Video: Venture Capital, Entrepreneurs and the Current Climate – Who is being successful and why

CreativeCapital - The Olympics and the Impact on London

The world’s greatest global event is about to arrive in London, Europe’s financial capital and a nexus for creative, transnational economic, trade, business and entrepreneurial activity.

The Olympics are promoted as theportent of long-term change. Communities are set for gentrification and the city’s unique spirit of innovation and creative energy will foster dynamic initiatives and campaigns that aim to transform EastEnd into one of the world's leading technology centres.

Join us for the next Creative Capital to hear from Olympic experts, and the Tech City Planners about what the Lea Valley Games have in store for London.

This event will be held @ Hospital Club, Tuesday 28th February from 7.00pm onwards. RSVP here!

Follow us on Facebook.

Venture Capital, Entrepreneurs and the Current Climate – Who is being successful and why

CreativeCapital is back for yet another year to bring together the best and brightest in their fields to discuss the hot topics of the day.
2011 has left the corporate world still struggling financially as the current climate is posing significant challenges for investments in all industries and especially the creation, survival and growth of SMEs.
Is there a vital need for innovative solutions? Is there a role for VCs and non-traditional sources of funding? Who is being successful and why?
Join us for CreativeCapital to discuss how promising 2012 will be and hear inspiring VC and Entrepreneurship success stories.
Our guest speakers include Stephen Rockman Founder of Merism Capital & Co-Founder at Hub Venture Labs, Bjoern Lasse Herrmann, a young serial entrepreneur and founder of the Startup Genome and Scott Sage.
This event will be held @ Hospital Club, Forest Room, on Tuesday 24 January, from 7.30pm onwards. Don't forget to RSVP here!
Follow us on Facebook.

Stephen Rockman is Founder of MerismCapital. Merism Capital provides seed funding for early stage social businesses: supporting entrepreneurs with equity investments of £50k to £150k for both financial and social returns. Stephen founded Merism in 2010 having discovered social enterprise’s challenges and opportunities whilst mentoring entrepreneurs for NESTA and UnLtd. In 2011 he co-founded Hub Venture Labs, based in Hub Westminster, the first incubator in Europe dedicated to investing in and creating better, more sustainable social entrepreneurs and championing innovation and impact across Europe. Previously Stephen spent twenty years in IT in various commercial roles with global software and services companies before becoming an advisor to and angel investor in start-up web and mobile companies in the UK, Europe and Israel. He is a guest lecturer in social investment at Goldsmiths College, where he also sat on the advisory group for the new MA in Social Entrepreneurship, and holds a number of non-exec roles in early stage companies and continues to mentorentrepreneurs.

Bjoern Lasse Herrmann is the 26 year-old founder of the Startup Genome. One year ago he & his team set out to find a scalable way to accelerate businesses across the world. After releasing two research reports on success & failure of startups that were downloaded 25,000 times he most recently released the first software product that is best described as a virtual mentor for now more than 13,000 software businesses. The published research has been adopted by morethan 50 universities globally - including Stanford and Berkeley. Harvard Business School Professor Thomas Eisenmann called the findings an important contribution. You can try the product at startupcompass.co and learn more about the research at blog.startupcompass.co. Before, Bjoern founded and led 4 for and non profit ventures in Germany, Bangladesh & the US. He also worked as an executive in Russia for one year for a mid sized marketing company. His personal passion or "leitmotif" is: unleashing human potential. His higher purpose is to strive to maximize the capitalization of every single individual.

Scott Sage is an Associate at DFJ Esprit. Scott’s current areas of interest at DFJ Esprit include mobile, consumer and enterprise companies. DFJ Esprit is a leading cross-stage venture capital firm with just under $1 billion under management that invests in European technology companies. The DFJ Esprit partners have invested and helped build many of the most successful venture companies starting in Europe of recent years, including RadiumOne, LOVEFiLM, Apatech, Buy.at, and KVS. Previously, Scott worked in marketing, business development, finance and research roles at Smarkets, BVCA and UBS. He is currently a board observer at Taptu and Redkite and has advised and invested into other consumer internetcompanies in Europe. Scott is one of the co-founders of City Meets Tech where he helps start-ups find the right mentors and seed capital.

Video: The Golden Tweet

Video: The Arcane

CreativeCapital – The Golden Tweet

With its simplicity of communication, Twitter stormed into a highly populated arena and took everything and everyone in its sway. With 50 million active users every day, it has been used as a marketing tool around the world and helped turn around declining business. And this is not all: in 2011 Twitter played a pivotal role in the Arab spring and London riots, with its 140 characters of power.

