Thank you Caroline Parkinson for an another inspiring day: the third Creative-Tech Gathering Scotland was another success, growing in ambition and reach with each year.
The whole day was a triumph, from the fabulous food to the great final venue at Edinburgh Futures Institute (the beautifully restored former Royal Infirmary buildings) and the attentive support staff, here are some of the speaker highlights to some to me in particular.
The first keynote was @Chris McKenna from MPC, the guys who do the animation and special effects for Life of Pi, Lion King, Mandalorian and much more, is a global player with a global workforce. Yet his talk put the creative/artist at the heart of the process: from concept art to 3D modeling, supported by software development, some of it proprietary to enable the artists to make things better, or more efficient. It was fascinating to see the behind-the-scenes of the making process. As he noted, the biggest reward is the audience reaction when all this hard work pays off.
The Perthshire Box Office was a different story; providing solutions for and by local people and supporting the development of collaborative networks at a local level. Andrew Girvan detailed how his company Scottie developed a tailor made platform by visionary Perth Theatre and Concert Hall that is shared by other organisations, festivals, and creative businesses across the region thus using the platform to collectively increase sales, increase audiences, connect and develop networks and start to address other but related issues, such as how to bring your audiences to you using digital products (eg audience books, additional content) or even connecting them to a local transport solution. As someone pointed, this is developing tools to enable and democratise social infrastructure. It is empowering social innovation through data driven innovation.
The session I chaired today heard @Trevor Davis - previously from IBM and now at UCA - presented the research work undertaken on sustainability in createch. The results were sobering. The key take away is that many (createch) businesses WANT to be more sustainable but the key blockage is ACCESS to reliable information and good tools. The made a tool, tailored to createch businesses and also collated an extensive list of information and resources. You can find more here: https://lnkd.in/ea2AfwNr
In short, the day left me inspired that the creative sector, yes, does some amazing stuff entertaining us with fabulous creative work that we may see in films and games but is is also quietly supporting local tailored made solutions that support social innovation.
A recent book chapter, with Aykut Coşkun Alessandra Schmidt Gerson Susan Lechelt argued for this very case; that Data Driven Innovation should not only support the 'blockbuster' innovation but also the 'social innovation' that is perhaps local, using 'small data' https://lnkd.in/eJ47g42M