If you were considering 'buying' innovation in or encouraging your own team to be a little more innovative, you'd find it hard to pull together a PowerPoint presentation of any length from the case studies, charts or images available from public and private online sources. When we went searching for role models of innovation, once again Creative Britain has been shown to be surely lacking.
The Design Council has, in it's defence, a fair sample of case studies. Design Weekregularly announces creatively-led innovations through it's daily news service. Government departments and other agencies (NESTA,the Technology Strategy Board , the Department of Innovation, Universities and Skills {DIUS} and the NESTA project site 'Innovation Index' all talk abstractly about innovation but, as the Innovation Index blog discusses, just what we mean by innovation is open to wide interpretation.
What's missing about almost all of these websites is any sense of either (a) the business imperative of creativity and innovation or (b) in what shape or form do we find true innovation? At one end of the scale, the Design Council and Design Week sites talk up the role of design and creativity with latest project news whilst at the other almost every Government department claims to know something about innovation.Somewhere in the middle, we're missing some pretty compelling stories of innovation in action in the UK economy.
Now, I'm definitely not suggesting for one minute that we can summarize innovation and design in easy-to-chew packages, but consider for a moment one episode of Dragon's Den. Like it or loathe it, it gives us a very revealing snapshot of a world where the world of design and creativity meets the world of business. Entrepreneur wanna-be's present innovations that are often ill-informed, romantic or plainly desperate whilst the Dragon's do some simple maths on just how viable the proposition is.
Where are the successful ones now? Do they feature on NESTA's site? How many great products and services utilising funds from the Technology Strategy Board are lauded on Government websites in the same vain as those to be found on the BBC Dragon's Den site?
This could be one of the ambitions of the Smarta initiative (see below), but in the meantime, I'd like to hear from you on innovations you've been involved with that better demonstrate creative and innovative Britain. Not another packaging makeover that you'll see in Design Week. Not another prosaic games-industry so-called 'innovation' from NESTA that really won't see the light of day. No. Not for us. We want real innovations of the kind that James Dyson would build in the Far East.
Tell us about your innovations. And we'll keep you posted on some of ours.
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( 3 / 417 )We came across this little gem today.
http://www.smarta.com/Default.aspx
Smarta is designed for business entrepreneurs who want to join a support network in getting their ideas out there. The service launches in November 2008, but in the meantime there are some useful testimonials and a blog.
With the economy in such dire straights and with analysts suggesting that the worse is yet to come, this is a brave move from the Brightstation Foundation. Dan Wagner is a serial entrepreneur. I met him a long while ago in his MAID and Dialog days when he had an office near the Cutty Sark in London. Here, its Shaa Wasmund, one of his partners, who has developed this social enterprise. Quite where it’s heading is unclear, but at the very least Wagner et al will be able to trawl the website for attractive new start-ups ripe for investment through the Brightstation venture fund.
We’ll keep an eye on this one.
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