Well done to all the finalists who took part in the GeoVation Camp held at Ordnance Survey head office in Southampton over the weekend. The finalists were chosen from the 43 ideas entered to our GeoVation Challenge to help people live in better places.
It was a truly amazing and inspiring weekend, and we offered support to help the 10 invited teams develop a prototype venture and become ‘match fit to pitch’ over the weekend. Helpers included service designers, Ordnance Survey and Land Registry colleagues, help with Business Models from Richard Browndson and former GeoVation winner Peter Boyce of City Farmers.
At the end of an exciting and energetic weekend, the teams were visited by the GeoVation judging panel to discuss how their ideas were progressing; they then pitched to the judges and audience for a slice £100,000 in innovation funding.
The audience also voted for their favourite idea to win the Community Award of £1,000.
The judges selected four Successful Finalists to be awarded funding to develop their ideas further.
- MyHome Energy Planner: A team from Carbon Co-op, National Energy Foundation and Urbed, with their idea for an online tool that will empower householders to understand current energy usage and take control of future energy demand. Using Ordnance Survey and Land Registry data, the team will plan a pilot first and work with local authorities and draw on their existing network of organisations. The tool will householders’ current whole house usage and prescribe a set of costed retrofit measures to reduce energy usage.
- Geo-vey: Swindon based, Dave Barter and Richard Reynolds’s idea uses data from Land Registry and Ordnance Survey to underpin the online portal, people can suggest improvements (IMPs) to their area. Sharing this through social media means they can gain support within their community and once a threshold is reached the idea can be submitted to relevant authorities for response, The portal will be free to use to individuals but organisations can also subscribe to use it to run open or closed surveys where there may be planned or suggested infrastructure improvements. The team plan to pilot this idea before rolling out.
- Democratising Development: Working on the themes of affordability and availability, Andy Reeve and Joyjit Sarjar’s idea uses Land Registry and Ordnance Survey data to identify small scale sites currently disused or unmanaged and bring these into the housing market. The team from Birmingham plan to use the WikiHouse principles of building small scale, easy to build houses to bring the option of self-build into the realms of more citizens.
- Holistic House Search: Bristol based, Ben Morley and his team’s idea for a a web service utilising Land Registry and Ordnance Survey data, along with other available data which will enable users to search for properties considering factors which contribute to the overall cost of living in that property. For instance, the service could show the impact of living 2 miles further from a workplace, if housing costs reduce but transport costs are increased, what is the overall cost over a 10 year period? The webservice could measure the impact for individuals and families who may be working in multiple locations. Holistic House Search was also the winner of the GeoVation Community Prize of £1,000 – voted for by the assembled GeoVators and helpers.
Other invited teams received feedback and the judges offered advice on how they could take their ideas forward.
The next stage is for the ideas chosen to submit a venture plan and the judging panel to meet again on 18 February 2015 to confirm the amounts of funding to be awarded.
A couple tweets from GeoVation Camp
Yay! very chuffed to be selected as a successful venture at #geovationcamp thank you @OrdnanceSurvey @LandRegGov
Congratulations to the #geovationcamp winners! We’ve had a brilliant weekend ~ thank you @GeoVation @OrdnanceSurvey #openinnovation
