Open Innovation Lab (OIL) is part of the Climate-KIC Accelerator programme. In the context of the Climate-KIC Accelerator, OIL aims to be a collaborative platform for rapid prototyping via learning, research, development and production, with wraparound support in developing the selected concepts. The goal will be to enhance these concepts via collaborative interventions during the one week workshop. This work will be carried out in multi- and interdisciplinary task groups comprised by the concept originator(s) and interested collaborators, with conceptual and technical advice from the experts and facilitators. As an introduction to the workshop there will be an agenda of industry talks from invited speakers on the themes of innovation, green tech, intellectual property, among others.

OIL is looking for individuals to participate in this collaborative innovation workshop in an environment of openness, exploration, and shared horizontal learning, research, development and production. The workshop aims to use Free/Libre Open Source (FLOS) software and hardware tools and related technologies. Think of this as a special unique opportunity to approach things in a, perhaps more experimental, way you would not normally dare to do.

OIL will bring people from different disciplines from the West Midlands, Ireland and wider Europe to work collaboratively on enhancing the selected concepts by taking new perspectives and approaches to underlying climate related challenges.

OIL will enable participants to appreciate where business ideas fit in the smart, knowledge-driven, low carbon economy. Government innovation policy in the UK and Ireland has traditionally focused on STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) and the ‘eight great technologies’. However, this omits how to factor in creative thinking into the technological mix. As such, STEAM — STEM with an Art component — is seen as a key opportunity for Europe.

OIL will be led by Birmingham City University’s Cross Innovation team, which has experience in bringing in and sharing best practice with practitioners, businesses and institutions from across Europe, notably via its key development role in the European Structural and Investment Funds (ESIF). The delivery will be shared with Sampad, a Birmingham-based organisation working in multi-disciplinary, international collaborative practices.

OIL was born from a research and production methodology called ‘Interactivos’, developed by Madrid-based Medialab Prado for the creative and educational uses of all technology. These events are a hybrid between a production workshop, a seminar and promotion of the developments via public showcase. ‘Interactivos’ makes space for reflection, new thinking and collaboration, enabling proposals to be researched, developed, produced and presented.

Hosted as part of Climate-KIC’s business incubator programme, Birmingham City University would like to welcome you to the kick-off of the Open Innovation Lab for a one day event about the future of smart cities and how design can boost innovation and create economic growth.

Birmingham City University has teamed up with Climate-KIC to run an Open Innovation Lab, a collaborative platform for rapid prototyping, with a multi-perspective focus. OIL is stage 2 of the Climate-KIC Accelerator, which focusses on climate change via cleantech commercialisation. This echoes Climate-KIC’s approach to breaking down siloes between sectors and disciplines, ensuring that those who have the motivation, capacity and skills to tackle problems relating to climate change through business activity are working together, enabling them to come up with sustainable, cutting-edge solutions. It is intended to take participants out of their comfort zone and draw on skills and experience from outside their sector.

This Innovation Conference is your opportunity to engage and hear from world leading experts in the social, economic and environmental fields on design-led processes and how it adds value to products and services and improves customer experiences. There will be a series of debates, provocative discussions and, in the true spirit of disruption, to play and to dabble as well.

What better place than Innovation Birmingham to do this, to meet some of the most active innovators as well as some international superstars in this arena. Conferences' contributors include:

Katharine Fuller

Director of Climate-KIC.

Mark Brill

Strategist and consultant for mobile, innovation and creative technologies. Leading expert in digital media, Internet-of-Things (IoT) and futurology.

Dr. Steve Harding

Head of Innovation Policy, Birmingham City University.

Dr. Rachel Armstrong keynote speaker

Innovates and designs sustainable solutions for the built and natural environment using advanced new technologies such as Synthetic Biology — the rational engineering of living systems — and smart chemistry. Her research prompts a re-evaluation of how we think about our homes and cities and raises questions about sustainable development of the built environment. She creates open innovation platforms for academia and industry to address environmental challenges such as carbon capture & recycling, smart ‘living’ materials and sustainable design. TED X Fellow.

Dr. Javier de la Cueva

International lawyer specialising in intellectual property and digital rights. He has defended numerous cases involving the uses of free licenses of intellectual property.

Matthew Rhodes

founder of Encraft, runs a cross-discipline consultancy, engineering and web applications company specialising in energy efficiency and low carbon buildings.

Brian Price

School of Engineering & Applied Science, Aston University.

