with the murmuration would make a nice (if rather well trodden) analogy for in-house team based innovation.

We actually took inspiration from bridge builders. In this context a starling is simply a cutwater, a bullwark against the relentless flow of water. It protects the bridge from erosion. We see our role as providing similar protection from the relentless flow of day to day life. At least in long enough bursts for useful innovation to happen.

Let's talk.

Tell us a little about your innovation challenge.

We'll give you a call and discuss how we could potentially help create the space to help you take that critical next step.

We're based in Scotland, but we work everywhere.