Malvern Festival of Innovation is a big success | Malvern Gazette

Posted on October 17, 2019 by Design in Design Innovation | 0 Comments

THE Malvern Festival of Innovation was another great success with a series of well attended, insightful events.

Highlights included a packed auditorium of cyber security professionals and computing students on Thursday at Malvern Theatres, Grange Road, as a series of expert speakers provided updates on cyber security best practice to make organisations more secure, particularly small medium enterprises with limited budget and bandwidth,

Festival founder Dr Adrian Burden said: “Another highlight was the sell-out Science and Technology Comedy Night, hosted by Ria Lina and featuring Sam Gregson, Martin Khechara and Foxdog Studios.

Held in the newly-refurbished Malvern Radio venue, the former Con Club in Church Street, this event had the audience in stitches of laughter as experiments and demonstrations were carried out live on stage.

Earlier in the week, the festival enthused hundreds of students from around the region at the Three Counties Showground.

Here the young people got to hear from Professor Philip Moriarty of the University of Nottingham, blockchain expert Tom Alcott from BlockMark Technologies, and award-winning energy engineering specialist Yasmin Ali from BEIS.

Exhibition highlights included a cricket simulator from BatFast, a new Tesla Model 3 electric vehicle, a drone and robot workshop from the Extreme Robotics Lab at the University of Birmingham, and particle analysis equipment courtesy of Malvern Panalytical.

The after-dinner talk on Thursday evening was given by David Page, founding CEO of London-based business-mix, and he highlighted some of the innovation projects he and his team are working on to tackle environment and sustainability issues.

This topic was discussed in more detail on Friday in the Coach House Theatre, Grange Road, where Philip Mossop from Pentatonic handed round samples of new products his company has developed to truly address the sustainable economy.

The festival finished on Saturday with a double-bill.

Marty Jopson operated light microscopes live on stage to view samples of insects, spiders, plants and cells, and Dr Martin Khechera performed Mission Transmission all about microbiology and the transmission of bacteria and viruses.