jbsh

Really good turn out at this morning’s Open Coffee with plenty of new faces and old friends. Sam Machin and Tom O’Neil both back after recent breaks, Sam even took time out from his Honeymoon to find an incubation centre in Dublin next to the Guinness factory so he could report back to us, that’s dedication (or at least that’s what he told us, mind you he also showed up with a brand new Acer sub-notebook).

New faces included Simon Jacobson, Joel, Melissa Kidd and Peter Livingstone.

Craig and I had a chance to catch up and agree some ideas to push Carrotmob Bristol forward a bit more and he also took the opportunity to show their latest mobile video project with Anglia Ruskin university providing a video map of the campus.

Peter, Tom, Matt Anderson and I had a good catch up on business confidence from our various perspectives. While a couple of industries have seen a down turn (or at least a hesitation) there are still plenty of growing technology businesses and great opportunities out there.

All of which bodes well for those starting and growing their businesses, and for those of us supporting them.

Apologies to those that I didn’t get to talk to but I’m greatly heartened that more people are turning up than I can network with in 90min (which is saying something). Thanks to everyone for supporting Open Coffee and look forward to seeing you all (and your colleagues, business partners, etc) at the next Open Coffee on 12 August.

Cheers

John

Well a lot has been happening and there are a couple of conversation threads so I thought I’d put up a quick ’story so far…’

Craig Hellen (Pod Chains) brought up Carrotmob at the OpenCoffee meeting on 1 July. We were talking about Seedcamp and various ideas for supporting innovative new businesses across the South West. Craig kind of lobbed Carrotmob in as a thought grenade and since none of us had heard of it it kind of fizzled out until later that evening when I’d had a chance to see the video and twittered it.

Craig and I swapped a couple of DM’s but everything pretty much went quiet until he shared an email he’d just received from Brent at Carrotmob saying what a great thing it’d be to see a Carrotmob campaign in Bristol. That got us going again and I dropped Kevin O’Malley a note at Connecting Bristol to drum up some more interest from the wider readership that he gets. I also got in touch with Bristol City Council as they organise the Harbour Festival and we’d (Craig and I) thought that’d be a great event to put Carrotmob alongside.

Following Kevin’s post and another twitter post lots of folks responded (@Z303, @mikedunn, @emargee, @PeteJ, @wrestlevania, & @bluerocket) so we set up a room in Friendfeed to discuss and share. Then Jacob Park from Carrotmob got in touch and Zoe and I swapped a couple emails with him and that lead to the suggestion that we (Bristol) might work with Carrotmob testing an application to help folks put together their own Carrotmob’s.

Which is all really cool!

The drawback is their application probably won’t be public until October, and it’s now only 10 days to the Harbour Festival (9 by the time I post this).

All of which means we’re still really keen to see Carrotmob come to Bristol, and we’re going to be helping Brent & Jacob specify and test their application, and we’re going to keep building the momentum here ready for a (probable) Halloween launch!

Right now the best way to register support is probably to join the Friendfeed group and/or subscribe to this blog. That way we’ll know you’re specifically interested in Carrotmob rather than my general ramblings, and you’ll find out more information as it becomes available. You can also leave suggestions in the comments for other groups to partner up with to make Carrotmob Bristol really take off.

Also, if anyone wants to take the lead in organising the Bristol Campaign, let us know and head over to the Carrotmob sign up page.

Happy mobbing

Carrotmob Makes It Rain from carrotmob on Vimeo.

This morning’s Open Coffee had some visitors from the research community asking about user generated innovations in the field of intelligent transport systems. Prof Glynn Lyonns and Dr’s Juliet Jain and Tilly Line are leading the activity to better understand this bottom up innovation driver in an industry that is dominated by top-down incrementalism.

The discussions quickly wheeled around forms of innovation, the challenges facing government in supporting innovations, and the competing interests after the funding that the Technology Strategy Board is making available. Nick Sturge (SetSquared) was on hand to provide a wider city and business perspective and the entrepreneur / innovators started coming up with both ideas and examples that I’m sure will keep Glynn, Juliet at Tilly busy for several weeks to come.

It was great to also welcome Sam Tipper from Gloucestershire who was pointed at OpenCoffee by Chris and got the details via chatting with Sam Harding via the GTalk widget on this website; and Robin from Bath who’s providing media businesses with growth and development consultancy support (and launching a business start up; website pending).

OpenCoffee will be running through the summer, every other Tues from about 8.30 in Starbucks on Park St (the next few are on 29 July, 12 & 26 Aug). Contact me at jwgbradford@gmail.com to be added to the email reminder list and/or follow OpenCoffeeBR1 on Twitter for reminders and nudges.

Uploaded on June 26,
2008 by Phil Hawksworth

Yesterday was spent in Manchester at the NESTA launch of their latest report (pdf not live yet) into innovation in the Creative Industries.

From a broad reading of the report, it seems to largely reflect last year’s report that much innovation in industry isn’t recorded in official statistics rather than not taking place. The Creative Industries face a further double whammy since very small and micro companies (under 10 employees) are excluded from the official returns, as are many of the SIC codes that cover the sector. Prof’s Ian Miles and Lawrence Green recognise that the existing surveys are a potential burden that the micro companies could probably do without, except that without the evidence base there won’t be policy and incentives from central Government.

This could be a valuable role for places like the Pervasive Media Studio and Universities? Aggregating and presenting an industry perspective on behalf of the micro business communities?

Most of the findings from the case study interviews could apply across pretty much any sector. Customers are more sophisticated, networked, discriminating and active. Not sure there are many industries where that isn’t the case. One point of note was a comment from the video games industry (one of the 4 sub-sector foci) for novel titles, sophistication and interfaces - wonder how that translates to the explosion in casual & mobile gaming, Kongregate, Gameloft, the Wii etc?

One aspect that might be unique was the reported lack of innovation management. Some of this is undoubtedly down to the speed of change and comparative size of companies, but may also be down to a culture of perpetual beta. Many of the associated issues that have been reported could be related to company size. How many firms under 10 employees have a dedicated R&D budget, or a formal knowledge management system whatever industry they’re in?

How about providing/managing a framework for Open Innovation as a role for HE in the creative sector?

Uploaded on July 23, 2006 by AB

There was a distinct whiff of entrepreneurial planning (if such a thing isn’t an oxymoron) at yesterday’s Open Coffee. The trigger was the launch of this year’s Seedcamp and the ensuing conversation about how we could encourage local start-ups to apply.

Things quickly moved on to running something in Bristol to encourage regional entrepreneurialism. Drawing on Seedcamp, Mashed, etc the idea was to give people an outcome orientated brief (i.e. build something that lets me communicate to a group) and then let folks come up with their own solutions. Critically, each idea would be judged not just on it’s technical/interestingness merits, but also on the marketing/presentation of the idea and on the business case. It sounded like more than a weekend event since we wanted to provide people with lots of plenary events and workshops to help round out ideas. Having said that we quickly came up with a whole bunch of people in the area that would have the relevant expertise to cover pretty much everything.

Sam Machin was fresh back from Mashed08 where the range and variety was outstanding (and the geekiness unsurpassed), but he thought there was a need for a longer event where the wider aspects of building a viable application could be rapidly prototyped. Clare was also along from the Pervasive Media Studio and we bounced a few ideas around on how this could be done and who would be instrumental. There was also a recognition that we needed to include Falmouth, Plymouth, Bournemouth and benefit from the many hotspots across the region.

Lots more to follow I’m sure!

Apologies to the folks on the other side of the room, there was plenty of intense discussion going on but I didn’t get over to join in. Hopefully we’ll hear what that led to shortly.