From Patrick Tresset's tweeting Aikon robot, to Watkins Books' turnaround, and the role of digital media in politics, join us for an evening where our guests will have more than 140 characters to say about their Twitter experiences.

This event will be held @ Hospital Club, Tuesday 22 November, from 7.30pm onwards. Don't forget to RSVP here.

Follow us on Facebook.

SPEAKERS:

Patrick Hayes is a political commentator for current affairs magazine spiked, an independent online phenomenon dedicated to raising the horizons of humanity by waging a culture war of words against misanthropy, priggishness, prejudice, luddism, illiberalism and irrationalism in all their ancient and modern forms. He also works part-time as head of press and promotions at the think-tank the Institute of Ideas and is a columnist for the Huffington Post and Free Society. He is a producer of the international Battle of Ideas festival, which he helped to establish in 2005. Previously he was head of research and development at TSL Education, publishers of The TES and Times Higher Education. Patrick regularly comments on politics and current affairs for a range of local, national and international media programmes, which have included Newsnight, Sunday Morning Live, BBC Radio 5 Live, Sky News, Russia Today and BBC London.

Etan Ilfeld is a London-based entrepreneur and the owner of Watkins Books, London's oldest spiritual bookshop. He will be talking about the apps Watkins Books is developing. And Hugh Thomas will talk about how Watkins Books has been so successful at building a following community.

Patrick Tresset is currently a researcher at Goldsmiths, University of London. After an interruption of almost seven years in his artistic practice, Tresset has found his medium of expression by diverting his on-going academic research he conducts in collaboration with Prof. Frederic Fol Leymarie from the Department of Computing. Their Aikon-II project investigates the sketching activity through computational modelling and robotics.

CreativeCapital – The Arcane

The sum total of our knowledge is limited by the band-width of our imagination. There are many things we know and many things we don't. Rational Science often finds itself in a position of proving facts that the ancients took for granted and had come to understand through different channels - take Plato's view on Atomic matter for example, or the Ancient understanding of the Earths relationship to the Sun.

Creative Capital seeks to promote knowledge, understanding and exchange and in October we will be exploring outside of the usual box. We will be exploring The Arcane.

Join us for a conversation with the owner of Watkins Book - London's foremost bookshop focused on the Arcane, an expert in Chess, and Sex with Robots – a Celtic mythology expert and an expert in the magic of the theatre.

A warming topic for the dark months of Winter, just before All Hallows Eve at the end of October.

Etan Ilfeld is a member of the Hospital Club and the owner of London's oldest esoteric bookshop, Watkins Books, established in 1893. Ilfeld is also editor in chief of the Watkins Review: Mind Body Spirit magazine, which is distributed internationally and provides an annual ranking of the 100 most spiritually influential people. Ilfeld aims to bring spirituality into the virtual spheres and has created an interactive crowd sourcing map of spiritual events across the globe. Watkins is also launching a series of mind, body and spirit apps.

David Levy is a Scottish International Master of chess, a businessman noted for his involvement with computer chess and artificial intelligence, and the founder of the Computer Olympiads and the Mind Sports Olympiads. He has written more than 40 books on chess and computers. Levy also wrote Love and Sex With Robots, published in the United States by HarperCollins, and forthcoming from Duckworth in the UK. Levy predicts that sex robots will hit the market within a couple of years.

John Matthews is the author of over 90 books including The Encyclopedia of Celtic Myth and Legend. He has published numerous books of alternative history on Ceremonial magic, Celtic mythology, Neoshamanism, and New Age beliefs. John worked as historical consultant on Jerry Bruckheimer's film King Arthur. He lives in Oxford, England. He has also recently created a new tarot deck, the Greenwood Tarot.

Nina Steiger is Associate Director at Soho Theatre and leads the Writers' Centre there. Prior to this post, Nina worked for seven years in the New York and regional theatres with such organisations as Ensemble Studio Theatre, New York Stage & Film and Hartford Stage Company alongside freelance work with companies such as The Foundry Theatre, Roundabout Theatre and Manhattan Theatre Club.

Speakers for CC Gamification

We're very excited to announce the first speaker for Gamification: Paul Bennun.

Paul Bennun is a Director of Somethin’ Else, a leading cross-platform / digital production company in the UK. Paul leads the Company’s digital output and future product / business strategy.
He holds internationally recognised awards in games, radio, mobile technology and interactive broadcasting such as Bafta Awards, Sony Radio Academy Awards and the GSM Association Awards.

