For the past year I along with Tony Fish have been growing, under the banner of  mashup*,  Ignite in partnership with Avanta.  The vision was to provide a space where early stage, high growth, companies can start, grow, meet and collaborate – accelerating the rate of their innovation and connecting with critical delivery and implementation skills.  So far fruit includes InDigital, Start-up Intelligence, Bluefield and OOsocial.

Whilst doing this I have also been part of the founding team to start-up a much bigger open collaboration/co-creation space called Innovation Warehouse (IW), in partnership with the City of London Corporation.

Innovation Warehouse is now open – the picture above (click to zoom) was taken last week but now people are starting to move in it’s filling up and feeling very much like our new home.

There is now 10,000 sq foot of digital incubation space above Smithfield meat market. IW is a shared, semi-open plan office space designed for growing companies in a vibrant atmosphere. We aim to attract dynamic young businesses who want to grow fast.  IW is not an exclusive club and is open to those who are prepared to stand up and justify why they will grow and what they are adding to the community.

ideas.org is based there as are a number of the new businesses mentioned above. If you’d like to talk about collaborating on digital products get in touch with me – simon at ideas.org.

The official launch week starts on June 13th when we will host a number of regular London events including mashup* events. ideas.org is also holding a Housewarming on the 21st June (the longest day) – if you’ve been invited the details are here: ideas.org Housewarming

I’ve just finished giving the Keynote presentation at the Knowledge Transfer Network’s Beacons for Innovation workshop on Data Driven Innovation in Manchester.

The presentation I gave is embedded below and available here.

Special thanks to Paul Clarke for his ideas and inspiration.