NESTA Connect

Collaborative Models in the Film Industry

I love film festivals, and the London Film Festival is one of my favourites.

This year, NESTA is sponsoring a London Film Festival Fringe event, called Power to the Pixel. Director Liz Rosenthal describes the event as looking “ahead to where the power of the internet and digital platforms can offer new opportunities for those creators and companies that can no longer effectively function within the old film business model”.

Of course, there are plenty of traditional film businesses trying to understand these opportunities also.

Showcased at Power to the Pixel were some of the most innovative creative and business tools from around the world. Here are some of them:

PlaceVine – brings content creators and brand owners together to create sponsored content. Check out Shane Meadows Somers Town for an example. Would you guess that his short film was fully funded by Eurostar?

M dot Strange – talked about how to make a $70 million (style) feature film in your bedroom, and then show the world how to do it for yourself via YouTube. He uses his social network of admirers as zombie extras who then virally market the movie. And then they subtitled it into 17 languages. For free.

Wreck a Movie – gives film-makers a platform to crowd-source their own production using social networks. Timo Vuorensola explained how he and some friends went from space cadets in Star Wreck: In the Pirkinning to selling war bonds to fund animated feature that satirises Moon-based Nazis in Iron Sky.

All of the talks will be up on the Power to the Pixel website soon.

What is the right size to thrive in a recession?

One of my favourite observations of the last couple of days comes from James Cherkoff who runs his own small business who asks:

"What do I say the next time my commercial bank asks for a solid business plan?"

Pot calling kettle, and all that. Anyway, the current crisis really demonstrates how everything and everybody is linked to everything else. And in particular that trust (between large financial institutions) is the bedrock upon which the 21st century networked economy is all about.

So our economic fate is increasingly intertwined with others and we are experiencing our first real networked global recession as Charlie Leadbeater says. This obviously means we have to find £400bn pounds when our banks get too creative, but it also creates plentiful opportunities if we know how to embrace them. So, ever the optimist, I am wondering whether, can we turn this to our advantage given the diversity and connectedness of the UK.

Desperation is the father of necessity (with necessity being the mother of invention) and it may well be the smaller agile businesses who can find the bigger opportunities in the next 12 months, though obviously the corporates ought to find it easier to whether the storm i.e. Small is Beautiful but Big is Powerful.

The crisis is a fascinating reminder for large swathes of the population (and estate agents) in how markets can go down as well as up, but more importantly is possibly a once in a generation opportunity to really radically redesign and rethink our politics, economics, and society for the better.

Convergence of Media Production

Broadcasters have for years now been talking about developing content across different platforms.

When it works well - BBC's coverage of the Olympics, Channel 4's Big Art Project - it is wonderful.

But TV producers and digital production companies have traditionally faced a key barrier to innovation. Their differing business models, ways or working and the issue of intellectual property ownership have meant that collaboration to produce convergent content is more difficult than it ought to be.

NESTA teamed up with PACT to sort it out, and they have produced some useful legal templates and a guide to allow firms to contract more easily to work together.

What we'd like to know is whether they can be used outside of these media sectors. If relevant to your business, please feel free to try them and let us know?

Guide to collobaorating

Jon

Battle of the Brands

Noah Brier has recently set up a new site called Brand Tags that does what it says on the tin. If you ever wondered what others felt about Pepsi and a stack of other brands, you can find out by looking at its tag cloud.

More fun, though, is the Battle Mode - the idea that some brands are stronger than others. Thanks to his innovative use of web 2.0 technology, we have a collaborative (and user-generated) brand ranking.

Hyper Island and Dare

A surprisingly recurrent question that I find myself asking about creative innovation at NESTA is "How do they do it in Sweden?". The Swedes seem to have a track record in good innovation practice.

So when Skillset launched their excellent Media Academy programme, which aims to nurture creative people for the new media sector, they drafted in Mattius Hanson from the wonderful Hyper Island.

I'm glad to say that the UK (notably Scotland) can hold its own too with Dare to be Digital having an equally successful record of getting talented people into industry - this time in games.

Innovation Edge - formal and informal conversations

We've got 3000 people registered to come to our annual conference called innovation edge next Tuesday. There are lots of interesting speakers but as has been mentioned many times before, the traditional speaker/audience format of big conferences doesn't make the most of the knowledge and networks of the attendees.

People have been experimenting with open space formats in recent years which is great but not right for such a big event i don't think. Also, sometimes we simply want to hear what people have to say. I'm looking forward to Tim Berners Lee in particular, even through it's via a video link up.

So facilitating some real dialogue at an event like this is tricky given the scale of the thing. However we are going to try and experiment which I've seen work really well at smaller events. Namely we've set up a Twitter account specifically for the conference and will try to participate in some conversations between the attendees live, and I'm the shmuck who agreed to do it. Now don't get me wrong, I'm really happy to try it but I'm not quite sure how it will work and am a little worried about insufficient connectivity at the venue, but nothing ventured nothing gained I guess.

Anyway the feed will appear on this blog so you can keep an eye on what's being talked about. We will also be live blogging here. Else, sign up to Twitter, if you haven't already done so, follow @innovationedge, and join the conversation if you fancy trying it.