Tuesday, May 30, 2006

LIVE BLOG: Tuesdays@FUTURE: Strengthening the Creative Industries and Technology in NEO

This is the first Tuesdays@FUTURE forum: a platform for civic engagement to strengthen innovation and entrepreneurship in the creative and technology industries to accelerate business opportunity in Northeast Ohio.

The Golden Ground Rule: We will behave toward one another in ways that build trust and respect.

Europe has invested in creative industry models such as The Irish Creative Design Community and the The Creative Scotland Awards. How can we elevate, connect and strengthen our regional assets in the creative industries?

David Moss: There needs to be a higher level of awareness about what is here in NEO; to refine the story.

Creating high value for media and creative industries. There is a strong need to establish and strengthen a network for infrastructure to support new forms of media and design.

FUTURE Advanced Partnerships program; will rely on networking and canvasing of the appropriate partnerships between industry and student talent.

CIA faculty seek to set up relationships for working partnerships.

What can be done together to strengthen the creative industries and technology initiatives for the future? What kind of conversations can be shaped? Here are some suggestions:

1) FUTURE Design Summit
2) Dan Cufaro: Design District
3) Michael DeAloia: Gaming Center
4) Innovation Awards/NorTech can a tandem exhibition be created and hosted at FUTURE Center?
5) Region wide initiative to create conceptual renderings
6) RTA Corridor - clear messaging ; via portable device?
7) Summit Spring 07: Regional collaboration for PhD studies

The Strategic Technology Alliance (STA) is a 26 nonprofit member organization; there is a need to further collaborative abilities to strengthen networks and next steps. What are some easy/low hanging fruit/projects? How can we leverage OneCommunity fiber? There is the need to innovate in all organizations.

When people begin to behave differently, eventually new activities will result.

What can happen when activities are worked together, aligned and move forward on projects?

Here are some updates on Ideation/Visual mapping software available:
Inspiration software
InFlow.com
Brain.com
Mindmap.com
Curio.com

How can we get this content and new conversations out across the region in a speedy way? Can we contact and send content on mulitple formats, such as: Adlephia; iPod; Internet; Web casting

Recommended: See the Viktor Schreckengost: Exhibit at the Cleveland Institute of Art here.

Thursday, May 25, 2006

Exploring New Frontiers: The STA @ FUTURE

Strategic Technology Alliance is meeting at FUTURE: the Center for Technology Transfer and Design...

We are gathered at FUTURE and listening to David Moss, FUTURE Director, of an overview of the Center and how it started from the collective thought of a brainstorming group of Professors and creatives. The Business Incubator will occupy ultimately over half of the space here for business incubation. Cross institutional efforts will be supported with talent and creatives from across the region.

Other FUTURE partners include One Cleveland

Production network will be created to handle the enormous demand for creative projects; the underlying mission is to create pathways for students and industry to slow brain drain. VR labs are being networked regionally, drive every design curriculum project we have across the region.

Kristen Baumlier, Chair of T.I.M.E. provides an overview of the work of students. Team projects will be needed for the students to push game design further. We are looking at a medium that math theory has generated. Students have combined techniques to build narrative and messaging for new virtual spaces. Students have explored the application of 2-D to 3 D spaces. In the future, we will have the capacity to navigate space in any way we desire.

Carnegie Mellon has connected with research strongly and we are starting to make these connections here. A media clip is shown the visualizes information - and in this case, sound.

Amanda Almon, new Chair of BioMedical Art - BioMedical Art, formerly known as medical illustration. Looking forward from textbooks to virtual applications. There are only 2 programs in the Country. NEO has good assets and investments in capabilities to visualize research for innovative solutions within digital media. Educational applications of VR example: macro degeneration.

Media goals for the program include digital illustration; 2 and 3D modeling and animation; medical sculpture; multimedia design, motion graphics; TV, film, web applications. Over 10,000 new models exist at CIA. Think in terms of virtual applications of 3D animations.

CCF BioMedical Department partners with CIA to produce new media information models. VR 3D Anatomy is also explored. Examples show and demonstrate media animation in small samples. The opportunity is to explore large scale applications. Student can be contracted out on a free lance basis. Any professional project that cross references different departments and capabilities goes through FUTURE.

Sunday, May 21, 2006

Beyond Journals! New and Different Approaches to Research



As advanced computer and imaging technologies generate more and larger data sets, the capacity to visualize and interpret that data becomes problematic. To promote new scientific visualization research, the National Science Foundation provided Major Research Instrument funding to develop the HIPerWall visualization system at the University of California, Irvine. At 200 megapixels, HIPerWall provides twice the resolution of any other display in the world and approximately ten times the resolution of typical tiled displays. Read more here and here.

The Digital Economy: A New Report

Be sure to read the Committee for Economic Development's report released recently, "Open Standards, Open Source, and Open Innovation: Harnessing the Benefits of Openness."

The new report details the benefits of openness in three areas – open standards, open-source software, and open innovation – and examines the major issues in the debate over whether openness should be encouraged or not. The report explains each of these three kinds of openness, details the public policy issues involved with each, and provides policy recommendations for dealing with these issues.

For practitioners of open source economic development this is great information and useful research!

Summary Report available here.

Full Report available here.

Scripps Institution of Oceanography: See the Big Picture

Put on your workforce development goggles: what are our opportunities to train people to make the required cognitive shifts and develop skills for the information economy? And, just how fluent are you? Think about this...

Scientific research is generating larger and larger data sets, largely due to the proliferation of sensor networks and advances in computational technology. The sheer volume of data, along with its complexity, makes it imperative to develop more sophisticated visualization tools to help scientists discern the significance of their data and to facilitate collaboration among scientists working with the same data.

Large-scale displays have proven very effective over the years at facilitating collaboration. However, the size of today’s data sets exceeds the resolution of earlier generations of display systems. The Scripps Institution of Oceanography (SIO) set out to build a very high resolution display system capable of displaying large data sets at full resolution.

Read more.

Getting Creative in Philadelphia

Here is an interesting article about accelerating innovation in Philadelphia:

Philadelphia Business Journal - April 7, 2006 by Bernard Dagenais

The buzz surrounding the so-called "creative economy" has been around for years. Authors have made good money exalting artists. Now, the issue is coming to roost in Philadelphia, which will soon hold a Global Creative Economy Conference Summit.

The summit, which is being produced by the city-backed economic development group Innovation Philadelphia, provides the region with an opportunity to help mold creativity into a stronger economic force.

Peggy Amsterdam, president of the Greater Philadelphia Cultural Alliance, thinks Philadelphia business leaders are missing something important and should be helping to drive the growth of the region's creative economy.

"This is something that the corporate community should be talking about, thinking about, promoting and seeding," said Amsterdam, who was one of the leaders of a group that set out to capitalize on the region's creative economy assets three years ago as part of a "Roadmap for Regional Growth." Read more.

We're Building an Innovation Zone in University Circle!

Join us for Tuesdays@FUTURE - forums to accelerate innovation and entrepreneurship at the very heart of the Innovation Economy: in the Creative Industries.

I-Open and partner anchoring organizations will collaborate to highlight the latest innovations in the creative industries in Northeast Ohio. We'll talk about global models and how other regions are strengthening existing and new economic development initiatives. Together, we will identify resources and capabilities and design transformative intiatives together to build the Innovation Economy in Northeast Ohio.

I-Open Innovation Zones are networked hubs of Open Source Economic Development activity. Open Source Economic Development practices help us to adjust our rate of activity to the volume and speed of innovation in new and different ways. The I-Open Strategic Process teaches people how to identify local innovation, envision transformative initiatives together and begin to work toward next steps.