About Denis Oakley & Co

Engineering-Led Innovation

My first job out of university was as a design engineer, working on high-speed railways. I was full of ideas – constantly spotting what I thought were better ways to do things. But every time I brought these ideas to my manager, I’d get, “Don’t reinvent the wheel, Oakley” or “What planet are you on”. Nothing I suggested ever went anywhere. It took years, and a few hard lessons, to understand why.

When I eventually left that job and began my journey as an entrepreneur, I realised my old managers were right – at least in part. Back then, I had no real understanding of what customers actually needed, how markets worked, or what made a business sustainable. My ideas weren’t wrong, but they were untethered from the real world.

Through a series of startups – spanning engineering products, food delivery, and even elderly care – I slowly started to see the bigger picture. I learned, often the hard way, just how much I hadn’t known.

Later, when I found myself working again with brilliant engineers – people with razor-sharp technical minds but the same blind spots I once had – I saw myself in them. I recognised the potential, and also the limitations in how we’re trained as engineers. That was the spark and I knew I could help.

Today, our work is about meeting technical teams where they are – regardless of background, experience, or culture – and helping them shift their mindset. It’s not about handing over a playbook. It’s about guiding them to ask the right questions, see problems from different angles, and build products people actually want.

We’ve experimented with all kinds of delivery – courses, lectures, platforms – but what works best, time and again, is personal mentoring. One-to-one. Peer to peer. From someone who’s lived it.

The best part of my job? Those quiet ‘aha’ moments when someone sees things differently – and everything clicks.

Thirty years ago, I was sketching railway signalling diagrams in pen and ink. The world we live in today – of AI, advanced chip design, and exponential innovation – was unimaginable back then. It’s humbling to think how much further we’ll go in the next thirty.