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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.

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.

Adaptics is building hardware applications that will allow you to collect and visualise measurement data using pocket-sized electronic tools — even a complete measurement toolbox — that connect wirelessly to your phone. Tim Redfern tells us about their line of products for measuring voltage, current, distance, area, and even the weather.

What idea did you start with, and how did it start to evolve?

We initially planned to design an electrical measuring circuit from scratch, but it’s much more practical to use this chip that manages the whole instrument.

Multimeters are used by electricians and people who design electronics, to measure voltage and current, but there’s a burgeoning market for artists and hobbyists who work with electronics, and that would be the market we initially envisage would be interested in [our product, Electic]. It’s quite niche, but the world market for multimeters is about 75 million — it’s not a market that’s going away anytime soon.

And since we started with LaunchPad, we’ve come to think of [Adaptics] as being a family of products, rather than thinking about it as being just one thing. We started thinking about a whole phenomenon of hardware and software products.

Can you describe what you mean by hardware apps?

We’re thinking about them as hardware apps because they’re products that have both a hardware and a software component.

It connects to your device via bluetooth and lets you make measurements. The advantage of it is that the kind of user interface you can make on a smartphone, and the features you can provide using the smartphone are much more advanced than the low-end multimeters. You can buy a basic multimeter for 20 euro, but with the smartphone, you can record the information, have a much more sophisticated interface, and save the information.

Higher end meters that do graphing can cost about 500 euro, but we’ll be able to offer features that are on a higher end at a lower price, and a lot more portable.

What else are you working on?
We started focusing on another measuring device that has wider appeal. It’s a sensor accessory that uses a laser to measure distance, and would have another couple of related sensors that will also have what’s called an inclinometer, which is like a spirit level. It will have a measuring wheel, which can be used like a tape measure to measure around curved things, or say, a path on a map. It can do things like measure area and volume.

We call it Constructic, and our initial research shows that loads of people will use it. We’re also hoping to keep them all below a hundred euro.

 

Tell us more about your approach

There’s never been an app that had a manual — the whole philosophy demands that everything has to be self-explanatory. And we want to make these products from that starting point, to blur the distinction between software on the screen and the accessory it works with.

The instructions for using it will be on the screen of the app, and you’ll be able to download it for free and preview it. Obviously you can’t do anything without the hardware, but the app will be a strong business lever for it — you can make the purchase inside the app.

Eventually we will be able to offer different versions of the software, once you’ve bought the hardware, and it will be more specific about what you’re using it for.

What was your engagement with Inventorium like?

I’d been to quite a few Inventorium events and was enjoying the discussions about devising ideas for tech startups and pitching them. It’s a different way of thinking about things, and I hadn’t had that background. I’ve been involved in creative industries and media, but the idea of actually making things and selling them is quite alien.

How did the team form?

On the round of LaunchPad 4, I was having a few chats with Jack, whom I worked with for Playhouse — a large-scale media project where we turned [Dublin’s] Liberty Hall into a big display — and a few other things. We thought it would be interesting to do something, and this was based somewhere in the centre of our interests, knowledge and abilities.

I’d been more involved in the electronics and low-level programming. Jack’s been more involved in hardware and physical design, and [fellow co-founder] Johnny, is focused on user interface and user experience design. Patrice is Johnny’s sister, and has been advising us on marketing and financial things.

It’s hard to start a business with a bunch of creative people. It would have been easier if we had someone to just take on the business end.

Where is the business now?

We’re working with a product designer who is hopefully going to come on board. We have to look closer, and look at the costs of getting into the small-scale manufacture of a prototype range. Then we’ll put them in front of people who will review them. Once we get funding together for the physical prototypes, it probably be a 3-to-4 month process to produce them.

And what else is on the horizon?

The third one, Meteotic, is the idea of a weather sensor, a mini weather station. It’s a wind speed measurer and thermometer, and measures moistures in the atmosphere. The idea would be that you could crowdsource the weather through it, mainly for outdoor activities. And we’re talking about one that’s even simpler and more mainstream, which is basically a scales for measuring weight, and it would tie in with recipe wizards. It would be a really neat, featureless cylindrical disc that you sit things on and it measures things for you. We’re quite excited for it.

This weekend the 870-mile Wales Coast Path (WCP) opens, a walkable route that stretches all the way from Chepstow to Saltney, Chester. Combined with the existing Offa’s Dyke Path, Wales will become the only place in the world where it’s both theoretically and practically possible to circumnavigate an entire country on foot.

Pembrokeshire or Shangri La?

What Wales lacks in ‘Land of Milk and Honey’ weather it more than makes up for with scenery, activities, coastal access, and natural and cultural heritage — not to mention actual milk and honey. That’s why last year the WCP was the #1 travel pick for Lonely Planet’s Best in Travel 2012, beating Borneo, Sicily, Arunachel Pradesh (described as a modern Shangri-La), and six other contenders for the top spot.

