The SEE project is a network of eleven partners in Europe engaging with regional and national government to integrate design into policy, particularly innovation policy. The project is co-financed by the European Regional Development Fund through the INTERREG IVC programme.

This conference is the project’s final event and aims to provide delegates with an overview of design’s role in innovation, recent design policy developments in Europe, examples of successful design policies and promotion programmes. The programme will be opened by Polish MEP, Jan Olbrycht with reflections on design as part of the Europe 2020 strategy.

Highlights from the conference include:

Design as part of innovation policy in a global context

Gavin Cawood / Operations Director, Design Wales

Making design policy happen in Denmark: the journey since 1997

Anders Byriel / CEO of Kvadrat, Chairman, Danish Design Council

Innovate and integrate: Design support for companies in New Zealand

Judith Thompson / Director, Better by Design

Design policy in practice: innovative strategies for local authorities in Flanders

Patrick Janssens / Mayor of Antwerp

Jan Van Alsenoy / Association of Flemish Cities and Municipalities

Design as a Government capability

Bryan Boyer / Strategic Design Lead, SITRA – the Finnish Innovation Fund

EU Design and Innovation Initiative: What’s next for design in Europe?

Christine Simon / European Commission DG Enterprise and Industry.

Further information can be found on http://www.seeproject.org/.

Whether you call it user-centred, people-centred, or human-centred design, those organisations that are closest to their customers are the ones that succeed in creating successful products and services. Come learn practical tools to apply design thinking in your own business at two upcoming mini-workshops organised by Meet for Real and delivered by Justin Knecht of the Centre for Design Innovation.

Register for the 10th of October in Cork, or the 17th of October in Galway.

What: Building Technology Hubs in Regional Locations
Who: Enterprise Ireland’s Applied Research Centres (AREs)
Venue: National Maritime College of Ireland (NMCI), Ringaskiddy, Cork
When: Wednesday 30th September 2009 at 10am
Enterprise Ireland would like to invite you to attend Innovating for Regional Industry, a showcase for the Regional ARE Centres in the Institutes of Technology outlining their research and support for Irish industry. The ARE Centres have established an excellent track record in increasing their capacity to engage in R&D and have enabled over 100 companies to develop new products and processes to gain a competitive edge, increase sales and achieve export growth.

Download the agenda

This past week I attended the first of four thematic workshops as part of the Sharing Experience Europe (SEE) Interreg IVC project. Ireland is one of eleven European partners as well as one of five members of the Policy Recommendation Research Group. After each of the four thematic workshops, a research group partner is responsible for the publication of policy recommendations to be distributed to policy makers and governments. The first will be out in September on “integrating creativity and design into regional innovation policy.”

The first day in Lyon featured guest speakers from several countries, including Greg Coyle of the Applied Innovation Group of Enterprise Ireland. On the second day everyone got down to serious work as each of the eleven partners presented “pecha kucha” presentations on the state of design and innovation policy in their own countries (Ireland, PPT, 1.14MB). This led to a mapping exercise of current activities. We then turned our attention to identifying the opportunities and barriers of integrating creativity and design into regional innovation policy, both from the standpoint of design support bodies and policy makers.

One of the unique features of the SEE project, is each partner is encouraged to bring a policy maker to participate in the workshops. This will continue through the length of the programme.

We ended the second day by drawing a collective response to the EU public consultation on “Design as a driver of user-centred innovation.” The consultation is still accepting replies from both individuals and organisations until the end of this week, Friday, June 26. Do take the time to respond. By putting an EU recommendation in place, Member States will have an obligation to consider the role of design in not only innovation policy, but stand-alone design policy, or integration into other EU policy directives.

I’m a self-admitted policy skeptic; much more interested in action-based programmes. However, we are taking a user-centred approach in including policy makers in the workshops, as well as doing research on how to draft effective recommendations for our target-audience as outcomes.

Paul Hughes of Orientation Lab, an initiative of Lava Design, Netherlands and Reza Abedini will conduct a day long workshop that will focus on how to use design to address issues or audiences that go beyond local and conventional visual frames of reference. The purpose of this workshop is to improve participants’ skills in thinking about design work produced for contemporary diverse communities and organisations. It will be of interest to organisations targeted at diverse audiences, NGOs, heads of communication who commission design, graphic designers, visual arts/design academics.

27th May, NCAD Gallery, Thomas Street, Dublin, 10 – 4pm
The cost of the workshop is €80 including lunch
To book, contact ICAD, elaine@icad.ie

May 18: ‘Enterprise Information Architecture’ – Louis Rosenfeld
May 19: ‘Commercial Ethnography’- James Kalbach
May 20: ‘Personas and Mental Models’ – James Kalbach

Early bird pricing is available until April 2, 2009. Space is limited.

