From Idea to Innovation: Building the Let’s Think Knowledge Exchange

Today marks a moment of reflection on our journey at Let’s Think—one that began with a deceptively simple question: How do we capture expert knowledge before it walks out the door of a company? 

As behavioural scientists, our team has long understood how difficult it is to surface what people know, especially when that knowledge is tacit, embedded in experience, and rarely documented. Our earliest insights came from recognising that organisations everywhere suffer from knowledge loss—whether someone is leaving a role or simply too busy to share what they know.

That idea resonated widely. At events like London Tech Week, it connected us to people like the Head of Innovation at a leading financial institution. She got it. Her team faced exactly this problem: talented secondees rotating in and out, but no scalable way to retain their learnings.

So we started building—with interviews, handwritten notes, and a prototype concept for the Knowledge Exchange.

That early work laid the foundations for something far more ambitious. Serendipity played its role again when I met Sarah Harris, Director of Innovation and Knowledge at Kingsley Napley, at a UKRI Innovation Lab. Her experience in legal investigations helped bridge our thinking to a high-stakes, knowledge-rich sector: Law. The Lab’s ESG and data access goals helped refine our proposition. We realised we weren’t just capturing knowledge. We were generating a novel expertise dataset that doesn’t currently exist in most organisations.

And then came the wildcard: LLMs. Fresh on the scene in late 2022, they offered a powerful new tool for micro-eliciting knowledge. Could we develop a product that captured meaningful insights in just five minutes? In an industry like law, where time is measured in six-minute increments, that challenge was not only exciting but necessary.

We've spent the last year testing, validating, and iterating the Knowledge Exchange. We’ve trialled the product internally. We’re running pilots with law firms like Kingsley Napley. And we’re seeing, with growing confidence, Behavioural Science AI is a technology that can transform knowledge management. 

What’s been most striking is how much the journey itself has shaped the product. Unexpected opportunities like innovation labs and pivots into new industries became forcing functions—shaping our assumptions, surfacing new needs, and accelerating our thinking.

The ideas were always there. But the path forward emerged only as we walked it, and heeded the signals for the best direction to go to solve a pressing customer problem. 

Wendy Jephson is the CEO and Co-founder of Let’s Think. She is a serial entrepreneur and duly qualified as a Behavioural Scientist and Lawyer.