Explorez tous les épisodes du podcast The Digital Forge Podcast

Richard Stubbs grew up in Maltby, in a mining family shaped by the strike, Orgreave and the long shadow of deindustrialisation. His father fought the state on land that would later become the Advanced Manufacturing Park. A generation later, Richard chaired the region’s economic board on that same ground.

That journey sits at the heart of Part One of this conversation.

In this episode of The Digital Forge, David Richards MBE speaks to Richard Stubbs, Chief Executive of Health Innovation Yorkshire & Humber, about class, opportunity, the NHS, technology and the future of healthcare.

Richard reflects on his mother’s journey from Jamaica to senior NHS leadership, his own path from Maltby to the BBC, and how live television gave him the urgency and resilience he later brought into the health service.

Then the conversation moves to the big question: why is the NHS so good at invention, but so slow at adoption?

Richard explains why healthcare innovation is not just a technology problem. It is a culture problem. A systems problem. An implementation problem. From fax machines and paper notes to pilots that never scale, he lays bare why the NHS can take years to adopt what already works.

The episode then turns to AI, ambient voice technology, patient data, Palantir, clinical risk, trust and the future role of doctors. Richard argues that AI could transform productivity, triage and access, but only if the public trusts it and the system understands the risks of standing still.

This is a conversation about the NHS at a breaking point, but also at a moment of extraordinary possibility.

If Part One asks whether the NHS can change fast enough, Part Two asks something even bigger: whether health is now the foundation of Britain’s economic future.

You can also meet speakers like Richard Stubbs live at The Digital Forge, where founders, investors, policymakers and industry leaders come together to explore the future of technology, innovation and regional growth.

Find upcoming events and join the community at ForgedForGrowth.com.

For more essays, analysis and commentary from David Richards MBE on AI, technology, work and society, subscribe to The Sunday Signal at thesundaysignal.ai

Naomi Timperley built her career on visibility. Then it became a threat.

In Part Two of The Digital Forge, David Richards MBE sits down with Naomi to explore a stalking ordeal that lasted four years, escalated across multiple platforms, and exposed just how unprepared our systems are to deal with this kind of abuse.

What began with two brief encounters spiralled into thousands of posts, relentless harassment and a campaign that affected not just Naomi, but multiple victims. Police involvement. Bail breaches. Years of delays. And eventually, a prison sentence.

Naomi speaks with clarity and courage about what it actually felt like. The loss of trust. The impact on her health, her work and her family. The fear of simply showing up. And the reality that even after a conviction, the risk does not disappear.

This is also a story about failure at scale. Social platforms that did nothing. Systems that moved too slowly. Laws that are still catching up with the way harm is now delivered.

And yet, it is also a story about resilience.

Naomi shares what she has learned, how she rebuilt her sense of control, and what others can do if they find themselves in the same position. Her message is practical, grounded and hard-won.

If Part One was about building influence, Part Two is about what happens when that influence is turned against you.

This is not an easy listen. But it is an important one.

Naomi Timperley did not come through the front door of the tech industry. She built her own way in.

In Part One of The Digital Forge, David Richards MBE sits down with Naomi to trace a journey that begins in army towns and travel agencies and ends at the very centre of the UK’s technology ecosystem.

Born in Devon, raised across military communities, Naomi describes a childhood shaped by movement, resilience and learning differently. Undiagnosed ADHD meant school never quite fit, but what she lacked in conventional academics, she made up for in instinct, communication and sheer drive.

From selling holidays to working as a rep in Bulgaria, to being bullied out of a tech recruitment role, Naomi’s early career was anything but smooth. Then came the pivot. A chance discovery of an American concept led her to launch Baby Loves Disco in the UK, scaling it to nine cities, landing national press before the first event, and turning down investment on Dragons’ Den.

What followed was not a business career in the traditional sense, but something far more influential. Naomi helped build the networks, communities and programmes that underpin the North’s tech ecosystem today. From Enterprise Lab to Tech North Advocates, from mentoring founders to championing women in tech, she became one of the most recognisable voices in UK innovation.

This is a story about confidence built the hard way. About backing yourself before anyone else does. And about creating opportunity where none existed.

Part One ends at the point where everything changes.

In Part Two, Naomi speaks about a stalking ordeal that would test her resilience, challenge the systems meant to protect her, and reshape how she thinks about visibility and power.

Simon Biltcliffe did not enter politics because business failed him. He entered because business showed him what failure really looks like when systems are wrong.

In Part Two of The Digital Forge, David Richards MBE moves beyond the story of Webmart and into something deeper. Power. Politics. Control. And why places like Barnsley were left behind.

