Bristol Tech Festival: Our top picks for Friday

All this week on TechSPARK we’ll be highlighting a few of the events from this year’s all-digital Bristol Tech Festival – just in time for you to sign up for the next day. If you’d like to see all the event hosted each day head to the Bristol Tech Festival website.

Friday morning at Bristol Tech Festival

Data ethics of the future and its impact on innovation

09:00 – 10:00, Friday 13th November

Data has become central to the way in which we live and work. Technology companies of the future will be founded on the use and exploitation of data but also judged on their legal and ethical use of that data.

We will look at the current legal and ethical framework for data ethics; consider how this is likely to evolve in the future and what technology companies should be doing now to get ahead of the curve.

Financial Technology in Research and Education

10:00 – 11:30, Friday 13th November

What is Fintech and what do we expect it to be in 10 or 20 years? How is higher education adapting to the pedagogic requirements of Fintech, and its multi-disciplinary nature.

Join the UWE Fintech team, as provide an insight into Fintech education in academia, its impact with industry, and its place in applying understanding in technologies like Blockchain, Big Data and AI!

The session will include a panel with members of academia, big industry players and local start-ups.

Also on Friday morning:

Friday afternoon at Bristol Tech Festival

Reimagining Digital Placemaking: Technology and the Public Realm towards 2030

14:00 – 15:00, Friday 13th November

How is technology influencing the design of our towns, cities and places of the future and how can we creatively engage communities in place-based design? Why do we need to reboot ‘The Digital City’ and what are the implications for minoritised communities?

Join an engaging panel comprising Fellows from the Bristol+Bath Creative R+D programme and beyond in exploring the future of digital placemaking. Hear some of the innovative and varied conceptual approaches and real-life applications of plce-based technologies – from social dreaming to digital twins – in the development of the future public realm.

Be Prepared to Forget Everything You Know About Innovation!

15:00 – 16:00, Friday 13th November

Innovation will only succeed if you embed it in your culture. It cannot be a bolt-on. We aim to debunk some of the myths surrounding what innovation is and how it’s achieved.

In this thought-provoking session, we will examine how local success story Viper Innovations created an Innovation Value Chain and put it at the core of their organisation. The result enabled them to successfully pivot their business to enter and embed themselves into new horizontal markets.

By the end of the session, you will be able to re-examine and challenge traditional attitudes to innovation and gain some insight into how to future-proof your organisation against the VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous) future that we all face.