From the StartUp Britain Website:

StartUp Britain is a new campaign by entrepreneurs for entrepreneurs, launched on 28th March 2011. Designed to celebrate, inspire and accelerate enterprise in the UK, it has the full backing of the Prime Minister, the Chancellor and HM Government.

This is a response from the private sector to the Government’s call for an ‘enterprise-led’ recovery.

For media enquiries, please email press@startupbritain.org
For all other enquiries please contact us at info@StartUpbritain.org

From what I can gather this website seems to aggregate a litany of different business support offerings some of the Britain’s leading and well established business. There tools and resources are intended to help both business just starting up as well as help established businesses continue to grow.

Here are some of the new features to be rolled out this year:

This portal will be a living market place for the wide range of enterprise support that is already available. The aim is not to replace current provision, but to give it a higher profile, and complement existing provision with further offers of support.

StartUp Britain began with 2 platform services: a catalogue of links to great web resources, and a bucketload of offers from our corporate supporters. Our ideas for extending this free-market, open-source approach to the provision of enterprise support and promotion include:

• Mentor Marketplace: Find or become a mentor
• Masterclass Platform: Deliver or sign up for a masterclass near you
• Pledge matchmaker: Step up to invest your resources in other organisations’ enterprise initiatives
• Best of the web: a database of StartUp content, apps, videos and case studies curated from the web
• A calendar of enterprise related events, into which you can suggest your own event, or just keep up to date with what’s going on.

Gintare and Candy are creative entrepreneurs based in London who decided to combine their skills to create their business that provides a platform for creative collaboration called WHY!. After studying and working for a couple the two took matters into their own hands and turn their passion into a business.  In 2010 Gintare and Candy became joined the crew of Official Behance Ambassors, which is a team of 18 creatives from around the world hand-picked to promote and plan events.

Welcome to The Centre for Creative Collaboration …

From the website, The Centre for Creative Collaboration is a new initiative in collaboration for London. It’s a pilot project and a prototype for a bigger idea.

We are bringing together leading and innovative researchers from London’s universities and colleges, creative industry practitioners and freelancers, SMEs and students. We are creating an environment, based on the principles of open innovation, where new collaborative projects can be conceived, developed and delivered. We’re interested in getting these ideas and concepts into use quickly and efficiently, and where possible and appropriate, aiding the commercial development and wealth creation that these new projects can produce. The project is all about Knowledge Exchange – not knowledge transfer but a more engaged concept that accepts that the flow of knowledge is and should be multilateral

The project is led by Professor Geoffrey Crossick, Vice-Chancellor of the University of London, in collaboration with the Central School of Speech and Drama, Goldsmiths and Royal Holloway (members of the Federal University of London) and Complexity Partners LLP. The project also has the support of the Higher Education Funding Council for England (“HEFCE”) and the London Development Agency.

The project direction is itself a collaborative effort and innovative; a multi-University partnership working with an SME to steer a project designed to be valuable to creative practitioners in London and beyond.

Check out our interview with Maria where we got to ask her a few questions about her entrepreneurial journey:

Maria Constantinescu

For as long as most of us can remember issues surrounding the protection of creative works when pitching concepts or submitting tenders & proposals to industry has been fraught with problems.
The growth of digital file sharing and more recently the increase in the number of brand owners using open innovation to draw in creative ideas may only increase the vulnerability experienced by creative people with no option but to expose their creative work, pre-contract.

The traditional fees for services model will continue to exist, however brand owners are trialling procurement models such as licensing, royalty and shared risk, more commonly associated with industrial design, with graphics, service design, packaging and digital disciplines. Their use of crowd sourcing competitions to elicit creative solutions for packaging, web platforms and even in some cases, brand identity, is rising.
We can argue about how appropriate such activity is but irrespective of whether a business engages in more traditional procurement methods or use competitions, the issue of protecting the value of creative proposals are very similar.



Andy Warhol courtesy of freakingnews.com

So how will the creative industries adapt and respond to procurement and remuneration changes?

And crucially how will they protect their creativity and the value of their knowledge based solutions?

The answer may lie in trust based engagement models

In an ideal world such vulnerability issues would not exist if trust were an automatic assurance during business negotiations. However, it is not.

That does not mean to imply that most people are purposefully disingenuous in their business dealings.

It means that without clear guidelines in place misunderstandings between the negotiating parties can result in one party feeling exploited if the unspoken terms they believed they were operating under differ from that of the other party.

To ensure all parties know where they stand, is a trust based procurement system with clear, non-complex terms and conditions and no legal paperwork or fees, the most mutually beneficial solution?

A group of UK based branding and interface designers behind the launch of Creative Barcode, think it might be. They have designed a simple yet clever solution to a complex problem.

