anne miller's blog

Now in its second year, the Enterprise Fellowship Scheme is run by Anglia Ruskin’s Centre for Enterprise Development and Research (CEDAR) and is open to anyone in the county who has a bright business idea and is looking for financial backing.

This is an interesting looking conference at Murray Edwards college, with an impressive range of speakers from Satish Kumar to Juliet Davenport.

The cost for local residents is very reasonable £160 or £70 for students

The Carbon Trust is launching an ‘Entrepreneurs’ Fast Track’ scheme. Applications open in September 2010

This looks as if it will be more useful for most Green Enterprise members than the previous scheme, as it's giving more emphasis to supporting early stage proof of concept and prototype development, rather than just focussing companies that are nearly ready for major VC investment. The scheme will also consolidate its existing Applied Research Grants and Business Incubation products into one service.

The Ordnance Survey is keen to encourage the use of their (newly released) open mapping data, so is running 3 competitions to find the best ideas that use this. The first "GeoVation Challenge" for 2010-2011 is “How can Britain feed itself?” The closing date is 3 September (12:00 noon)

The prize is

The Technology Strategy Board is launching an SBRI (Small Business Research Initiative) programme to retrofit government buildings in London so they are more energy efficient and have lower carbon dioxide emissions.

They particularly welcome applications from small businesses, with innovative ideas.  Successful applicants get £20K phase1 funding  for a design proposal, followed by phase 2 funding for  a demonstration

Renewables East are putting on a conference on feed-in tarriffs in Cambridge Wednesday 3 March. Details here

It looks very interesting for Green Enterpreneurs.  Normal entry price is £50, but its FREE for Green Enterprise Community  Members if you email nigeldent@renewableseast.org.uk

Anne

Green Enterprise meetings will be on 1 March, 8 April, 24 May, 28 June, 27Sept, 25 October, 22 November, 20 December 2010

The more observant of you will notice that this is a migration from the 1st monday of the month to the 4th Monday. (The meeting room availablity is better on the 4th monday)

Anne

Just read an interesting article in a Guardian supplement, pointing out that later this year the government will be launching a new initiative, expecting all schools to cut their carbon emissions.  School budgets are also likely to be under great pressure, so there may be an interesting opportunity for IT savvy green entrepreneurs to help them work out what to do.

This generated a nice buzz.

Although the formal session of the first meeting of Green-enterprise community finished at 9:45, discussions continued in the pub afterwards until we got thrown out at midnight!  It looked to me as if at least one third of the participants had made useful connections. Quite a few were arranging to meet together afterwards.

It’s clear there is a hunger for a Green enterprise community of some sort, although as one might expect, people’s needs vary according to what stage of the journey they’re on. 

Having spent the last week in Copenhagen, doing what I can  to help get a fair, strong and binding climate deal, I'm back in the UK feeling rather depressed about the prospects. The combination of politicians, self interested lobby groups, bureacratic secrecy, mutual suspicion and  widespread frustration is a toxic combination.

However the trip started me thinking about Euro Climate Heaven and Euro Climate Hell