Comments by
pindec
As a core part of its digital strategy, I would love to see AWM funding a city centre Rapid Innovation Lab with flexible co-working, meeting and workshop space, a set of experimental kit plus support staff, plus additional funding with which to grow an agile community that can freely innovate and self-organise around technological and funding opportunities.
The lab would have core kit such a few fast desktops; full range of OSs; dedicated application and database servers; plus more experimental kit like UMPCs, bunch of mobile kit including NFC enabled phones; all the USB sensors you can think of; a few microprocessors; gumstix; RFID tags of all flavours; lots of power/connectivity for people to bring their own stuff; bunch of software; all the leads in the world etc. etc. plus access to servicing staff to keep it all running, plus appropriately techie facilitator staff to help people experiment as required, plus a lab director to oversee everything, plus space(s) for working, co-working, experimenting, learning and meeting.
The lab would have a (free) membership system to enable people/organisations/university researchers/whoever to sign up to the innovation community. The community can then self-organise around the Lab - including deciding how to use additional funds e.g. to purchase equipment and/or expertise and/or software as required. This approach would enable local members interested in innovating in the space to define and agree what they need to move forward, rather than AWM trying to deliver a top-down solution which will inevitably be not techie enough for some, and too techie for others. It would be important that the lab director were independent from AWM and other funding bodies; they should reflect the interests of the community rather than the funders.
Members of the innovation community can then book out time with kit and/or experts and/or drop in for ad-hoc co-working and/or brainstorming sessions. Interested experts (whether innovation members or from outside) can offer to host sessions - either to showcase their work or to host more workshop / seminar type sessions to disseminate knowledge/skills. So one week you might be able to join a session building ways to extract then mash up raw data from Council web pages; another week you can start doing some rapid prototyping of mobile games that integrate with environment sensors; another week it’s finding out about the most recent AI research from local Universities – with each session being appropriately captured via blogs/flip/ qik/twitter/wiki/whatever. Sessions run when a min number of people sign up – so the space is used to deliver sessions in which at least x number of people are interested. Companies looking for collaborators could also showcase their work and/or have a (virtual?) space to seek collaborators.
The lab should also have several studio areas for more permanent sites for startups/individuals/small SMEs who don’t yet have a dedicated office - say each “studio” area hosts a company free for max x (3?) months; these “interns” are then voted for by the innovation community based on a pitching session every x months.
The lab should host regular open studio sessions where users/interested bunnies/press/whoever are invited in to see what everyone is up to. The lab could also use these sessions for user testing. The lab could also host investment and project pitching sessions, giving individuals/organisations with spare capital and/or problems they need solving by an ICT/multimedia company a space in which to meet/talk to those members seeking funds. Organisations within the West Midlands that require expert help in digital technology would gravitate towards the lab, which would provide a focal centre for innovators to meet those with problems that need solving.
The lab should also have a regular prize fund to hand out innovation grants to members for experimentation purposes; if a requirement of that innovation is that the code is all open source, then the innovation lab could also become a repository for experimental code, on which everyone is free to build. The fund would be open to individual members/companies and to collaborations - so members are free to join up together for short, sharp burts of funded dev to see how it works out. The secondary characteristics of the funding should be that barriers to accessing it are low (swift, clear, open approval process; little/no paperwork; few outputs other than either running code or analysis of why the approach/code doesn’t work; requirement to use agile development methods rather than closely specifying the deliverable before dev starts).
Members could then use the innovation funds/lab to broaden/deepen their knowledge in their areas of interest, and contribute to the shared knowledge, then move on using that knowledge and/or with new collaborators they’ve met through the lab to develop their own private solutions that they can make money out of. Alternatively, split the grants so a proportion of them require open-source code as a deliverable (with higher awards to reflect the fact you’re paying for the IP), the rest where the IP resides with the recipient.
As AWM’s digital goals change, then some proportion of the grants could be themed. With a swift grant-giving process mediated through the Innovation Lab, AWM then would have direct access to a group of interested, motivated innovators ready to rumble – this would enable both AWM and innovators within the city to respond much faster to economic and technological shifts.
If AWM wanted some of the outputs of the lab to be available on the FIZ, you could simply open a pinhole to the lab servers - so all the installed apps are visible free on Wi-Fi devices in the city centre, giving the lab a larger potential set of (test) users.
The city centre location and open sessions would make the innovation visible and accessible. People, knowledge, skills and money would coalesce around the lab.
*and* it should host a BarCamp
*and* we should call it Cow Orking 
Examples of this kind of working:
1. Bristol’s Pervasive Media studio: http://www.pmstudio.co.uk/ (note the open sessions; workshops; user testing days)
2. Brighton’s “The Werks” co-working model: http://thewerks.org.uk/about (though the emphasis is not so much on the technical innovation so they can afford to be self-funded through subscrptions, the model is very interesting)
3. BarCamp: http://barcamp.org/ (Birmingham needs one! *cough* manchester’s had one *cough*)
4. Birmingham’s Hack Space: http://groups.google.com/group/birmingham-hack-space [disclaimer: I'm a member] (clear evidence of demand for this kind of thing)