A few weeks ago I was in India for the Global Innovation Forum. India has huge ambitions in innovation, stretching from launching satellites to village-level sanitation projects.
We have just held a 'Feast of Innovation Workshops' at City University where a unique collection of workshop leaders, each of four in turn leading a workshop on the same stage of innovation process, demonstrated the need to adapt the style of your workshop to its theme.
The projects all came together at a workshop event in the Autumn which was focused around learning. You can see some photos of the day below; it took place in Birmingham at Fazeley studios which was a great space to work in as it gave us plenty of room to work in small groups as well as sharing news and socialising over tea breaks.
What do the marine chronometer, baked beans and the private spaceflight industry have in common? They were all developed or accelerated in response to challenge prizes.
NESTA welcomes the recently announced seed enterprise investment scheme (SEIS)
In mid-November NESTA again helped host Silicon Valley Comes to the UK, with a flood of activities from appathons for students to design new apps for public services, to high profile events with Valley luminaries such as Reid Hoffman.
Next Gen, the independent review of the skills needs of the video games and VFX industries led by Ian Livingstone and Alex Hope, and produced with NESTA, made a total of 20 recommendations for government, industry and educators.
Could crowdfunding be a long-term source of capital for those seeking to finance social, creative or business ventures?
Venture capital has much to be proud of. In the past fifty years, it has helped build a host of great companies, from Intel and Genentech to Facebook and Google.
As one of the projects to benefit from funding through NESTA's Age Unlimited programme, we embarked on a journey of project development which has been both uplifting and enlightening.
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