Simon returns to South Yorkshire not out of nostalgia, but conviction. He argues that the North does not lack talent, ambition or opportunity. It lacks power. The UK, he says, is one of the most centralised countries in the developed world, with decisions made far from the people who live with the consequences.

He explains his idea of Marxist capitalism. Not ideology, but a system. Use capitalism to create value. Then distribute that value back to the people who made it. Simple. Uncomfortable. Necessary.

This episode also lifts the lid on the machinery of the state. Lobbying, regulation, taxation, and why governments often make it harder to build than it needs to be. Simon argues that the UK could unlock growth overnight by removing friction, decentralising control and trusting local leadership.

And then there is Yorkshire.

A region of more than five million people with almost no real power. Simon makes the case for devolution, for economic self-determination, and for turning places like Barnsley from afterthoughts into engines of growth.

This is not a polite conversation. It is a challenge.

If Part One was about building a company with values, Part Two is about building a system that works.

Most founders talk about values. Simon Biltcliffe built them into systems.

In Part One of this two-part episode of The Digital Forge, David Richards MBE sits down with Simon Biltcliffe, founder of Webmart, one of the most unconventional and quietly radical businesses in Britain.

Simon grew up in Staincross outside Barnsley, shaped by community, the miners’ strike, and the hard lessons of deindustrialisation. He was thrown out of university twice, rode his motorbike south with no plan and no money, and stumbled into a job running a million-pound hologram machine in Corby. From there he discovered sales, built a team, and then had the kind of week that breaks people. A company collapsed, a mortgage tripled, and interest rates jumped to 15 per cent.

Then came the moment that changed everything.

A trip to Japan in 1993 where Simon saw what the world would later call a Kindle. He came home convinced print would be disrupted. His bosses told him to stick with the knitting. So he built it himself.

This episode follows the birth of Webmart and the culture decisions that made it famous. Open salaries. Radical transparency. One version of the truth. A profit-sharing model that hands the upside to employees. Simon calls it Marxist capitalism. Not politics, but a deliberate rejection of extractive business.

Part One ends as the story turns. Barnsley to Bicester and back again. The two Bs. And the question of why a man who built a successful company in the South came home to Yorkshire with a bigger mission.

Part Two is coming.

If you want a founder story with grit, humour, and a serious challenge to how British business is run, start here.

Most founders never talk about the moments that nearly ended them. Ashley Tate does.

In Part Two of this two-part episode of The Digital Forge, David Richards MBE returns with Ashley to trace the comeback story. After two brutal lessons in the energy world, Ashley explains how those disasters became the foundation for his biggest success.This episode is the truth about rebuilding.Ashley tells the story of how Mina began as a consumer idea, then pivoted hard into fleets when he spotted a pain nobody had solved. Drivers were not charging at home because it hit their personal electricity bills. Fleet managers were stuck. Mina became the missing link, and product-market fit arrived in a single meeting.From there, Ashley breaks down what actually drives a breakthrough. Partnerships. Pricing. Focus. Timing. The discipline to build foundations before scaling. He also lifts the lid on what it is really like to be acquired, how he survived two years inside a major corporate, and why he treated it like an MBA.The episode ends with the next chapter. Ashley is now Co-Chair of Sheffield Angels, backing early-stage founders in the region, building an investment culture Sheffield has lacked for too long, and proving that experience earned the hard way is worth more than theory.If Part One was the fall, Part Two is the recovery. And the blueprint.Subscribe to The Digital Forge on Spotify or Apple Podcasts so you never miss what comes next.

Ashley Tate built his first business before most people finish school.

In Part One of this two-part episode of The Digital Forge, David Richards MBE sits down with Ashley to unpack the early years of a career shaped by instinct, experimentation and hard lessons learned the long way round.

Growing up in Dronfield and Sheffield, Ashley always knew he wanted to work for himself. At sixteen he was importing mini motorbikes, processing card payments from his bedroom and shipping hundreds of units across the UK. By nineteen he was running a student property business that grew into a serious operation. From there came Split the Bills, a business that scaled fast, generated huge cash flow, and nearly collapsed under the weight of its own complexity.

Ashley speaks with rare honesty about what went wrong. Losing control of finances. Operating on hope rather than data. Facing winding-up petitions. Buying his own business back out of administration with borrowed money and credit cards. Then doing it all again in energy, just as wholesale markets imploded.

This is not a story about overnight success. It is a story about learning in public, surviving failure, and understanding that grit without discipline eventually catches up with you.

