Archive for the ‘Inventorium Event’ Category

Ireland’s vibrant culture of ideas doesn’t stop at The Pale

Our first Open Mic Jams ran last autumn, as part of Innovation Dublin. Participants pitched to packed houses at the Stag’s Head and The Odessa Club, and before we even get to the great ideas, we loved the sheer energy in the room. People seemed to like the stripped-down format, too.

So we thought we’d take the show on the road.

In Ireland, more than half our population lives outside an urban area, and of our cities, the resources, networks and attention are disproportionately focused on Dublin. “Most of the channels to express ideas are in Dublin, but there are a lot of people with good ideas outside of Dublin,” says Brendan O’Driscoll CEO of LaunchPad company, Soundwave, who pitched in Kilkenny. “It’s very important for there to be opportunities in other cities.”

Our Open Mic Jams in Waterford and Kilkenny were aimed at creative and innovative clusters in the southeast, but we also welcomed pitches from anywhere in Ireland — it’s not just about going where the ideas are, it’s about bringing people together.

Langton’s, Kilkenny (28/2/2012)

There’s already a thriving arts, culture, and startup community in Kilkenny, and we’re grateful for the enthusiasm of the people who got involved to help us spread the word. At our Kilkenny event, the networking opportunity seemed at least as beneficial as the open forum.

We heard eight pitches in total, including one from Kilkenny-based LaunchPad company, Instant Opinion, who talked about their feedback service that helps hotels and restaurants respond in realtime, so their customers leave happy.

“The three minutes makes you really focus and hone in on your message,” says Soundwave’s O’Driscoll. “In NDRC we had visuals to carry our message but we had to reinvent the pitch without visual aids or props. It really helped us focus on our message.”

But it wasn’t just established early-stage companies or LaunchPad participants. Or even tech companies. One of the benefits to hosting an event like this in a smaller city is that you get a really broad range of contributions.

“One woman had an idea for an arts festival, and everyone would dress as their favourite literary character,” says O’Driscoll. “That was a breath of fresh air, hearing a strong idea that doesn’t necessarily revolve around a next-generation web service.”

He’s talking about Clare Muldowney’s Literal Festival, a community-based event she wants to run, that would be both literary and theatrical. Inventorium is focused on digital ideas, but it’s still key to realise that not all digital ideas start out that way, and that traditional ideas might develop a digital element. And failing all of that, the exchange itself is valuable.

“There’s better crossover there,” he adds. “It was nice to have feedback from people in the arts about tech ideas, and vice-versa.”

Oh, and then there was the marriage proposal.

“We opened the floor after our pitch and one lady asked for more information. Then she asked if she could marry one of us,” says O’Driscoll. “I think we’re the first startup to get a marriage proposal out of an open mic jam.”

But you never know — look out, Lisdoonvarna.

Waterford (6/3/2012)

Waterford’s tech startup cluster, based around Waterford Institute of Technology, meant that this event especially helped people forge some real, meaningful links.

We heard seven ideas in total, with some impressive breadth. These ranged from Elaine Larkin’s early-stage Freelance Availability idea, to help link freelancers with available work, as well as her second idea for a news syndication service, to Nicholas McNulty’s concept based on condensed matter and shock waves, with which he and some colleagues in the nuclear industry want to develop a process for smashing solids into powder

Dublin-based startup Popdeem, a current LaunchPad company, also came down to pitch. About three weeks into their LaunchPad tenure, they realised they had to make a major change to their concept.

“We were right in the middle of our pivot when we went to the Open Mic Jam,” says CEO Richard Whelan, one of its founders. “So instead of coming down with a really firm idea, we pitched the problem and talked about two or three solutions that we had.” When they pitched, they were still called StudyBuddy, but the event was part of a major shift that included a name change.

In addition to putting some things in perspective, the team liked the energy of Waterford. “There’s a good buzz down there because it’s a smaller community,” says Whelan. “It opened our eyes, and we met a group of guys [based there] who ended up developing our facebook timeline page for us.”

