After a year off to complete my Psychology degree at University of Bristol I have decided to relaunch my Web Site.

A little bit of history, I started Business With Heart Limited when I left HP Labs back in 2007. My consultancy has been both a background and foreground activity over the past 5 years, depending on what else I have been up to with my academic studies and research. My initial consultancy consisted of Patent workshops, Open Space Technology workshops and Innovation  Consultancy. Clients included: Channel 4, RBS, HP Labs, the Arts Council, SW Screen, Cornwall Film, Aardman Animation and others. During the last year I pretty much suspended all consultancy to complete my studies as a Psychologist. I now have a Psychology degree from University of Bristol, and am a Member of the British Psychology Society.I continue now as a PhD and Freelance commercial researcher studying the Cognitive Psychology of Film – in an ambitious research activity that I am calling: “Watching People Watching Film”.

Last year I found myself turning down Innovation Work. There seems to be a shortage of experienced people running this type of consultancy so I have decided to relaunch these activities. At the end of last year, I was approached by the University of Bristol SARTRE project , a multi-disciplined Bio-Sensing Research initiaitive which seeks to translate cutting-edge academic research into practical technology. I was very excited at the prospect of working with this group. Bio-Sensing and Bio-Engineering is really at the forefront of what is possible, and the possibilities for medicine, and engineering are breath taking. So I accepted to run an Open Space Technology workshop for them. This ran in December 2011, with participants from Bristol, Bath, Cardiff and Exeter Universities. The event was an amazing success in terms of innovative proposals that were drafted and funded as a direct results of this workshop and the satisfaction and positive feedback of the participated. The success, and enthusiasm for this workshop made me realise that taking the skills and processes  I have learned from Industrial Research into academia was a huge step. Academia often suffers from disconnection and isolation of research and researchers, whereas commercial research and development has had to solve these problems. Running group industrial innovation processes with the academic researchers, with deep knowledge and skills can offer big wins. So I have made a new years resolution to do more work likes this with academics.

In January the University of Bath Research Development & Support Office approached me. They wanted to use similar processes, to those we had used for SARTRE to fast-track some Bio-sensor  research proposals that would then be sent into competitive grant awarding processes. The result was an Open Space Technology workshop run at Bath University. Participants were invited from Bath, Bristol and Cardiff University.