Part One ends at the moment where most founders would walk away. In Part Two, we explore how Ashley rebuilt, what those failures taught him, and how they shaped the investor and founder he is today at Sheffield Angels and beyond.

If you have ever built something, broken something, or wondered whether you could come back from the edge, this episode will stay with you.

Part Two of the Volker Hirsch story begins where most careers would have ended.

Fresh from being arrested and held in a Maltese jail in the collapse of a dot-com era mobile incubator, Volker Hirsch had a choice. Retreat to safety or build again. He chose the harder path.

In this episode of The Digital Forge, David Richards MBE follows Volker through the aftermath. How he rebuilt his career, moved to the UK, helped shape the early mobile games industry, co-founded multiple companies, and went on to invest in some of the UK’s most successful education and technology startups.

Volker reflects on what failure really teaches you, why being early is often indistinguishable from being wrong, and how pattern recognition, not prediction, defines the best founders and investors. He talks candidly about venture capital, the difference between UK and US attitudes to risk, and why ecosystems like the North of England need confidence as much as capital.

This is a conversation about perspective earned the hard way. About learning when to walk away, when to double down, and how to see around corners after you have been burned.

If Part One was about the rise and fall of technology giants, Part Two is about what it takes to survive them.

Volker Hirsch has lived several technology lifetimes in one career.

In Part One of this two-part episode of The Digital Forge, David Richards MBE sits down with Volker to trace an extraordinary journey that begins in German law firms and runs straight through the first mobile revolution, the rise of social gaming, and the peak of BlackBerry’s dominance.

Volker left a successful legal career to join one of the world’s first mobile-only incubators in 2000, helping launch some of the earliest mobile fan clubs and games long before smartphones existed. He went on to help build Scoreloop, growing it to more than 450 million users, before the company was acquired by BlackBerry, where he worked from the inside as the company tried and failed to reinvent itself.

This episode is about timing, conviction and being close enough to history to see how giants rise and fall. Volker explains what BlackBerry got right, what it misunderstood, and why execution mattered more than technology.

And then the story takes a turn.

Part One ends with Volker recounting the night he was arrested and held in a Maltese jail for four hours, accused of money laundering in the fallout of a collapsing mobile incubator. What happened next changed the direction of his life and career.

Part Two continues the story.

If you want to understand how early mobile really worked, why BlackBerry lost its grip on the world, and how chaos can become a catalyst, this is where it begins.

Tim Craggs is building technology that could change how we understand disease.

In this episode of The Digital Forge, David Richards MBE sits down with Tim Craggs, founder and CEO of Exciting Instruments, a University of Sheffield spin-out developing a new generation of tools for single-molecule research.

What once required vast, expensive machines in specialist labs can now sit on a benchtop. That shift matters. Tim explains how being able to observe single molecules in action opens the door to earlier disease detection, better drug discovery, and eventually new ways of tackling conditions like Parkinson’s.

But this is not just a story about science. It is a story about conviction and risk. Tim talks candidly about funding the business through customer sales before raising capital, scaling a deep-tech team at speed, and moving from academic research into global commercial markets in pharma and biotech.

We explore what it takes to build hard technology in the UK, why first-principles science still matters, and how Sheffield is quietly producing tools that could help reshape modern medicine.

This is a conversation about patience, precision, and building technology that may one day help cure diseases we still struggle to understand.

In this episode of The Digital Forge Podcast, David Richards MBE sits down with Dan Ridsdale, Head of Technology, Media and Telecoms at Edison Group, to get inside the mind of the modern tech investor. After more than 25 years analysing listed technology companies and working with management teams across the UK and Europe, Dan has a rare view of what really moves markets - and what does not. 

This conversation goes beyond valuation jargon and earnings calls. Dan and David unpack how investors actually build conviction, why some founders cut through while others never get noticed, and what a compelling “equity story” looks like from the other side of the table. They dig into the state of UK public markets, why ambitious growth companies so often feel overlooked, and what needs to change if Britain is serious about backing its own tech and industrial champions. 

In this episode, they explore:

• How a career in telecoms software and market analysis led Dan into equity research

• What institutional investors really look for in a tech or industrial company

• The biggest mistakes founders make when pitching to the market

• How to tell a clear, credible growth story that resonates with investors

• The challenges and opportunities for UK-listed tech and industrial businesses today

• Practical advice for northern and regional companies trying to attract serious capital

A candid, practical guide for founders, CFOs, and anyone who wants to understand how investors think before they step into the City.

Bruce Katz is one of the most influential thinkers on cities and metropolitan economies. He has advised US Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, shaped national policy, and helped city leaders around the world rebuild their economies from the ground up.

