That’s what I like about living in London: the many opportunities for events that bring together people who illustrate the state of the art – of thinking, business and, above all, funding:
- whether it’s Dimensional Analysis at the Isaac Newton Institute in Cambridge which confirmed once again why my thinking is different and solves mathematical problems that people are trying to solve
- or a BioWednesday entitled Creating the Right Culture and Supporting Entrepreneurs in Life Sciences that gave me a chance to present my innovation with one slide in three minutes
- or today’s Connecting the Supply Chain which I attended for I suspected applications for the layering of complex data.
The outcome?
- An invitation to use my prototype to forecast data from a lecturer in Sustainable Electrical Power Engineering from the University of Greenwich for an academic publication.
- The possibility for writing a proposal to bridge the “Smart Meter” roll-out (top down, single product) with the OpenHub and LightSpeedDerby projects (bottom up, multiple products, multiple applications in the context of Smart Cities).
- Discussions about my innovation with an electronics firm that is looking for partners.
- The challenge to get my prototype working on my new laptop.
- A critique of the governmental conference centre that wastes energy on coloured lighting but wasn’t able to heat our room sufficiently.
If only I could meet the right people with an ‘intelligent chequebook’ instead of having to fit into yet another ‘scope’ of a ‘funding competition’. For this funding style is a complete waste of resources, if follow-on funding is not built-in which is the case for the OpenHubs and LightSpeedDerby. What does it take for government to wake up???