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Equine Tech

Creative crossover in the Equine industry

The Equine Tech creative cross-over event was a collaboration between Askham Bryan College and Science City York. The intention was to use open innovation and collaborative process to bring together those working in the equine industry and those in the creative and digital sector to explore new ideas and create new products solutions to challenges experienced by horse owners, riders, and carers, in both the leisure and racing industries.

Held in June at Askham Bryan College, the two-day hackathon-style event used Viatic’s open innovation process to support the participants through the process. We helped the partners prep for the day and designed the programme, taking people through the process of understanding and clarifying the challenges, exploring existing solutions and their limitations, coming up with new ideas and crafting those into feasible business proportions.

As ever, the events were busy and intense, with significant cross-collaboration amongst the groups. In the end, Smart Stable emerged as the winner team, with Gait Keeper named runner up. Smart Stable received £10,000 prize to develop and prototype their products, along with an additional support package to help them.

Viatic and Askham Bryan College are now supporting the Smart Stable team as they establish their new company and develop their prototype products for showcasing at Venturefest Yorkshire in November 2016. There they will have the opportunity to showcase their prototypes, test their future ideas and (crucially) seek further capital from investors at the event.

Once again, this event showed the power of open innovation and of bringing people from a range of disciplines together in a structured way.

“very noticeable with the winning team was they had lots of different people with lots of different ideas and found a way how they could combine them into something very innovative”
Chris Danks, Chair of Science City York and Equine Tech event judge.

"bringing those different skill-sets together has come up with a lot of ideas that wouldn’t have been generated by those individuals alone"
Loni Loftus, Askham Bryan College



-- Video still in production - coming soon! --

Equine Tech video on You Tube


Project Info

  • Client Askham Bryan College and Science City York
  • Date Summer/Autumn 2016
  • Type Open Innovation Event
  • Place York
  • #EquineTech

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