INNOVATION UK39 Creating success With an exciting new programme of projects, the Creative Industries KTN is making the most of future opportunities and challenges The UK's creative industries are one of the great eco-nomic success stories of recent times. They generate rev-enues of nearly £ 70bn a year and account for thousands of jobs. They are also a great powerhouse for innova-tion, with entire sectors of the global creative indus-tries market pioneered here thanks to UK- led inventions and technologies. However, the pace of technological change and the ambi-tions of global competitors means that UK organisa-tions must remain at the forefront of innovation and knowledge sharing. To accelerate this important work, the UK's Creative Industries Knowledge Transfer Network has launched an exciting new programme of 14 projects - Beacons for Innovation - it will tackle over the next two years. Each Beacon Project will examine the opportunities and challenges faced by the creative industries in relation to technology- focused innovation. These 14 themes have been identified through extensive consultation with leading experts from across the UK. Each project will be run to a tight timetable to ensure it delivers real business value. A community will be created around each Beacon, with live events and online activities. These will identify the priority innovation and business needs that will enable organisations to turn the visions of the future that are generated by this work into business successes for the UK. John Cass, director of the Creative Industries KTN says: " The Beacon Projects involve innovators from all sectors of the creative industries and from across the UK. This is a unique opportunity to get involved with big debates and share great ideas with people who want to make things happen." The first three Beacon Projects have been launched. The first two look at digital content, what sort of devices will we be using to access content and how will networks need to develop to enable people to move, manage, track and store data. The third Beacon examines knowledge transfer and how the UK's creative industries can better exploit KT opportunities. Jeremy Davenport, deputy director of the KTN, says: " As we spoke to people it became apparent that issues around digital content were vital to many areas of the creative industries and we are sure this Beacon will pro-voke a lot of interesting discussions. " While knowledge transfer is an area where the creative industries do not engage as much as other sectors, we need to examine what can be done to address this as KT clearly offers huge opportunities." The KTN has launched a social- networking site to sup-port the Beacon Projects and this will be at the heart of the communities and the Beacon Project activities. However, there will also be live events in various locations around the UK. John adds: " We want people from all areas of the creative industries and technology- related organisations to get involved, whether they work for multinationals or start-ups, academia or funding organisations. " This is a very exciting opportunity to help shape the landscape for the creative industries and ensure that the UK remains a world- class innovator." Membership of the Creative Industries KTN is free and people can register and read the full Beacons for Innovation report at: www. creativeindustriesktn. org. Creative Industries Creative industries ktn

40INNOVATION UKINNOVATION Digital Business is a new KTN that combines a range of programmes and activities to meet the demands of an ever- growing industry Doing business in the digital age As part of the Technology Strategy Board rationalisa-tion and refocusing of the Knowledge Transfer Network ( KTN) portfolio, a new KTN has been formed from the Grid Computing Now! Cyber- Security and Location & Timing KTNs. The Digital Business KTN ( name to be confirmed) will carry forward the programmes and activities of the Cyber- Security and Location & Timing communities into a new age of digital business, where the ability to operate securely across cyber- space and assure the quality of data used in building up patterns of activity are critical. Grid Computing Now! will evolve into a new programme focused on Scalable Computing. Challenges of meeting huge peaks of demand for serv-ices discussed in this publication previously have been highlighted as priorities in the new programme, namely delivering IT as a service; sustainability and the design of distributed services/ applications. The ability to utilise IT as a service in the organisation; ie the ability to utilise on- demand resources to extend a computing infrastructure; or to adopt a platform for business activities such as delivering an e- commerce package for online business or to deliver functionality directly to end users through software as a service. These capabilities for on- demand computing are at the leading edge of company requirements as the new wave of inno-vation and enthusiasm related to the Cloud and the use of the Internet is unleashed. The new Scalable Computing programme will also feature further work in the area of sustainability. How will data-centres evolve to meet the challenge of cap and trade on carbon emissions? Where is the trade- off between owned and rented capacity? How will business and government services be best delivered in this new age of controls ( and shortages) of energy? What are the trade- offs for knowl-edge workers in terms of facilities on the desktop, at home or travelling? The programme will seek to expand its understanding and publish up- to- date information to guide the activities of network members building on the work already done by Grid Computing Now! Finally, the evolution of large computing infrastructures and the widespread adoption of multi- core comput-ing represent new opportunities to design distributed applications and services to enable highly flexible and capable deployments to meet the peaks and demands of customers in this age of the " always on" user. Building upon lessons carefully captured in the parallel computing world over the past few generations, the need to structure programmes and data more carefully to allow multiple accessors; the need to design algorithms such that they can operate in parallel and the need to design deliverable functionality in parallel to many different end users will all be highlighted here. As ICT increasingly moves to mobile devices, location and timing technology has a vital role in the explosion of location- aware services for professional and mass-market applications. Location technology underpins a wide range of services including logistics, intelligent transport, location- aware gaming, autonomous vehi-cle control, dynamic traffic routing, assisted living, provision of location- sensitive information and virtual or augmented reality. A vast range of new location aware applications are becoming available for mobile devices via the iPhone Digital Business Digital business ktn