IT Innovation Challenges blog

Oxford rain CC BY-NC-SA © YBP

April has been and and gone with plenty of showers, not always so sweet. For IT Innovation, April was a busy month. Work has continued on getting the successful projects from the Autumn round set up and ready to start, which has involved meeting with all the student projects to go through the administrative procedures involved. Some of them have started and the rest will follow in the months to come. Please keep an eye on the IT Innovation blog for updates. A kick-off meeting was held with people involved in the projects, where they could make contact and share ideas (see separate post).

This month has also seen the ideas from the Spring challenge be reviewed and shortlisted. Of the 26 ideas that were submitted, seven were invited to progress to the final stage which involves submitting a project proposal and presenting it to the IT Innovation Panel. Idea creators are invited to meet with the IT Innovation team to talk about their plans and the process of writing the proposal. We find these meetings very interesting – it is inspiring to meet the dedicated project leaders and hear about their great ideas. The pitch event will be held on June 1^st and the result will be announced as soon as the successful projects confirm that they are taking up the challenge.

Image by Lupin CC-BY-SA-3.0 via Wikimedia Commons

Since the announcements of the successful projects funded in the autumn round of the IT Innovation Challenges much work has been going on to get the projects set up and started. It is not only a question of getting the account set up and money transferred but the project managers may also have to deal with recruitment of staff, re-arranging of non-project duties, and much more. Despite their busy schedules, about 20 of the project staff involved in new projects took the time to gather for the kick-off meeting in late April.

In addition to some brief general information from the Innovation team, participants got to meet Roy Azoulay who introduced Isis Innovation and what they can do to support the projects, now or in the future. John Miles, who is running a project funded in a previous round, talked about his project and his experiences of being part of the IT Innovation scheme.

The main purpose of the meeting was to offer the projects a chance to meet and learn about what others are doing. Each team gave a brief overview of their project, and it was interesting to see how much cross-over there was. New links were established, and suggestions and contacts were shared. At the end of the meeting, it was suggested that these kind of sessions are set up more regularly, inviting all IT Innovation projects to come along and share ideas and experiences. We are currently looking for a suitable date and will send out an invitation shortly.

Examination Schools (CC BY-SA © YBP)

This week, IT Innovation Challenges appeared on the programme for the UAS Conference. Despite an early start, some 20 people found their way to Room 11 at the Examination Schools to hear Stuart Lee talk about the scheme.

Stuart started by running a simple audience participation activity and within a couple of minutes he had managed to explain the concept of crowdsourcing, show the difficulty of getting people to collaborate, and illustrate the benefits of using an open process for funding applications. He then went on to talk about the background to IT Innovations Challenges and explain how it is run, before introducing some of the projects that have been funded. He also provided some overall statistics of use, showing that there is a steady increase in the number of people who access the Oxford Ideas platform and that users engage with the ideas that are shared by posting comments and suggestions, offering their support through comments or votes.

Before opening up for questions and discussion, Stuart invited anyone who is interested in using the ideas platform for their own challenges to contact the IT Innovation team for support.

The most visible activity in March has been the submission and discussion of ideas in the Spring Challenge. 26 ideas were shared and these were viewed nearly 4,000 times. 233 people interacted with them, for example by adding comments and suggestions. The ideas are now being reviewed and a selection will be invited to submit and present a project proposal which will then be considered for funding by the IT Innovation Panel. The outcome of the Spring Challenge should be known some time in June.

At the same time as the Spring Challenge has been running, the Innovation staff have been busy preparing for the start of the projects funded in the previous round (list of funded projects). The award letters, detailing the conditions for the funding, have been sent out to be signed and then returned. In some cases, start dates need to be adjusted or budgets revised and sometimes new project names are selected. Once all the details are settled, the financial accounts can be set up for each project and the responsibility for managing the project admin is moved to the units where they are based.

Student projects are slightly different as these are administered and supported by IT Services. Innovation staff have been meeting with the project managers for the new student projects to offer some advice and guidance related to running an IT Innovation student project. We talk about the processes for purchasing, employment contracts, contracting external developers, and more.  It is great to work with the new projects and meet the committed, enthusiastic, and capable project members, even if it at time surprises us how many new issues seem to pop up in each round. There is no such thing as a ‘standard student project’, that’s for sure. But then, it wouldn’t be truly innovative if all projects were the same.

We hope to publish more information about all individual projects, staff and students, as they get underway. A first presentation is offered by the OAR student project (Oxford Artistic and Practice Based Research Platform), run by students at the Ruskin School of Art (Read about OAR).