For the detailed program of the workshops, please visit www.uxworkshops.com or have a look at http://tinyurl.com/7fhlf5

Location of the workshops:
EMPIRE RIVERSIDE HOTEL
Bernhard-Nocht-Straße 97
D-20359 Hamburg
www.empire-riverside.de

Date: 25 March 2009
Time: 8:30
Location: Crowne Plaza, Northwood, Santry, Dublin 9

The benefit of this half day seminar focuses on how to create an innovative culture within your organization, and on the recently recognized role of standardization in innovation. We are all aware how important innovation is in the current climate – this timely seminar provides an opportunity to adopt a standardized approach to continuous innovation.

Key note speakers explore how standards offer innovators a level playing field, facilitating competition and interoperability between new and existing products, services and processes.

Each participant will receive a FREE copy of the NSAI ‘Guide to Good Practice in Innovation and Products Development Processes’ due to be launched at the seminar.

Want to know more, go to www.nsai.ie to review the full seminar details or you can call Eoin McCabe, telephone +353 (0) 807 3824.

The Event brought together over 200 attendees from different backgrounds but most of them  having a common goal for the day: gathering information about starting up a business.

In my opinion the event was a success as it covered everything from Licensing Agreements to HR, from Founding to PR, from research to product management to increase profitability. I firmly believe that even though the information was presented at a high level there wasn’t one person present that didn’t learn something new on the day. I know I returned with pages of notes.

One of the best presentations I attended, even though it is pretty hard to differentiate as they were all really good, was ‘Are you too nice for your own good? The dangers of bad HR.’

Sheena Clohessy’s message to all the starting companies was: ‘keep the HR management in your own hands’. She explained that a wrong choice of an employee will cost you over 60% of his yearly wage.

The 3 rules of HR that Sheena underlined are:

• Rule1 – Selection:
  • getting into your company needs to be a challenge. When someone comes for an interview don’t be afraid to ask them the tough questions like: ‘what is your biggest failure?’ or ‘What is the best/worst team you worked in?’
  • have a job description
  • do a reference check BEFORE hiring the person
  • use the 6 month probation period
  • Ask yourself these 3 questions:
    • Can they do it? = Their Ability
    • Will they do it? = Their Motivation
    • Will they fit in? = Their Attitude
• Rule2 – Fair Procedures:
  • When you hire someone you have to tell them how they can get fired – give them the reasons for dismissal
  • Have a disciplinary procedure
  • Get everything in writing – document everything
  • Don’t be overly tolerant
  • Be consistent
• Rule3 – Decide to lead:
  • Motivate people – the two key words here are ‘Achievement’ and ‘Recognition’

Another interesting and useful talk was Anton Mannering’s presentation about ‘The Power of Networking’.

Here are some of the points he addressed and that I added to my ‘Keep in Mind’ list:

- Use peoples’ names - I really think this, depending of your culture, might be easy or hard to get used to. Coming to Ireland from Romania, I always thought it was an Irish thing but I found out that there is more to it. By using a person’s name in the conversation you give them recognition; you are acknowledging them; and you show them that they are important to you.

- Listen – the other day I heard a story about the wise old owl living in an oak. The more he saw, the less he spoke. The less he spoke, the more he heard.

- Ask Questions – by asking questions you show interest and you also learn a lot.

- Nobody is a nobody – give your time to everybody. I could associate this to ‘Don’t judge a book by its cover’

- Empower the others – share your knowledge! A friend of mine used this in a presentation also. She said that you have to go through life with one hand up and one hand down. You will find people in life that will be willing to help you and pull you up, genuine people like Anton for example; but don’t forget about the people behind you also, and give them a hand when they will need it.

- And finally, Focus on making Connections and not Sales.

There were a lot of other informative and eye opening presentations at this event, like Siofra Flood’s presentation about ‘What to put in the small print – top tips for end user licensing’ or ‘PR on a shoestring’ by Pat Phelan. Unfortunately I can’t cover them all here but I have good news. They were all recorded and they will be soon made available on the BizSpark website. I hope you’ll enjoy them as much as I did.

The day-long event is scheduled to run on Tuesday, February 24th, in the Radisson SAS Royal Hotel in Dublin’s city centre. Entrance is free of charge.

The aim of the event is to provide business guidance for Start-ups and anyone in Ireland or Northern Ireland who thinks they might like to start-up a tech company. Topics will include stories from experienced Irish entrepreneurs, and practical advice from individuals and organisations who have been working with the local Tech Start-up community over the past few years.

If you are interested in the event you can register and find more information here.