Initial thoughts from last week’s #disruptbrum

Last Tuesday,  I worked with Birmingham City University to run a brilliant event at BomLab all about the Creative economy in Birmingham and where it is going.

The event not only brought a number of great speakers including Andrew Erskine (Tom Fleming Creative Consultancy), Stefan Shaw (BBC),  Will Evans (Amery Brothers),  Immy Kaur (ImpactHub Birmingham) and BomLab fellows amongst others but a really engaged and informed audience.

Amongst various event management, PR and social media duties for this event,  I facilitated a group exercise called Moonshots, inspired by work done with Mark Brill last year and definitely channelling some of those Silicon Valley-ish ideation techniques which is all about getting folks to consider new ideas for the near future.

Many fantastic ideas were generated during the facilitation.  More broadly, there was a healthy debate on Twitter, and much needed provocations on the Creative economy of Birmingham itself as well as discussions around the nature of disruption and what innovation means.

Post-event, I have been having a lot of thoughts around the use of the word ‘innovation’,  prompted by some of the discussions and I will be blogging about this imminently.

In the meantime, please do check out the Storify for the event’s hashtag #disruptbrum by clicking here.