Uploaded on July 23, 2006 by AB

There was a distinct whiff of entrepreneurial planning (if such a thing isn’t an oxymoron) at yesterday’s Open Coffee. The trigger was the launch of this year’s Seedcamp and the ensuing conversation about how we could encourage local start-ups to apply.

Things quickly moved on to running something in Bristol to encourage regional entrepreneurialism. Drawing on Seedcamp, Mashed, etc the idea was to give people an outcome orientated brief (i.e. build something that lets me communicate to a group) and then let folks come up with their own solutions. Critically, each idea would be judged not just on it’s technical/interestingness merits, but also on the marketing/presentation of the idea and on the business case. It sounded like more than a weekend event since we wanted to provide people with lots of plenary events and workshops to help round out ideas. Having said that we quickly came up with a whole bunch of people in the area that would have the relevant expertise to cover pretty much everything.

Sam Machin was fresh back from Mashed08 where the range and variety was outstanding (and the geekiness unsurpassed), but he thought there was a need for a longer event where the wider aspects of building a viable application could be rapidly prototyped. Clare was also along from the Pervasive Media Studio and we bounced a few ideas around on how this could be done and who would be instrumental. There was also a recognition that we needed to include Falmouth, Plymouth, Bournemouth and benefit from the many hotspots across the region.

Lots more to follow I’m sure!

Apologies to the folks on the other side of the room, there was plenty of intense discussion going on but I didn’t get over to join in. Hopefully we’ll hear what that led to shortly.