Innovation Edge 2008

May 26, 2008 | Leave a Comment

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Last week I headed over to NESTA’s Innovation Edge conference at the Royal Festival Hall.  I didn’t actually know too much about NESTA before I signed up to the event however they invest in early stage companies who put innovation at the forefront of their offering.  The day was made up of talks in the morning and then breaking out into smaller seminars during the afternoon.  The morning talks were actually very inspirational with some great speakers including Tim Berners-Lee.  Tim discussed his reasoning’s behind making the World Wide Web open source by giving it all away for free and managed to say the best quote of the day when he described the frustrations he experienced of sharing information when new colleagues were brought on board “that’s why I invented the Web”….golden!

After Tim, Sir Bob Geldof came on stage and gave a very heartfelt and honest account of what inspired him to make it when he was living in poverty in Ireland.  The main take out of the day that stuck in my mind came from Sir Bob who pointed out that as a nation we have become so engrossed in watching people fail that we have forgotten what we are trying to achieve.  We should celebrate trying and not be afraid to fail.

After Sir Bob, The PM Gordon Brown came on stage to give a 15 min talk on the need to develop and support creative talents within the UK and how the government will support innovation within the UK which was pretty good.   The afternoon seminars however, were a bit of a let down.  I think there was a general feeling that innovation was not at the heart of most of the seminars which I found to be particularly true to one that I attended solely to hear Giles Andrews (founder of Zopa) talk about the company and what they are doing to develop their offering.  Unfortunately the panel seldom let him actually speak and after loosing interest I returned to the main hall to speak with Six to Start.

All in all Innovation Edge was great and for those who couldn’t attend, NESTA have put all the talks on the site which you can view here.

Posted by Jamie Coomber | Filed Under Blog, Conference, Events, Innovation, Technology, Video