He also met someone from Waterford IT who suggested he contact the CEO of Wexford-based R Works, a company that sells a productivity application for managing distributed teams, since the ideas were similar, but for a different market.

“It was similar to what we wanted to get into, and I was lucky to get 15 minutes of the CEO’s time, where we had a really good conversation,” says Whelan, who quickly learned that what R Works does for large industries wouldn’t work for the student market.

“It put the final nail in the pivot coffin, and it was good to know I could open up a dialogue with people quite high up and it was comfortable.”

In Waterford and the surrounding areas it’s not just about catering to the Waterford market, or even the Irish market. In fact, a large urban area like Dublin can leave us with a false sense of a large market.

In smaller cities, towns, and rural areas, innovators have no choice but to look outside their own regions; it’s small communities of highly skilled people, focusing on the bigger picture.

We admit we’re more used to working within Dublin-based networks, where everything is within easy reach, but we also know how limiting that can be. The rest of the country isn’t like Dublin, and tapping into new networks can work to everyone’s advantage.

We’d love to hear more about how we can best meet the needs of innovators in areas outside of Dublin, and outside of our own comfort zone.

Learn more about music analytics company Soundwave.

And keep an eye on Popdeem’s site for a beta launch.

Digital Culture Wales

27 March, 2012

Galeri, Caernarfon

We spoke with our own Martin Owen about Wales’s long history of collaborative creativity and what was learned about meeting the needs of Welsh arts communities in the 21st century. And we ended up learning something about Romanticism, wartime art rescue, and an unusual idea for an art museum.

What was the focus of the Digital Culture Wales event?

We had individual musicians, people who run performance spaces, art galleries, music ensembles, and we had people from the National Theatre Wales Community, who are peripatetic. It was a variety of people in the arts and culture space, all there to talk about ways that cultural businesses in Wales can improve their capacity to reach, build, and address their audiences.

We’ll get to the unusual art museum in a minute, but what were some of the problems and digital ideas people talked about?

They need to be able to up their marketing game. We need to help them improve their marketing capacity, find ways to help them get training, better business-to-business networking. They just don’t talk to each other enough across the value chain. So that was some of the focus.

You mentioned a concerted events database for north Wales. Can you tell us more about what that involves?

There was also talk about a good, central repository. It’d be the equivalent of something like Time Out, only digital, and without necessarily needing to approach an editor.

There would be properly structured APIs, so that, say, if I was running a series of guesthouse websites, and you were looking at my guesthouse, you could easily find out what else is happening during the time you would be visiting. And local papers, businesses — they would automatically have this updated database for events.

Wales has a history of loose but dynamic collaboration in the arts. Tell us how you came across a forgotten artists’ colony in Snowdonia

I was on holiday in Norway and I got kind of a shock. I had a day in Bergen, where it’s always drizzling, so I made for the art gallery. In amongst the Edvard Munchs was this painting of a local waterfall in Betws Y Coed.

I hadn’t been to the Norwegian hinterland yet, where there are waterfalls every few miles. But despite all of these waterfalls, this Norwegian artist had gone to north Wales to paint this relatively unimpressive waterfall.

He went, presumably, to hang out with this colony of artists. In this very picturesque mountain village of Betws Y Coed, in north Wales, there was one of the largest artists’ colonies in the world in the end of the 19th century.

What was it called? And why isn’t it remembered?

It wasn’t called anything — it didn’t have a name. But it was a fairly significant Romantic period colony but it somehow slipped from art history and was rapidly replaced by early 20th-century modernism.

The idea [for a collection] was brought up by a local artist called David Woodford, who was at the event. There’s no permanent collection and no collective memory of this fine art movement in north Wales. So you can see things on the walls of galleries in New York or Norway, but you can’t see them on the walls of galleries here.