From the rugged cliffs of Pembrokeshire to the geologically unique landscape of Anglesey, dolphin-spotting in New Quay and heritage from the prehistoric to the industrial, any project of this scale brings a whole series of challenges and opportunities. That’s why GeoVation, the innovation arm of the Ordnance Survey has included the path and the communities along it in its 2012 GeoVation Challenge.

The GeoVation Challenge

In the past few years, the OS has been opening up its data, making it easier and more exciting for people with great ideas to use spatial data to make those concepts into reality. The GeoVation challenges offer £125,000 worth of prizes to help develop the best ideas that use geography and geolocation.

At Challenge-specific pow wows, GeoVation looked at some of the problem areas that arise with the new path, and at how it will redefine some of the long-standing questions and challenges for the relevant communities.

For example, we can’t change the wet Welsh weather, but we can find ways to make tourism less seasonal, by providing more wet-weather activities. There are increased (and existing) needs for accommodation, toilet facilities, transport and parking, and mobile and internet connectivity. Addressing these needs is not only helpful for visitors but provides engagement opportunities for communities, as well as potential business opportunities.

Inventorium and GeoVation

GeoVation and Inventorium were brought together by our shared dedication to open innovation and collaboration.

Inventorium held a workshop on March 1st, where we brought together stakeholders to generate and shape ideas that could be uploaded to the GeoVation Challenge website. We wanted to engage with tourism providers, local authorities, accommodation providers, outdoor activity groups, local organisations and voluntary bodies, to encourage fruitful collaborations that might not otherwise have happened.

There were 22 participants, and ideas were submitted to the Challenge website, along with other idea submissions from around the UK. We are waiting to hear the winners of the challenge who will go forward to the GeoVation Bootcamp on June 22nd and 23rd, where the concepts will begin to take shape as potentially viable commercial prospects. The winners of the challenge will be announced in early July. The top prize money is £40,000, with two further prizes and a community prize of £1,000 and we’ll keep you posted.

The best GeoVation Challenge ideas will win big prizes, but when they’re implemented, they’ll mean everyone wins.

“The original architects of the Internet got the big things right. By making the network open, they enabled the greatest exchange of ideas in history. By making the Internet scalable, they enabled explosive innovation in the infrastructure.” Tom Tauke, Verizon Executive Vice President of Public Affairs, Policy, Google Public Policy Blog

With those words, Tom Tauke reminded his audience to continue to let loose the tigers of openness and co-operation against limiting closed models of innovation and development. Open Innovation (OI) continues this movement and is one of the key processes underlying Inventorium.

OI starts from the idea that innovation is not a solitary activity. Organisations and individuals should use external as well as internal ideas, and internal and external paths to market, as they seek to advance their technology and processes. Henry Chesborough, Director for the Center of Open Innovation coined the phrase in his book: “Open Innovation: The New Imperative for Creating and Profiting from Technology.”

The key characteristics of OI revolve around creating collaborative and convergent business linkages, opening up new channels to market, finding and exploiting new and emerging technologies as solutions to problems, accelerating and improving internal and external R&D connections, and improving exploitation of existing Intellectual Property.

The Chesborough model is illustrated here:

The vehicle in Ireland and Wales for optimising these OI characteristics is Inventorium. We bring together people with opportunities and needs, digital solutions and know-how to create new products, systems and services.

Large corporate structures, particularly internationals, have departments, subsidiaries and comparatively massive budgets to pursue and develop new products and services internally, within a possessive paradigm (closed innovation). This is not possible for individuals and SMEs. Yet it is individuals and SMEs who are inherently more innovative, focused and fleeter of foot in assessing risk – and who have greatest difficulty in funding, marketing and distributing their ideas and technologies.

The Inventorium vision is one which draws on the growing expertise of our technologically orientated small enterprises and the expertise in our universities to fulfill the need and demand for innovation within our public sector and small or start-up enterprises.

The market for knowledge is growing as fast as technological developments can support it. The increasing availability of skilled technicians and “ideas merchants” and the growth of the venture capital market, coupled with increasing capability and logistic prowess of external suppliers and external options for good ideas waiting to be activated, plus the potential for extraordinary rewards, are all accelerating the new market for knowledge. If businesses or individuals do not use their knowledge, someone else will.

A critical point for Inventorium is engaging existing entrepreneurs and nascent new entrepreneurs, while encouraging creative people, sector specialists, technologists, academics, undergraduates and research students into the process.

Inventorium thus provides the framework in which trusted relationships are built and ideas carefully nurtured. Outcomes should be a revenue stream for some participants, or better service delivery for others. A result orientation is essential for success and satisfaction for all participants. Out of such successes grow future ideas and collaborative projects.

