If you’re going to name your business Innovative Technology, you’d better be bringing something special to the market, so I was struck by how this Manchester-based company was using technology to address an issue facing the retail sector.

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With the growth of self-checkouts, age verification for products such as alcohol has become an issue. Innovative Technology is addressing this with the roll out of software that accurately estimates the age of the customer and either requests a check or lets the transaction take place and the customer go on their way.

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As someone in the mid-50s this seems pretty sensible. The one irritation about self-checkouts is waiting around for someone to come and manually approve you being over age (particularly with all my grey hair). But I was also intrigued by another benefit of the technology. Apparently ID checks are one of the main reasons for conflict between retail staff and customers. When the decision is made by a computer, much of that conflict goes away.

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This is an additional significant benefit for hard working retail staff who don’t need the threat of violence at work. We’ve seen first hand through our work with the National Business Crime Solution (NBCS) the growth in attacks against retail workers. And anything that helps reduce this has a lot of merit. 

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As we prepare to close for the year, my colleague Emily John has picked out some of her favourite PR fails of the year (not her’s personally, but some of the companies that hit the headlines for the wrong reasons). One of these is Boeing where the bad news seems to keep coming, year after year. It reminded me that the Netflix documentary on the company – Downfall – is a great watch if you have time this year.