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 Women in Technology and J.P.Morgan co-hosted 'Insight into Innovation in the Workplace’ on Thursday 20th October 2011 at the Blythswood Square Hotel in Glasgow. This was our second evening networking event in Scotland and it was great to see a full house - the buzz from the networking was very loud!
The formal part of the evening started with a brief welcome from Women in Technology's MD, Maggie Berry, and then we heard from our speakers - James Gardner, General Manager at Spigit, the world's largest innovation management software company and Morna Simpson, CEO of FlockEdu, an educational social network.
James is the author of the popular innovation blog Innovator Inside and his talk covered a range of topics including the story of innovation in Lloyds TSB, the blockers, tricks and dealing with innovation 'antibodies', the story of innovation in the UK government and insights into developing innovation by the crowd. Prior to joining Spigit, James was the Director of Future Design at the Department for Work and Pensions and Head of Innovation & Research at Lloyds Banking Group.
Next up was Morna Simpson who, as well as being CEO of FlockEdu, is also UK Ambassador for Female Entrepreneurs 2011 and founder of Girl Geek Scotland. Morna gave the audience an overview of the underlying principles, processes and methods of Design Innovation which is a means of innovating through and with design and usually involves a range of collaborators. She gave an insight into how Design Innovation methodologies can be applied to diverse situations from the redesign of business processes to the rapid development of new products.
After James and Morna's presentations there was a panel Q&A session with James and Morna as well as Polly Purvis, Executive Director of ScotlandIS, the trade body for software, IT and creative technology businesses in Scotland, Lynsey Bowes, Service Excellence & Innovation Manager at J.P.Morgan's European Technology Centre and Rory MacDonald, Vice President, Investment Banking & Research Technology at J.P.Morgan. There was an interesting range of questions from how to find time for innovation in business when staff and budget cuts are being made through to how can a pipeline of women working in IT be created to provide future talent in the technology profession. Bios of all of the speakers and panellists can be found in the agenda link at the top of this page.
The evening finished with more networking and the last guests left just after 10pm. One attendee said,
"I thoroughly enjoyed the Women in Technology event which proved to be both interesting and a great networking opportunity."
We hope this will be the first of many events in Glasgow!
If you have any questions at all, please don't hesitate to contact Maggie Berry on 020 7422 9214 or mberry@womenin.co.uk.
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