On another note, we have been on the receiving end of some recent SWRDA initiatives to improve and support creative industries. These have been a massive help to us in terms of mentoring and advice in areas where we would not have thought to pay for. We would wholly back any initiative to provide this to more up and coming creative companies, but perhaps this is where money is going in the funding restructure

Does anyone have details of what is intended to be funded instead of Bristol Media and 0117?

Ideally innovative creative businesses would be much better at creating a case for support. However small innovative businesses are ill-equipped to do this, and need to spend time directly on their product, service and customers. I guess it’s a chicken and egg problem. It looks like classic market failure to me (as in net benefits could be realised against an investment, but they can’t be produced by capitalist market forces alone).

Specifically compounding this are the issues I’ve outlined around inter-agency politics, and the issue you identified around government targets, which seems to result in a message of ‘no help here’ when businesses do invest in lobbying.

Keen to identify a way in which the schemes can be used to support your aims and ambitions.

Most innovation funds do go to engineering based projects. This is partly due to being a tangible project but it is also becuase the enginneering busineses (mainly aerospace) are well equiped to lobbying government and invest time and money to do so.

@Matt – yes, you have a point. The tangibility is interesting in that genetics for example without knowing anything about it, if i said I was “researching the feasibility of isolating a cancer gene, can you help me?” – you would instantly get a grasp of what I/we were about – the internet creative industries don’t have this tangibility and neither is it frankly that innovative – when you see these “bedroom geneticists” doing this stuff at home with £1000 worth of equipment you see that it’s these guys that are the new hackers – the new geeks… The real innovators…

@Andy – it’s not that I disagree with the basic premise – the government should make idea flow and fruition easier, they should spend their money more efficiently – it’s that we all (me included) always expect this help but tend not do too much ourselves. We are all in a position to help each other, stimulate our own and others growth and then maybe the government might actually see this blip on the radar. Maybe.

We have a new thing we are doing with our clients where we recommend them to each other, three at a time and hopefully they will do the same – it’s not a big deal but it’s a seed of community and that’s the kind of stuff I want to see in the bigger picture.

btw Cash handouts may suck – but i’d still like one please.

Interesting discussion.

cheers,

Andy

I thought that too, but thinking about it again… are they really tangible? I mean genetics… is that more tangible and understandable than our own industry?

Some guy (said he was a former journalist) on the train last night overheard convo between myself and colleagues and came over and said: ‘I really have no idea what you are talking about. I think of myself as a smart articulate guy, but just don’t understand the words you are saying’. We then had quite a long discussion about what sort of concepts someone looking from the outside needs to grasp and understand about (in this case) IT in general.

It was an interesting talk, and no doubt if I overheard to geneticists talking I would be in the same situation.

Although I fundamentally disagree with some of it!

I don’t particularly want support from the government. I just don’t want them to make things hard for me and my business. And actually a cash payout might be nice… Generally they don’t get what we do and by the time they do; we’ve moved on…

“Too often the sense is that we are a ’supplier’ being ‘commissioned’ to ‘deliver outcomes’.”

This is a great quote – and frankly that’s generally exactly what we are… I am no customer of any government agency despite giving them all my hard earned taxes (but maybe that’s your point). However as a supplier being commissioned to deliver outcomes to them you realise how slow, beaurocratic and “scared” they are… This however is changing – keep an eye on South West RDA…

You’d be amazed how many of these government departments take advice from “brand/design” agencies on the web based technology industries. It’s like taking advice from a car body shop on how to make an engine…

These agencies (like SWRDA) need new blood, more understanding – and I think that’s coming – the problem is we’ve been here for a long time watching them slowly wake up to our industries… But we are just a tiny speck – look a what they are doing to encourage new energy, genetics, biotech and pharma – these are tangible so easier to grasp form the outset… We deal in a world of voodoo of bits and bytes and ethereal messing systems that send tweets and get responses from faceless phantoms that actually tells us how great or (or shit) we are…

I think my point is (getting a bit carried away here!), these bodies are waking up slowly, it’s just a shame it’s not at the same pace as the innovators – but then would they be innovators if they weren’t miles out in front with nobody understanding what they were doing?

http://www.twitter.com/redeye

But I would welcome more ambition in
the scope of Bristol innovation beyond the technical space into the
idea generation space, innovation beyond just Digital Media. I think there is a bigger game for Bristol to play and the Bristol Media
folks could be key players
in that game.

Could Bristol be a hub for invention and idea creation – building on it’s many strengths?

As for Social Ideation’…

Social – i.e. involving lots of people of different disciplines.
Maybe face-to-face in a cluster
also connected over Web 2.0 style
social media.
Ideation – Idea+Creation.
Steve

Right, but that fat internet pipe, and the collaboration of the companies on it (ie BMEX) is a facilitator to those ideas and people there in the Watershed, right? So what if you could expand that and have more locations, companies, people connected to this network and facilitate even more?

What I am saying is that it is the role of the regional agencies to help with that facilitation, and one sure way they can do that is to help fund some of these projects that are doing this.

Bristol Media is another example of an organisation that facilitates people getting together to work on these innovative ideas, in a way that crosses all disciplines of the media sector in Bristol. But their funding is likely to be reduced this year and limited to specific project-by-project funding.

-Matt

PS. ’social ideation’ ?!

Matt – I am playing devils
advocate here in the interests
of creating some energy
and debate. With all due respect I think you still have missed my
point. I am not advocating we
all becoming climate experts.
I am advocating that Bristol
specializes in being a hub
for “INNOVATION TOOLS”. Facilitating innovation?

The question is how
do you co-create ideas that cross
boundaries? How do you do ideation?

Something that is certain in today’s complex world is that nothing fits in a neat box anymore.

You might not personally care about climate change or the other
pressing issues in the world but they
will have an impact on innovation
in every field and every future
scenario you paint.

I would love to find a forum within Bristol to think outside the box.Think more widely. Think
about thinking that is innovative.

I have been facilitating and
creating proprietary innovation
in large companies for many years.
I know methods for facilitated
thinking can and do work.

But now I think the time is
right for an Open Source Innovation Tool Box. So many of the
tools that are used by top companies to create truly innovative ideas
in a systematic way are
proprietary, e.g. such as 6 Sigma,
de Bono’s tools, and many others.

The communication tools of web 2.0,
facebook, digital media, are part
of the picture. They are
powerful tools for social networking and social enterprise.
They are not an end in themselves.

As is pointed out in Wikkinomics
(a book everyone should read I believe).
The true innovation of web 2.0
is mass collaboration and the
three counter intuitive
principles of innovation:
Openness, Sharing and Peering….

I have a long history of
working with digital media
innovation , but I do not go
to the Watershed in the evening
because they have a fat internet
pipe. I go because they provoke
me with ideas facilitated through
digital media.

The festival of ideas I believe
is a step in the right direction.

The age of digital media is
dead, the age of social ideation
is here.
Steve