People didn’t respond particularly strongly to it specifically, but one of the things that interested people is the idea that there’s a lot of “hiding lights under bushels” in north Wales. And it brought us back to an idea for a virtual gallery of fine art.

Can you tell us more about that?

We had a meeting on digital technology and tourism in late 2010, and there was a suggestion that we create a virtual art gallery in a quarry in another mountain town, Blaenau Ffestiniog.

Why a quarry in Blaenau Ffestiniog?

In World War II, the artistic treasures of the nation that were held in London — the Queen’s pictures, the contents of the National Gallery — they were all stored in a disused quarry in this mountain village, to protect them.

So the idea that was pitched then was that we create a digital or digitised national fine art museum with the treasures of the nation. We would have digital images and because it would be completely dark inside the cavern, we could do whatever we wanted, and have interesting ways of displaying these digitised works.

We could juxtapose works of art in ways that other galleries can’t. For example, if you were to take a single subject, say, The Last Supper or St Jerome, in the way that they’re hung in the National Gallery in London. If it’s an 18th-century French painting, it’s with the other 18th-century French paintings. But we could have a space where we could compare the interpretation across lots of artists and periods.

There are so many interesting ways we could use this space to rethink art galleries in a digital form. And it would also be an experience because you’re in an interesting space. One of the things north Wales needs, too, is more wet-weather attractions.

What has happened with this digital museum idea?

It’s an idea that the community around Blaenau Ffestiniog are still addressing. They have some money to support their regeneration. They’re considering a number of ideas.

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One of the reasons we love our Inventorium event participants is the way that the growing and ever-changing community and collaborations introduce us to ideas we might not have thought of, or have thought to put together.

The more people we meet, the more confident we feel about the creative and exciting ideas and projects that are either happening, or have the potential to happen. So when we’re addressing the digital needs of the culture industry in north Wales, how can we best tap into the strengths of these communities, so they can perform better?

We hosted a follow-up event on April 23 in Ty Menai, for anyone who wanted to take some of these ideas forward, so stay tuned for updates. Martin has also started a discussion on LinkedIn, where the conversation continues.

What happens when you combine experience and youthful exuberance without making young innovators feel they need to choose between education and ideation?

Jenny Dickinson talks about the excitement of working with creative media students from Coleg Harlech and Coleg Ceredigion at our Creative Technology and the Welsh Environment event back in February.

The Workshop

We’d intended to do an event in collaboration with Coleg Harlech because we’ve already been working with Xsportmap’s Chris Headleand, who lectures in creative media there. Coleg Harlech ran a seminar in the morning with a series of great speakers, focusing on creative businesses. We heard from Rebecca Colley-Jones, who talked about the impact of technology on the environment. We had a talk from Tom Beverley and Rhys Jones, who develop mobile applications for education.

At the Inventorium workshop, we ended up with students from Coleg Harlech and a group from Coleg Ceredigion. The idea was to give young people a chance to generate ideas, evaluate them, and look for business opportunities in them.

We split the 18 students into groups, where they played Inventorium Poker, then chose two of their best ideas to explore for business viability. They looked at the obstacles, the market, how to get customers — in general, how to take an idea and look at it like an entrepreneur. They presented the initial ideas to each other, and then spent the rest of the afternoon developing.

Idea highlights

A lot of the students are studying filmmaking, so one group had a recce app, which would make it easy to source filming locations that met certain criteria. For example, if you needed a location by the sea with mountains in the background that looked good at night, the app would help you find that. It would take in tidal information, information about the moon and artificial lighting that would tell you about brightness, etc.

There was a pair of students who want to convert old buses into environmentally friendly and bespoke mobile homes. They’re really keen on doing it, so we worked closely with them on how they would source the buses, do the design and conversion, and market themselves.

Another idea was a farm that would be controlled by virtual shareholders who would control what the farm did. They could watch through webcams and follow online, and make decisions about animals, crops, what to buy, and what to sell.