This is a transition period. As people come to understand and trust the power of OI when managed by an intermediary ‘honest broker’ organisation such as Inventorium, so the concept of openness for idea growth will spread. It will become more embedded in corporate culture and success beyond technology. We would call that a “win win” for everyone.

Following our Green Symposium last October which was held in association with the Green Innovation and Future Technologies (GIFT) Project, we would like to draw your attention the Launch of their new Green Innovation Network. The launch will take place on the 2nd May in Bangor, details are given below as well as links to a survey to help them shape future events.

Green Innovation Network/Rhwydwaith Arloesi Gwyrdd 

Green Business Breakfast Launch

Enjoy breakfast and be inspired at our first Green Business Breakfast in Bangor on Wed 2^nd May, (07:45 – 10:15).  Key speakers include Andy Middleton, founder of the ‘Do Lectures’ and carbon neutral adventure company, TYF, plus award winning construction company Wates. A FREE ‘Save Money, Reduce Waste’ workshop for businesses follows and we’re even providing lunch. Stay for all or part of the morning and contact Sue Francis at s.francis@bangor.ac.uk to find out more or book your place.

Green Innovation Network Survey

Help us shape our future events and training by completing our short (less than 10 mins, honest!) survey, for which you could win a delicious food hamper from Welsh gift company, Bodlon. Click here -  https://www.survey.bris.ac.uk/bangor/gins – before Friday 13^th April. Go on, you know you want to!

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Lansio Brecwast Busnes Gwyrdd

Mwynhewch frecwast a chael eich ysbrydoli yn y cyntaf o’n Brecwastau Busnes Gwyrdd ym Mangor ddydd Mercher 2 Mai (07:45 – 10:15).  Bydd y prif siaradwyr yn cynnwys Andy Middleton, sefydlydd y ‘Do Lectures’ a’r cwmni antur carbon niwtral, TYF, yn ogystal â’r cwmni adeiladu Wates.   I ddilyn ceir gweithdy AM DDIM i fusnesau ar ‘Arbed Arian, Lleihau Gwastraff’, ac rydym hyd yn oed yn darparu cinio.  Arhoswch am y bore i gyd, neu ran ohono, a chysylltwch â Sue Francis yn s.francis@bangor.ac.uk i gael gwybod mwy neu i archebu eich lle.

Arolwg Rhwydwaith Arloesi Gwyrdd

Helpwch ni i gynllunio at ddigwyddiadau a hyfforddiant yn y dyfodol drwy lenwi ein holiadur byr (fel gymer lai na 10 munud, wir yr!), ac fe allech ennill basged fwyd hyfryd gan y cwmni Cymreig, Bodlon.   Cliciwch yma – https://www.survey.bris.ac.uk/bangor/arag – cyn dydd Gwener 13 Ebrill. Bwriwch iddi, rydych yn gwybod eich bod eisiau gwneud hynny!

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 …

As we build up to next months Inventorium ‘Digital Culture‘ event I read a report on the BBC news over the weekend and thought is gave some surprising statics when it comes to children and culture.

The report is based on a study which claims that millions of British children are “culture starved” as they have never been to an art gallery, theatre or museum.

When they looked into the reasons a quarter of parents said they could not afford to visit attractions with 28% saying they did not have the time and 18% believed their child was “too young for culture”.

When asked what cultural activities their children had participated in, the most popular was learning an instrument (39%), with ballet (24%), painting (23%) and singing in a choir (22%) the next most popular activities.

Emma Gray, from Marketing Birmingham, which runs the Visit Birmingham campaign, said it was important for all generations to embrace cultural activity.

“Culture can take many kinds of forms and it’s essential our children are encouraged to get involved with this at any early age,” she said.

“A few trips during the year to museums, landmarks or even cultural festivals will prove to be memorable, informative and fun occasions for youngsters.”

During the workshop on the 27th March we hope to bring a diverse group of people together to discuss problems such as this in the culture sector and then develop solutions to these problems leading to new services and even new businesses. Find out more here.

Read the full article here.

Dragon Run 1027 is a 1027 mile, circumnavigation of Wales by Arry and Guy over 45 days.

The route will consist of 2 National Trails, primarily the Wales Coast Path that is due to officially open on 5th May and The Offa’s Dyke path, which runs the length of the Wales/England border. This presents many challenges not just with stamina and endurance but coping with various terrains, wind and weather conditions. It is by no means a flat easy run and is along varying elevations of coastal paths, tracks and minor roads.

This admirable pair will commence Dragon Run 1027 outside the Senedd Building in Cardiff on Friday 6th April and will tackle the run in a clockwise direction. Fundraising collections will be held at most of the stopping points along the route and any support is appreciated. To find out how you can help click here.

The Smarter City is undoubtedly one of the big issues of the next decade. The ability to integrate data to provide better service to the workers, residents and visitors to a city has potential to generate new and exciting business opportunities. It is a playing field for fresh thinking for both big players and the small start-up in digital business. Read More …