Barcode it and share it.

A user-friendly App that belies the technology behind it is used to produce a unique barcode with Creators details embedded. It is pasted into written and visual files associated with the project proposal.

Files are then shared with third parties including brand owners, suppliers and co-creation partners. The data owner panel and link to terms and conditions are clearly visible. It complements a non-disclosure agreement as it shows ‘what’ has been exposed, when and by whom.

Traditionally barcodes have been used by retailers for around 50 years. They denote that any item carrying a barcode belongs to another party until it has been purchased.

Today, businesses are using digital barcodes on advertisements and marketing materials. When scanned they provide product information and purchase details.

Advertisements now regularly carry barcodes

Creative Barcode performs in much the same way. Each barcode is unique and contains the creators’ ownership and contact details. However it goes further than that as it is supported by non-complex permission based terms and conditions of use.  The terms are simple. The party receiving authorised, barcoded files may not utilise any of the work without the express permission of the creator. This applies to concepts articulated in written and visual formats.

These terms are agreed prior to work being exposed to the brand owner, potential partner or open innovation competition managers.  The permission based usage rules are simple to understand & adhere to.

The Creative Barcode system throws the opportunity wide open for trust based engagement between creative industries and brand owners. If critical mass is achieved it stands a chance of becoming the normal terms of trading.

Once a concept has been purchased or project completed and paid for the system generates a transfer of ownership certificate. This protects the purchaser should any future claim be made regards the source of the work.

It is also provides tangible value to the work purchased irrespective of whether the certificate is provided following completion of a traditional fees for services project or the sale of a concept submitted to an open innovation competition.

Just Barcode it and share it.

Getting creative with traditional barcodes                                            Digital Barcodes with your details embedded

Creative Barcode was launched in the UK in September 2010. It is a not for profit organisation developed and funded by designers and innovators for the benefit of their peers worldwide. Protect your work with Creative Barcode™. No complex paperwork – just barcode it and share it. The annual cost to join Creative Barcode is just £30 and includes 5 barcodes, documentation, and use of an optional file transfer system. Later in the year, Creative Barcode members will also benefit from a Community of members directory to identify and access creative partners and peers across the world.    www.creativebarcode.com email team@creativebarcode.com

Aspart of the IP Beacon, we are running a national survey to capture sector responses to scenarios emerging from the debate so far. This process will validate a vital steer towards future directions informing the current policy debate on IP reform and creative industry funding.

Please take this opportunity to complete our concise online IP and open source survey – for just 5 minutes of your time you will have a chance to win a Kindle wifi. Deadline to complete the survey is this Friday 11th February 2011.

For further information on findings so far, you can see IP Beacon Baseline and Scenarios Reports here.

Feel free to forward this email to a colleague.

Kind regards

The Creative Industries KTN and Inngot

To find out more about click here

It is always a huge pleasure to listen to Eric, and to hear him elucidate Lean Startup as a means of measurable progress through constant learning – but this is the first time we’ve heard him talk about it as a methodology for the scientific management of knowledge work, which potentially has profound and destabilising implications for the creative industries.

At one point he talks about how in the pre-industrial era, management of the work of a master craftsman involved paying them and hoping for the best – which is more or less how we treat a lot of creative knowledge work now. Some of the heuristics and strategies of Lean Startup, applied rigorously, start to suggest ways in which knowledge work can be far more testable, and reactive to the instant responses of clients, readers, listeners… etc. We’ll leave it up to you to imagine how that kind of approach would play out in your niche of the creative market.

Apologies for the camera dives at several points – it was a really packed audience and got quite cramped in the Lean Startup mosh-pit at the front.

If you’re interested in Lean Startup, you should sign up for the London Lean Startup meetup.

We got a chance to talk to modfilms, mod productions and (upcoming) rack&pin founder Michela Ledwidge this week, on the windy rooftop of a busy soho production house.

Michela is one of the world wide web’s creative pioneers, who has been pursuing the idea of remixable film as a creative practice from an unique artistic and technical perspective, for longer than most people have had an email address. Few people who have creative ambitions in this area have the technical chops to back it up, or an awareness of the technical infrastructure required to pull something like that off in a way that lives up to the potential of the medium. The Lumière brothers would, no doubt, approve.

But this interview isn’t really about remixable film. It’s the first in a series of interviews with creative practitioners that have developed hybrid economies to support their practices. Somewhere between infrastructure development, business process innovation, market development and ‘creative digital’ service provision – Michela is one of those rare and interesting people who have made a business of their art, without making art their business.

Thanks to the marvellous sci-fi/feminist/open-source collective Constantvzw for the inspiration for the questions, from their Cuisine Interne Keuken project about the personal economies of cultural producers.

Enjoy!