Young people as natural innovators

We’ve done a lot of idea generation workshops, but this was a different, much younger group than the ones we’ve worked with before. Young people add a really good angle to our events, I think. They have so many fantastic ideas, and they’re really boundless in terms of where their minds will go. They’re really good fun, and not afraid to say stuff.

When it comes to technology, and especially creative technology, they know what they want and they know what would work. They’ve been brought up with the technology, so they’re vital to the process of developing more of it. The challenge is helping them to be creative with the technology that exists already.

They were more aware of the entrepreneurial side of things than I thought they would be, so we’re excited to help them learn how to develop that kind of thinking. I was surprised how mature they were, and not only how interested they were in ways that you could make money out of creative media, but also how much they’d already thought about it.

And their presentation skills were really very good — they were so confident standing up and explaining their ideas. That’s something that can be built on to make them successful entrepreneurs.

What’s next?

We’ve been following up on the ideas and we’re looking at going to Coleg Ceredigion to run another workshop with students who want to take their ideas on further. If they’re interested — which we hope they will be — we’ll help them source people working in industry who might be able to see where the ideas will go, and perhaps develop a product. The idea will come from students, who will always be involved, but the industry expertise can help make it a reality.

We’ve talked before about creating situations where young people are encouraged to make their ideas happen, and we’re hoping that we can help them build on this without feeling they need to leave education before they’re ready.

There are at least three ways to interpret this tile – each has interesting implications.

The first is using digital technology to promote cultural activity in Wales.  This is the basis on which our workshop on March 27th is initially conceived. Can we do things with digital technology that will develop resilient arts and culture for makers, performers, promoters and audiences? What can be done to make a living for those employed in arts and culture? How can we build a satisfied audience group? And so on.  The answer my come from digital interactions with taxi and bus services as much as anything that appears on the wall or on the stage.

Read More …

Wikipedia states that the Blaa is a white doughy bread roll speciality that is particular to Waterford and Kilkenny.  This came as a surprise to us at Inventorium as we were led to believe that the Blaa was originally created in Waterford city back in the 17th century.  Was there some form of inter-county high-espionage at play here ? 

Four centuries later, our curiosity has gotten the better of us.   We’ve decided to give both counties the chance to pit their creative juices against each other.   The Inventorium Open Mic Idea Jam roadshow visits the capitals of both counties to determine which has the best new business ideas of the 21st century.  

We kick off in Langtons in Kilkenny on Tuesday Feb 28th at 7pm and quickly follow it with Tuesday 6th March at 7pm in the KazBar in Waterford City.

We’ve had a huge response from both cities with people not just registering, but also getting their pitch slot confirmed for the night.    You can expect to hear loads of different ideas including an iPad game designed to teach 7 year olds orthographic 3D, the perpetual motion machine that plugs into your attic cold water tank and an topical online service to help people struggling with eating disorders.

 Our events in Dublin we’re oversubscribed and people found it difficult gain access to the event because they failed to pre-register online for their chosen event. So, take a look at our video clips of earlier Idea Jams, grab a few friends and register to attend your counties event.  Remember, you don’t have to pitch an idea to come along, but just like any Open Mic night, you’re welcome to provide feedback .. good and bad ….

What happens to your eureka moments? Do you write them across your hand? Do you scribble them on the back of an envelope? There’s an app for that and now there’s a forum, too. Inventorium’s Open Mic Idea Jam series was part of Innovation Dublin 2011, and offered an audience and a microphone to anyone with an idea and three minutes to spare. Below is a review of the events and details of the Open Mic Idea Jams planned in Wales and Ireland in 2012. 

