‘News’ category

I booked a stand at the Brighton and Hove Business Show one week before the exhibition. A week in which I was flat out with client work during the day. So, I spent 24 hours over that week getting my act together. Here’s what happened…

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We’ve just finished a consultancy report for a client. They wanted us to help them make a decision: should they continue to develop an online business, or should they abandon it? (more…)

How do academic writers refer to posts in an online forum? We had no idea (and admittedly, hadn’t given it any thought) until late last year when we started designing the Modern Languages Association’s Handbook for Writers of Research Papers.

The MLA Handbook is the gold-standard reference for academic researchers in the US, but it lacked an online version. For the Seventh edition, our partners Semantico were commissioned to build one, and we designed the interface. The site has just gone live.

The book is a surprisingly interesting read, covering not just citation rules but style guidance, case studies and research technique. Strunk and White fans should check it out. The rest of you may be interested to read our short case study (forgive style errors).

We’d love to hear what you think about these designs for a new marketing pack.

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Footsie, our idea to help businesses reduce their carbon footprint, has been shortlisted for the Social Innovation Camp in December.

Please vote for it! Your votes will send it to the camp, where we’ll be able to spend a weekend knocking the idea into shape and working out where to take it next.

And where would that be? Maybe Unltd? Our plan is to get seed funding to work up the idea into a business plan and pitch. Then we’d start approaching businesses who might be interested in sponsoring the project. With four businesses involved, we’d have a set of beta testers and enough money to build the site.

But first we need your votes…

We’ve been talking to a couple of climate change organisations recently, and it’s inspired us to start thinking about how online environments can help individuals and organisations adapt.

What’s the goal here — to raise awareness? No — everyone knows we’re in an eighteen-wheeler heading for the cliff. We know this. We’re just too paralysed to steer. (For anyone who wants to understand how we got to this point, and how much worse the situation is than they realise, watch this gripping video). (more…)

Update: we were shortlisted for Social Innovation Camp.

Footsie will help larger businesses develop a carbon-reduction strategy through a game experience of pledges and prediction markets.

It’s a collaborative tool which will engage all staff in planning, implementing, monitoring and evaluating change strategies – all with a few minutes of engagement a week. (more…)

I’ve been talking about the BBC Innovation Lab for several days now, and I realised I still haven’t properly explained how it works. So now I will.

The first stage is soliciting applications in a short, structured, text-only format. No fancy visuals, no investment in eye-candy, no false promises.

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At the end of Part 2, I asked a question which I failed to answer. "Could these self-conscious innovation processes ever take hold in the television world?" To address it we need to know a little more about the people involved in the Lab. (more…)

The second way in which the Innovation Labs were a good thing (see Part 1 was that they were a self-conscious attempt at a better creative process. Ever started a new job and wondered – why the hell do they do things like this? It’s crazy! You can see so many ways to improve processes. And then the outrage starts to fade as you get on with the job, and six weeks in you’re just like everybody else.

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