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Beers & Innovation (NMK)

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The UK's quirky innovation culture - at once scruffy and loveable, while at the same time maddeningly inadequate - has been taxing the minds of a lot of people recently.... Is Britain fundamentally incapabale of making commercial success from great technology ideas and products? It's all up for debate at our inaugural innovation night...

NB: THIS EVENT HAS BEEN POSTPONED UNTIL THE NEW YEAR. We will be announcing a new date for the event soon. Bookings can be made as soon as the new date is announced.

The UK's quirky innovation culture - at once scruffy and loveable, while at the same time maddeningly inadequate - has been taxing the minds of a lot of people recently....

Like in this post, from Tom Coates on Plasticbag.org, which elicited an avalanche of comments and was echoed around the blogosphere:

"...our industry seems dominated by a few moribund and clumsy giants leading a culture that's inarticulate, unadventurous and profoundly constrained. There's something very wrong here.

My main question is this: Where are all the bloody start-ups? Where are the small passionate groups of creative technologists (people with clue) getting together to build web applications and public-facing products that push things forward? Where is the Blogger or Flickr or Odeo or Six Apart of the UK? What aspect of this country is it that confounds these aspirations? And I know that Audioscrobbler is wonderful. I really love it. But eventually you have to ask - is that really all we can do?

So is it a lack of money or a poverty of ambition?"

What is it about our cultural heritage and here-and-now that stops us from being more entrepreneurial? Is it that we aren’t coming up with great ideas? Or is it our lack of vision or business acumen that stops these ground-breaking ideas from coming to fruition?

When asked in a survey, “Do you think that starting a new business is a respected occupation in your community?” 91 percent of Americans said yes, as compared to 28 percent of British and 8 percent of Japanese respondents. (John Gartner ‘The Hypomaniac American’)

Can entrepreneurialism be taught or is it ingrained in the national psyche? Does Britain have the pioneering spirit, the optimism required, and the acceptance of failure prevalent in the US, or can we fashion our own type of dynamism and success?

Why EBay and not QXL? Why Bill Gates and not Tim Berners-Lee?

Why so much dynamism in digital advertising and marketing compared to the digital start-ups sector?

Come along to our inaugural innovation night, hear it from people who are - or have been - in the thick of it, and have your say on the issues. Perhaps we can start untangling some of them...

Who should attend:
Anyone who's ever had a good idea and never did anything with it. Anyone else who cares about these things.

Speakers to be announced soon.

Location

The Bell & Compass (downstairs bar), 9-11 Villiers St, London WC2N 6NA.