The Idea Jam was intended as a place to share ideas at all points of development, network with like-minded and compatibly different people, and contribute to a climate of idea-sharing, mutual encouragement, and constructive critique. There were potential investors and mentors present, too, but for most it seemed a chance to open up new conversations about ideas. Eighteen people spoke at the first event in the Stag’s Head, beginning with Conor Lynch of Connector.ie, and his idea for a website for skill sharing. The pitches ran the gamut from an idea for an eco-friendly and cost effective way to dry clothes without a tumble drier, to a travel website targeting walkers in Wicklow aged 50+, to a cloud hosting service called Astroboa, described as “like a WordPress service for data”.

There was a similar mix of digital, service and physical product pitches at the second Open Mic event at Odessa, including a novel idea for car sharing that sounded like a cross between Airbnb.com and Gocar.ie. Along with this were some very early-stage, more amorphous ideas like Lisa Feay’s idea for a jazz radio station, and some other arts focused concepts, like Castle Variations, an annual week-long musical mashup in a castle.

The Idea Jams bring together a wide range of people and ideas that wouldn’t otherwise end up in the same room on purpose. They’re as useful for the audience as they are for the people pitching, a few of whom seem to have gone home with business cards for potential collaborators, partners, investors or customers. However, what was striking but perhaps not surprising was the fairly low representation of women, not just pitching, but actually attending the event. Is it because there are fewer female entrepreneurs? Or is a woman less likely to air publicly an idea that isn’t quite ready yet?

The most striking thing was this: digital companies, organisations, would-be entrepreneurs and innovators can learn some important lessons from people who make physical products, or sell services. We know already that starting something successful, whether it’s for profit, for fun, or for the greater good, means understanding who your customer is, what that customer needs, and being really clear what problem you’re solving. Your sweat equity, your money, and your passion is tied up in this great new idea. It’s easy to think that you’ve thought all of the important things through everything else can be clarified later.

For a video of previous Open Mic nights click here.

More Open Mic Idea Jams are planned for 2012:

Wales: 17th April, Fat Cat, Bangor

For more details and to register visit the events section of our website.

We are having a Festival of Ideas. We are exploring different ways innovation might look in a small nation – especially the more peripheral bits of it.  We want to get a feel from those who are already practicing innovators, we want to investigate and explore how innovators are managing to do it – what drives them and how they are supported. At the end of the festival we want to ask ourselves hard questions about how we can be better at innovating.

The Festival is an event as part of the Ireland Wales Interreg project Inventorium. It is being supported by Pontio – whose physical manifestation – an arts and innovation centre being built in the centre of Bangor. Both Inventorium and Pontio are premised on the idea that innovation is not a solitary activity – it requires conversation and multiple perspectives. We bring people together who might not normally meet. Innovation, at its very least requires one conversation between someone with an idea or invention and someone who needs to use the invention. In most circumstances there needs to be some third person who has the wherewithal to drive it from and idea and deliver it to the customer. We might call them an entrepreneur – but that is something we can learn.

Inventorium also encourages Open Innovation based on the idea that innovation does not necessarily come from in-house and equally innovation may be better exploited in environments other than the place it started. The Public Sector needs to learn this.

So we are having a Festival that brings people together to be  innovative about innovation.  It is a participatory day with invited contributors and anyone else who wants to think hard and differently for a day.

We have invited some key contributors. We have people with international reputations in design thinking and enabling people to think differently. We have invited local pioneers who have made international impact through their actions. We have invited the small business  people who are not settling for the ordinary.

We will start the day with inspiration. We will hear short messages from those who are innovating in the arts, science, commerce, and technology and how Wales works for them.

We then get to the practical business of conversation for innovation. We will work on problems set by real business – and that will mean leaving the venue to visit people in their place of business. We will reflect on the process and imagine what we/they might do next.

Finally we get into a non adversarial debate. We will hear different perspectives on innovation in a small nation – what can be done, what needs to be done and what we can do.

This event is not for the faint hearted. It is for those who want to innovate or innovate more, and want the mutual support and atmosphere of being in a culture of innovation. There is more about the free to attend event on http://www.inventorium.org/events/innovation-in-a-small-nation/