Rehan Bhana

Associate Professor in Cloud Computing (Enterprise Infrastructure) has over 18 years of experience in IT allied with entrepreneurial origins. Leading innovation and internationalisation in the field of computing at Birmingham City University, Rehan directs the Living Labs Application (an Interreg EU funded project, LILA). LILA puts into practice a novel model of ‘transnational user labs to inform start-ups innovation’.

The biggest contributor to this event is 'you'.

The most persuasive means of engagement is to get everyone 'taking part' and in on the 'action', we hope to get you fully involved in co-creation and collaboration as well. So if you're an engineer, creative, technologist, designer, maker, doer, scientist, academic, policy maker or visionary with a passion to co-design and experiment, this event is most definitely for you.

We can't wait to see you sharing your ideas and inspiration as well, so please join us for what promises to be a really interesting day.

Note places are limited so please book now to avoid missing out.

The seven days of the Climate-KIC Open Innovation Lab will be a mixture of expert input and masterclasses, interactive workshops in mixed groups, with a large proportion of time dedicated to Lab sessions for groups to develop their ideas with mentoring and coaching support available as needed. A variety of innovation models and tools will be introduced along with business planning and product development/deployment approaches and support.

The OI Lab agenda is planned out as follows, but is designed to be flexible and responsive to the needs of the groups throughout the week and so may be amended to fit with developments or changing requirements. The principle is to balance external input with time to apply new learning and develop business ideas — providing new tools and approaches that can be used during the OI Lab but also in the future, as well as ensuring groups can use the time, techniques and support to significantly develop their ideas and their businesses during the week long programme.

Innovation Lab I Thursday 24th September

Fresh from the Innovation & Sustainability Conferences on the previous day, the Innovation Labs kicks off with an introduction and overview of what to expect over the following 7 days, along with an overview on Open Innovation and how it will be used during the programme. Businesses will then pitch their proposed projects to the group and collaborators will introduce themselves and their skills, followed by formation of the working groups for the week.

We’ll grab some pizza for lunch and then introduce the innovation framework which underpins the process being used. We’ll then focus in on the first stage of the framework, working in the newly formed groups to define and communicate the problems (or opportunities) being tackled by each business. More pitching as each group summarises their problem/opportunity.

Innovation Lab II Friday 25th September

Friday is about transition from problem framing to ideation, generating and/or developing ideas and using an Open Innovation approach to strengthen and stretch these, through and combination of masterclasses and interactive workshops. Groups will then find out a bit more about the required outputs for the end of the week and then have the first of many focused Lab sessions, providing a “make space” for groups to develop ideas and build/prototype them, supported by the coaches and mentors.

Innovation Lab III Saturday 26th September

Saturday is a key day in the programme, where groups will participate in a series of User Lab sessions, a unique opportunity to test ideas and prototypes with a variety of people and gain crucial feedback and evidence needed to validate ideas and refine products. Each group will participate in multiple, short User Lab sessions with time to develop and refine prototypes in between, supported by the mentoring team. A very busy day, but followed by relaxing with a BBQ and beers from midafternoon onwards.

User Lab

Day four of OI Lab, will be user opportunity to interactively engage and inform entrepreneurs and collaborators operating in the digital and green industry. An opportunity to hear first-hand the essence of a tech start-up and the successes that can be achieved when technology is applied to enhance all aspects of the modern life.

Join us in person on Saturday 26th September 2015 at Innovation Birmingham. If you are joining in from mainland Europe please contact our LILA partners (http://lilaproject.eu/) in your region to enable you in this process.

Book tickets for User Lab

Time	Themes	User Group
11:00h	Web Design	Marketing Design, Communication Design	Refreshments
11:30h		User Experience Design, Interactive Design
12:00h	Network of Humans	Social & Cultural Inclusive Networks, Critical Knowledge Production
12:30h		Storytelling, Storyboarding, Modelling, Animation
13:00h	Network of Things	Thermoelectrics & Photovoltaics, Energy Harvesting
13:30h		Internet of Things Devices & Protocols, Web of Things Architecture
14:00h	Product Design	Electrical Engineering, Physical Computing
14:30h		Engineering Design, Industrial Design
15:00h	Social Space — Networking & Collaboration		BBQ – Aqua Marine

Innovation Lab IV Sunday 27th September

A flexible day with relaxed and open Lab sessions with mentors on hand to assist if required. No set structure, just some time to develop you ideas, work on your prototypes or reflect on your progress or learning journey so far or just to let it all sink in. Finish mid-afternoon followed by a social evening.

