Posts By / palford

Crowdfunding SMEs

Uncategorized

I have some researchers visiting from the University of Ulster in February and they would like to take the opportunity to interview 2 or 3 SME owners who have used crowdfunding. I’d be grateful if anyone has contacts that they could pass on to me:  palford@bournemouth.ac.uk

Feedback on FP7 EU bid – lessons learned from feedback

Awarded & submitted bids, BU research

Philip Alford (School of Tourism) and Mark Dover (Applied Sciences) put a consortium together and submitted an application to the EU FP7 program. The project title was Cloud Information Retrieval and Re-Use System and the bid was for nearly €4 million. The following summarises the project:

Tourism indirectly generates more than 10% of the European Union’s GDP and Tourism sector comprises SMEs employing less than 50 people Their respective diversity and fragmentation means that individual SMEs, and their often localised associations, lack the resources to generate and define sophisticated, sustainable marketing tools enabling the competitive campaigns required to maintain position and growth. The recent expansions in social networking and advances in Cloud Computing technologies and infrastructure now present an opportunity to develop sophisticated, dynamic, promotion and marketing tools for use by any SME, in any context – without any requirement for end-user knowledge of the configuration of the service delivery. CIRRUS is thus designed to develop such a universally functional framework, employing a suite of tools, supporting a simplistic dashboard interface, to enable sophisticated, dynamic, marketing input and provision of services at the individual, non expert, level across the many different sectors of the European tourism industry. CIRRUS will

1. Develop a novel, simplistic, non-expert dashboard interface to cloud content and usage enabling incorporation into web and marketing media.

2. Build a support framework behind the dashboard for tourism SMEs which embraces the new marketing paradigm of online customer-to-customer marketing and which is based on international best practice.

3. Conduct 4 Validation Case Studies from 3 European Countries, and different tourism perspectives (accommodation, attractions and events), illustrating enhanced business performance through CIRRUS use.

4. Build and adapt, through these case studies, the application and facilitate its deployment in the targeted countries.

5. Position the application for deployment, with input from both SMEs and SME-AGs, in member states beyond those immediately involved in the partnership.

We were unsuccessful with the application but got some useful feedback from the EU. In summary we needed to:

  • More fully describe the limitations of the current state of the art technology in tourism
  • Make the interdependencies of the work packages clearer
  • More adequately demonstrate the partners’ expertise in key areas
  • Improve the dissemination activities which are described but are not particularly targeted
  • Provide more detail on the exploitation plans of the SME partners

 

Great events to launch the Digital Hub

Research news

We had two great events this week both hosted by the Digital Hub at Bournemouth University. The Digital Day on the 19th July took place at Kimmeridge House on Talbot Campus and the Digital Dinner at the Chewton Glen.

Both events were attended by the Vice Chancellor of the University, Professor John Vinney and by a range of businesses – large and small who had come to hear how Bournemouth University’s Digital Hub could provide them with knowledge and expertise to help them take advantage of the opportunities presented by the creative and digital economy.

There was a wide range of expertise on display – all of which you can find out more about on the Digital Hub website.

Delegates also had the pleasure of hearing an inspirational keynote speaker, Tiffany St James who, among a staggering array of roles, has advised the UK government on its social media and runs a series of workshops for The Guardian on digital media. Tiffany’s slides are available for download on this site. The event trended on Twitter (London) for 30 minutes #BUdigihub – testimony to the interest online and the live Twitter feed at the event.

Digital Hub event on 19th July

BU Challenges

The launch event for the Digital Hub is drawing near and we have over 70 registrations and growing interest and publicity. This event is primarily aimed at external organisations and is designed to showcase BU research related to the creative and digital economy. We’ve got a great program lined up and a fantastic keynote speaker who is also an ex-BU graduate. More information is available at : http://digital-day-bournemouth-university.eventbrite.com/ and it would be great if you know of any businesses and organisations who would benefit from attending the event if you could push this link and information out to your networks. As there are already a lot of staff participating in the event from 5 different schools we are not opening it up to general staff registration, however if you would like to find out more about the Hub please email : thedigitalhub@bournemouth.ac.uk

 

Digital Hub publicity

Trying to define digital economy

BU Challenges, Research themes

At a recent meeting which John Oliver arranged we tried to define some key terms for the creative and digital theme and the inital viewpoint was that the ‘digital economy’ was a narrower definition focusing mainly on enterprise and ‘doing’, however this definition of the digital economy from the The Research Council UK is broader:  “the novel design or use of information and communication technologies to help transform the lives of individuals, society or business (RCUK website accessed February 2011).”

Creative & Digital Economy Theme

BU research, Research news

I’d like to update colleagues on the Digital Hub HEIF-funded project which runs in its current format to the end of July. Picking up on an earlier post by John Oliver of the Media School, the Hub is currently providing a lead on this important theme across the university with colleagues from the School of Tourism, Media School, DEC, Applied Sciences and the Busines School involved – it is by any definition a cross-university project. There have already been several tangible outputs:

  • The Hub has just secured £70k of funding for three projects related to digital tourism and online consumer behaviour – two of these projects are a collaboration between Dr Philip Alford (School of Tourism) and Dr Jacqui Taylor (DEC) and are inter-discplinary projects involving psychology and digital marketing (in a tourism context);
  • The Digital Hub website is up and running with the current objective of building a community of experts around the digital theme;
  • The Hub has also embraced social media and has both a Facebook page and a Twitter feed (LinkedIn is under development);
  • The Hub has two events planned – both aimed at external organisations (businesses, charities, public sector): A Digital Dinner which will be an invitation-only event designed to showcase our expertise around this theme; a Digital Day event on the 19th July at Kimmeridge House which, although showcasing our expertise, will be more of a consultative event and an opportunity for us to listen to what organisations’ needs are around the CDE theme. After the keynotes the central value-added proposition of the event is to feature breakout seminars where Digital Theme leaders will present but also use them as an opportunity to engage with organisations.
  • Both events feature Tiffany St James as a keynote speaker. Tiffany is currently retained by Microsoft, The Guardian, Channel 4 and built the world’s first social media laboratory as a managed service for Euro RSCG London, one of the UK’s top integrated advertising agencies. She is a Special Advisor to the British Interactive Media Association and Advisor to the Speaker of the House of Commons. And as a bonus she is a BU graduate! This will give the Digital Hub at Bournemouth University great profile and form a positive association.

If you’re interested in being involved the BU digital community then send me an email (Philip Alford:  palford@bournemouth.ac.uk)