Creative D
I spent my morning in the “City Wall Space” of the Wood Quay Venue which is quite an amazing venue I have to say. As explained on their website, the room features the original Hiberno Norse City Wall that dates from 1100AD.
But the wall wasn’t the reason of me spending my morning there! It was the first event of the year of a fairly new Networking Event in Dublin called CreativeD, specifically designed for the creative industries.
I wasn’t sure in what way this event would benefit me but I had the feeling that it wouldn’t be a complete waste of time anyway. So yesterday, I finally paid the €90 for the year membership which includes five 3-hours events starting from today until May 2011.
And the tagline of today’s event was…
Competitive Creativity – How can we be more Innovative?
Well, I didn’t think it would be as inspiring as it has been.
First, I met some lovely people from different creative industries (writing, photography, furniture design, animation and of course other web and graphic designers) and it was very nice talking about their visions, their projects, their struggles… It wasn’t only about selling yourself to other people and giving as many business cards as possible, which was the main reason why I haven’t been to any business network groups until now. I am not a sales person and I don’t particularly like to repeat the same speech over and over again.
I would rather go and meet people and talk about different things, and maybe at the end of an interesting conversation, realise that the other person needs my services!
The other side of this event, which wasn’t only based on networking, was the presentation given by Cathal Gaffney, Co-owner of Brown Bag Films. He was really good. Really good speaker, good power-point presentation (and that’s hard to do), good story and good examples.
I think everybody in the room could identify himself in Cathal’s experience in some way, even if I am not going to use the part regarding the importance of company culture when hiring people before a few years.
Other than that – without giving everything away – he talked to us about writing a realistic business strategy which matches your personal goals and sticking to it. He also talked, of course, about innovation and how it could save a company from ending its journey early.
After Cathal, George Boyle, architect, presented to us a very nice project called Fumbally Square linked to Fumbally Exchange.
Fumbally Square is a new office development that has been redesigned in order to host Fumbally Exchange, a community of design-focussed small businesses, sole traders and start-ups.
George explained how for a very low rent, these professionals could come and work in this office space in a very flexible way.
That would definitely something I would have a look at if I can’t work from home anymore and why not for a few weeks if I start to feel very lonely!
Let’s not forget about the (very important) coffee/tea as well as viennoiseries and sandwiches offered to us!
Thank you to the organisers which dynamically managed the event by directing the networking part with a little question/answer game and got us to talk about our experiences to fill a big paper board about Creativity and Innovation.
Well done CreativeD and I am really looking forward to the next event!
Leave a Reply