NESTA Collaborative Workshop 21.03.13

We were greeted by the inspiring surroundings of The Hub on the Royal Mile in Edinburgh on a rare day of sunshine (obviously out for the meeting of the 2nd call projects), with participants’ prompt arrival  motivated by the breakfast rolls provided at the beginning of the meeting – very clever NESTA.

Despite having three consortium members missing in action, the CReATeS team looked forward to meeting the four projects successful in securing funding from the 2nd round of the NESTA R&D Digital Fund.

The day began with a quick introduction from Gillian Easson, who presented what the Nesta’s role and brief details of the other projects they are involved in – One day Digital; Rooted; Enterprise Tool Kit and Make_it_local.

The agenda then took us onto the most exciting part of the day – finding out and hearing from the next round of funded projects! Until now, we knew very little about the projects apart from their bid applications and were looking forward to putting a face to each project.

Then it was our turn to tell the projects about CReATeS and how we are involved in the project.  Claire and Doris explained how we ‘got the job’ and what we will be looking to research in regards to the projects. We hope this provided the projects will an idea of what to expect from us and our level of engagement with them.  Tracey Gregory of Tom Fleming’s Creative Consultancy followed our presentation and presented their input and involvement in the project.

After lunch, the expert leads got together with their respective projects to develop a blueprint of the activities that need to occur throughout the course of the project. This exercise aimed to sharpen the organisation of the project and provide recognition of the activities whose completion may ultimately affect the success of the project.

The first call projects joined us after our 121 time and told the second call projects about their learnings from the project and how their projects have developed over the course of the funding, imparting valuable knowledge, processes and recognition of activities to the second call project teams.

A full day of learning, meeting and collaborating was nicely round off with some fine wine, tasty canapes and a lot of networking.

About Fiona Millar

Research Funding Officer for the Faculty of Natural Sciences, typically blogging about funding, social media and my perspective on the research funding environment.
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