CreativeCapital Gamification

Gamification has been transforming our daily life. Yet, we seldom acknowledge it consciously, for it has become ubiquitously embedded in our televisions, computers, smart phones and other electronic devices.

Quite simply, Gamification is the use of game play dynamics for non-game applications. The possibilities are endless, from encouraging desired behaviours to perform tasks ordinarily considered dull.

Join us for an evening where conversation becomes a game. Explore the multi-layered ideas of Gamification and meet the people putting these concepts into practice.

This event will be held @ Hospital Club, Thursday 28 July, from 7.30pm onwards. Don't forget to RSVP here.

Follow us on Facebook.

Video: Graphic Facilitation Uncovered

Graphic Facilitation Uncovered from CreativeCapital - Events on Vimeo.

Graphic facilitation of an event on... Graphic Facilitation

Cartoon strip imagining the narrative sequence of CreativeCapital, by Josh Knowles.

Visual scribing capturing the environment of the room, by Josh Knowles.

Visual scribing of Luis Rosenthal’s presentation, by Joel Cooper.

CreativeCapital May - Graphic Facilitation Uncovered

Graphic Facilitation is a world beyond minutes and powerpoint presentations. It cuts to the heart of a communication process, translating talk and visualising complex ideas in a way that is memorable, approachable and organised.
Come join us for an evening where conversation becomes illustration. Explore the many faces of Graphic Facilitation and meet the artists that are helping corporations and communities to transform.

This event will take place @ The Hospital Club Wednesday, May 25th 2011, from 7.30pm onwards. See you there. Don't forget to RSVP.

Event picture illustration by Joel Cooper.

Video: Open Innovations - Green Shoots

Open Innovations - Green Shoots from CreativeCapital - Events on Vimeo.

Open Innovations – Green Shoots

Open innovations approaches, where knowledge and information should not be contained, but disseminated and shared, have had a deep impact in the way companies behave and in the way new business models are being developed.

Following up from the two last CreativeCapital, where our panels talked about low impact, high volume failure, and the close relationship between sustainability and arts, come and join us for an evening of great conversation about the green shoots that are rooting open innovations.

This event will take place @ The Hospital Club Tuesday, March 22nd 2011, from 7.30pm onwards. See you there. Don't forget to RSVP.

Video: Sustainable Arts - The Super Creatives

CreativeCapital - Sustainable Arts - The Super Creatives from CreativeCapital - Events on Vimeo.

CreativeCapital - Sustainable Arts - The Super Creatives

Artists mirror the challenges of their times - and sustainability of our natural resources, planet, cities, economies are at the heart of some of the most captivating Art being created today.

Come and meet the artists and curators who are working at the heart of these approaches - join us for an evening of great conversation with the Super-Creatives.

This event will take place @ The Hospital Club Wednesday, February 23rd 2011, from 7.30pm onwards. See you there.

 CreativeCapital - Sustainable Arts - The Super Creatives

Video: Try Again, Fail Again, Fail Better

Try Again, Fail Again, Fail Better from CreativeCapital - Events on Vimeo.

Video: The Internet

CreativeCapital - The Internet from CreativeCapital - Events on Vimeo.

TRY AGAIN, FAIL AGAIN, FAIL BETTER (Samuel Beckett)

Constant, low impact, high volume, iterative failure and experimentation is at the heart of all Creative Endeavour. Cycles of Innovation, Renewal and Change define life today.

Failure can be a taboo topic though - but not anymore. We are kicking off the year with a lively conversation from members talking about their biggest and most hilarious failures, and what they learned from those experiences.

Join us for what promises to be an amusing and enjoyable evening.

This event will take place @ The Hospital Club Tuesday, January 25th 2011, from 7.30pm onwards. See you there.

CreativeCapital - The Internet

In the past one 1½ decade, the internet had an tremendous impact on our life. We are freer than ever to find information! But such freedom has also put governments on defence, some of them censoring and banning content.

Easier than ever, the internet is now a place where everyone has a say and a contribution, whether through images, video, music and even... text! What has the internet added to our lives, the world, everything? What are we in danger of losing? What needs to be created using the Internet in the future?
Come and meet the people who are constantly transforming the internet and join us for an evening with great conversation and opinions.

This event will take place @ The Hospital Club Tuesday, November 23rd 2010, from 7.30pm onwards. See you there.