Our company values
Science for society's good
Core values
Our core values are pragmatism, fairness, integrity and proactivity, which we define as follows:
Pragmatism: To be realistic, knowing what to prioritise when, being goal-led without being dogmatic, appreciating that plans evolve over time and, while striving to make evidence-led decisions, recognising that some decisions have to be based on incomplete data.
Fairness: To treat each other with respect and dignity, being empathetic to an individual’s situation, in order to create an environment that encourages conversation, teamwork and an openness about our weaknesses; one in which we learn lessons from our mistakes, which are accepted as an inevitable part of personal development.
Integrity: To work with honesty and resilience, ensuring that actions are taken with transparency, acknowledging difficulties when they are encountered, and knowing when to say “I don’t know” and when to challenge authority.
Proactivity: To be diligent and innovative, not just in research and development but in all aspects of business, identifying risks before they are encountered, seeking solutions to anticipated challenges, and knowing when to act without being told.
We commit to undertake our work in a way that embodies our core values while being conscious of its potential environmental and societal impacts. We also seek to continuously develop our employees to ensure that our values run consistently through our company.
All staff and student visitors undergo formal training to ensure the safety of themselves and others, and we operate to Quality Assured principles. As such, we maintain accurate records and work to documented and standardised methodologies, while pragmatically accepting that R&D requires methods to be constantly reviewed and refined.
We are proud of our innovations and seek to build on these, working with partners where they add value and fill our knowledge gaps, to develop socially desirable solutions that sustainably improve efficiency within agriculture.
Responsible innovation
We have adopted the Anticipate, Reflect, Engage, Act (AREA) model for responsible innovation:
Anticipate: Fully understanding the impact of our work is essential for us to achieve our aim of becoming a globally recognised company. This approach extends to decisions on partners; we only engage with those who share our standards, including our approaches to responsible innovation, even when that may have negative short-term cost implications.
Reflect: Having committed to a particular R&D path, we continually monitor developments in the company and the wider community to remain aware of any arising changes (both good and bad). We routinely report on these at management and board meetings.
Engage: Active engagement with the communities that may be affected by our innovations helps us to ensure that our products solve real challenges (as well as increasing awareness of our products). It also helps us to better anticipate the broader effects that our innovations may have. We also engage with universities and innovation and knowledge centres including CIEL, CENSIS and the IBioIC.
Act: We combine all these factors to guide our R&D and wider business strategies.