In this episode of The Digital Forge, David Richards MBE sits down with Katz for a wide-ranging conversation about the future of place, power and production. Katz explains why cities, not national governments, now lead the way on innovation and growth, and why the next industrial era will be driven by regions that know how to combine research, talent and manufacturing.

Together they explore the lessons from America’s reindustrialisation, the rise of advanced manufacturing districts, and what South Yorkshire must do to compete with global leaders in clean energy, aerospace, defence and deep tech. Katz also reflects on the South Yorkshire Growth Plan and why the region is better positioned than most to seize the new economic moment.

This is a conversation about strategy, capital and the renewal of industry.

If you want to understand how cities rise, how nations rebuild, and where future prosperity will be created, start here.

In November 1983, six armed men broke into a Brink’s-Mat warehouse near Heathrow Airport and stole three tonnes of gold bullion worth £26 million. Led by Brian Robinson and Micky McAvoy, the gang thought they were taking cash. What they found changed British crime forever.As the investigation unfolded, the trail led far beyond London to Sheffield. The stolen bullion had been melted down and disguised as scrap. Much of it arrived at the Sheffield Assay Office for official hallmarking.In this episode of The Digital Forge, David Richards MBE returns to the Assay Office with Ashley Carson to piece together how one of Britain’s most trusted institutions became entwined in one of its darkest criminal sagas.Ashley recalls what it was like working there as John “Goldfinger” Palmer, the jeweller who helped launder the gold, personally visited Sheffield with shipments for testing and marking. He remembers the rumours, the suspicions, and the moment the Assay Office found itself caught in a story of money, murder, and global intrigue.It’s a story of greed, audacity and the thin line between legitimacy and crime and how Sheffield, the city of steel, found its mark on the crime of the century.

Inside a quiet building in Sheffield, every piece of precious metal, gold, silver, platinum, and palladium, still carries a mark that has defined trust for more than 250 years. The Sheffield hallmark.

In this episode of The Digital Forge, David Richards MBE meets Ashley Carson, the city’s longest-serving Assay Master. From apprentice to leader, Ashley has spent nearly fifty years testing and marking the precious metals that carry Sheffield’s reputation around the world.

It’s a story of precision and pride, of heritage and modernisation, and of a man who has literally shaped the authenticity of British craftsmanship.

For decades, Britain has talked about innovation while letting its factories fall silent.

Now, from a cluster of hangars and labs on the edge of Sheffield, a new industrial revolution is taking shape.

In this episode of The Digital Forge, David Richards MBE talks with Ben Morgan, Chief Executive of the Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre (AMRC) — the organisation leading Britain’s return to making.

Ben argues that the UK’s future depends on reconnecting invention and production, backing engineering talent, and rebuilding confidence in the power of the North. He explains how South Yorkshire has become a global testbed for advanced manufacturing, clean energy and defence technology, and why the world is watching.

This is not nostalgia for the past. It’s a manifesto for what comes next.

Listen to hear:

• How Britain can close the gap between research and real production.

• Why skills, pride and purpose matter as much as policy.

• How the AMRC is proving that manufacturing isn’t dying, it’s evolving.

A sharp, uncompromising conversation about leadership, technology and the rebirth of British industry.

In this episode of The Digital Forge, David Richards MBE sits down with Louisa Harrison-Walker OBE, Chief Executive of the Sheffield Chamber of Commerce and Industry.
Louisa speaks with rare honesty about reaching breaking point after the death of a close friend, the mental health struggles that followed, and how time away helped her reset her life, her leadership, and her priorities.
From that deeply personal story comes a powerful conversation about resilience, vulnerability in leadership, and her vision for Sheffield as it redefines its identity for a new industrial age.
This episode explores:
• Burnout, grief, and the courage to be open about mental health.
• Why self-care isn’t selfish and how it can transform organisations.
• The Chamber’s role in helping Sheffield’s entrepreneurs and businesses succeed.
• Why Sheffield can lead in advanced manufacturing, clean energy, and inclusive growth.
A candid, emotional, and inspiring conversation about leadership, resilience, and building a city where everyone can thrive.

Host David Richards sits down with Adam Pollock to explore his journey from barrister and private investigator to broker and investment banker. Adam breaks down what investment banking is really about, why the UK doesn’t lack money but needs to allocate it better, and how pensions and the EIS scheme fit into the picture. He also shines a spotlight on the talent and innovative businesses thriving in Sheffield — and shares his thoughts on how smarter investment could fuel growth across the UK economy.