Innovation Lab V Monday 28th September

After a more relaxed Sunday, the pace picks back up again. Starting off with a critical review of progress so far and chance for groups to reflect on their progress (one of the key elements needed for the Influence Lab on Wednesday) groups will then press on with developing their solutions and business propositions with mentors on hand, as ever. After some fish & chips, there's then more Lab Time in the afternoon, getting ready for the final straight.

Innovation Lab VI Tuesday 29th September

Opening with a masterclass on rapid deployment techniques, groups will then have their final lab session to complete their work, building in all that they’ve picked up during the programme in preparation for the Influence Lab. Some more pizza, final touches to presentation and prototypes and then the mentor team will bring everyone together to wrap up the Open Innovation Lab programme, ready for the all-important Influence Lab on Wednesday 30th.

Innovation Labs' facilitators include:

Alexa Torlo

Transforming the Region, Birmingham City University.

Clayton Shaw

Clayton Shaw works for Sampad, a Birmingham intercultural arts development organisation where he is responsible for development, policies, local, national and international partnerships, financial management, marketing, and operational management. He supports the director and board, and works closely with the programme manager on new methods of arts programming and audience development.  Prior to this he worked at Arts Council England to support a number of cultural organisations, the Herbert Arts Gallery in Coventry managing an arts and heritage events programme, and Birmingham City Council’s arts team with responsibility for commissioning artists to develop talent and skills. He has a keen interest in contributing to the development of the arts sector, particularly with advancements with digital technology for artistic production and audience engagement within the context of socially led practices. Clayton’s educational achievements include a Masters in European cultural policy and management at the University of Warwick, a BA (Hons) degree in Fine Art at Birmingham City University, and more recently he has been awarded the title of Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Birmingham.

Ian Graham Director Viatic Ltd

  @IanG_York

Ian is a change leader specialising in city and social innovation and works across both public and private sectors. He is a Fellow of the RSA and has extensive experience in embedding innovation and leading business development and transformation.

After working for the City of York Council for ten years in a wide variety of roles including Head of Innovation and Head of Business Change, Ian founded Viatic to specialise in open innovation, collaborative co-production methods and leading cultural change within organisations. Previously, he has also worked in IT and change roles for global insurance company Aviva.

Ian co-designed York’s multi-award-winning “GeniUS!” open innovation model and has designed and facilitated numerous of creative/hackathon style events to tackle societal challenges in areas ranging from collaborative youth services to the future of libraries, as well as using similar principles to design and support accelerator programmes for SMEs.

An accomplished coach and experienced in trans-national projects, Ian has also worked with cities worldwide such as Cape Town, Tallinn and San Sebastian, helping them develop and deploy problem solving models and culture which use open innovation and customer collaboration to deliver new solutions to their challenges.

Pablo Ripollés nonsense engineering

  nonsenseengineering.org

Pablo has been a long-time researcher in the area of computational science & engineering, more specifically in the field of aerospace engineering. He has developed several software packages for companies such as EADS or Airbus.

Starting as early as 2006, he has been frequently involved in many of the Madrid-based Medialab Prado activities either as collaborator or assistant in the context of Interactivos?/Visualizar as well as teacher in several Openlab creative coding workshops. It was in this avant-garde collaborative context where he acknowledged the importance to develop the capacity to continuously learn how to learn together.

In 2008, he met the kinetic sculptor Theo Jansen and has been participating in several of his exhibitions and beach experiments around the world ever since (Madrid, Tokyo, Scheveningen, Moscow).

Currently, he is developing an experimental interdisciplinary syllabus for teaching the fundamentals of science from within a computational setting to art & design students at the Istituto Europeo di Design.

Chema Blanco etc inventions

  www.etcinventions.com

Chema Blanco is a freelance former and consultant in non-conventional creative interactive systems. Telecommunication engineer with Msc Knowldege Engineering and Msc Cogntive Systems and Interactive Media. He has developed different AI and robotic projects as a university researcher and now he is focused on information systems and interactive installations for corporations, schools, museums, marketing and advertising companies and for artistic innovative environments. He co-founded Etc Inventions, an engineering cooperative specialized in interactive technologies and management of multidisciplinary projects and teams. Besides he is researching about self-sufficiency, interactive technologies and sustainability in Medialab Prado in Madrid.

Gregory Hough

Will Evans

Prototypes may be publicly exhibited in the project partners’ printed documents or websites but with full credit to the originators and collaborators.

Prototypes carried out will be the property of their author(s), although whenever said prototypes are shown at Innovation Birmingham events, and whenever images of said prototypes are reproduced in catalogues or websites, their relationships with Innovation Birmingham and Climate-KIC wil be mentioned. The names of the people who participated in developing the prototypes will also be shown.

Birmingham City University

With around 23,500 students from 80 different countries, BCU is one of the largest universities in the UK. BCU plays a number of key roles in the development of the creative economy and works as a catalyst to bring fresh perspectives and new ideas to the marketplace, by working with regional organisations to encourage cross-sector partnerships; stimulate collaborative projects; promote collective strengths and embed enterprise into curriculum. To that end BCU has set up a Cross Innovation project to promote collaborative and user-driven innovation that happens across sectorial, organisational, technological and geographic boundaries.

The Centre for Low-Carbon Research aims to address the rapid transition required towards a low-carbon economy, to reduce climate change due to increasing consumption of energy and to create a more sustainable society. This needs close-to-market research to reduce the carbon emissions of existing technologies, fundamental research into alternative energy sources and reduction of energy demand. Such research requires a multi-disciplinary approach, combining technological expertise with an understanding of societal factors including public policy that govern uptake. This is a major focus of research funding from the EU and UK governments and research councils. Key research themes include:

• Bioenergy
• Low carbon transportation
• Intelligent buildings
• Supply chain logistics

These themes will also provide a focus for cross-University collaboration in research, knowledge exchange and technology transfer.

The Centre has access to a range of excellent research facilities, including a BioEnergy Lab for bench-scale testing, pilot-scale testing and an analytical suite.

The Centre for Environment and Society Research (CESR) at BCU carries out applied research at the interface between the built and natural environments. CESR work across disciplinary and theoretical boundaries to tackle a range of complex policy challenges. There are four centres of excellence within CESR: the Centre for Digital Construction, the Knowledge ExCHANGE Research Centre of Excellence, the Centre of Planning and Environmental Sustainability and the Centre for Plant and Machinery Management.

"Alexa Torlo, Business Engagement Manager, explains: "We have recognised the increasing importance of the process of ‘cross innovation’, especially as we strive to generate new ideas in a time of global uncertainty.

"The Open Innovation Lab echoes Climate-KIC’s approach to breaking down silos between sectors and brings companies together to tackle problems and share ideas, coming up with sustainable and cutting edge solutions.

"The idea behind cross innovation is simple; it focusses on the positive process by which creative industries can drive innovation in the wider economy. This sort of approach is great for generating new ideas and can reap real benefits. We have had a lot of success over the past four years and we are excited to test this approach at Innovation Birmingham with low-carbon and green technology businesses."

Sampad

Sampad is a Birmingham-based organisation that seeks to develop content relevant to today’s society. It is continually testing projects that exploit digital technology via web, mobile technology, or other format. Previous and current projects have incorporated data-visualisations, interactive 3D architectural projection-mapping (as in the Mandala performance for the London 2012 Festival), augmented reality, touch table technology, and gaming. In summary, Sampad aims to promote inter-cultural learning through different art-forms to encourage awareness, appreciation, and participation in arts and heritage for everybody.

Innovation Birmingham Campus

The Innovation Birmingham team actively works with and bring together the public and private sectors, creating interfaces for people with ideas, technologies, expertise and experience, and money. It is a one-stop-shop for innovators, entrepreneurs and investors looking to develop or fund tech start-ups with high growth potential. It is far from just bricks and mortar; the team actively nurtures an interactive and supportive community within the place.

Innovation Birmingham is focused on a service offering for founders of new technology ventures, as well as more established tech businesses. The campus facilities include the Entrepreneurs for the Future (e4f) multi-occupancy centre, hot-desking facilities and a wide range of flexible office units. The Campus strategy is about encouraging people to visit, engage with the businesses based there, and attract new tenants. By creating a wide range of valuable opportunities, the missing aspects of a successful business puzzle can be solved, helping innovators and tech entrepreneurs to succeed.

Climate-KIC

Climate-KIC is Europe’s largest public-private innovation partnership focused on climate change, consisting of dynamic companies, the best academic institutions and the public sector.

Viatic

Viatic is a specialist innovation and change consultancy, based in York (UK) and led by Ian Graham, a change leader who specialises in Open Innovation. Working across both public and private sectors, Viatic has a wealth of experience in the design and delivery of innovation-led, collaborative events which bring together a diverse range of participants to solve defined challenges.

Combined with 13 years experience in change management, organisational culture transformation and business strategy development, Viatic are essentially all about the journey - working with people to understand their vision, help define the route and set them on their way.