Speakers
Ross Cox
Ross is the CEO of Dispace Technology, the team behind Switch Events Management software. Ross teamed up with Ben Hancy (MCR systems) to start Dispace in 2018 to help venues make more of their spaces and facilities by enabling live online booking. It has since developed into a sophisticated events and venue management solution that helps clients in the higher education, local government, charity and commercial sectors.
Ross’s background is in lending, developing technology and data products to help with access to credit, and ethical debt management. He co-founded two successful start-ups by building disruptive solutions to meet a change in customer and market demands.
The common theme in his career is challenging the status quo by understanding problems and opportunities people and organisation’s face, why they are important to them and how products and services can be developed to meet those needs. At Dispace they work with a design thinking methodology to stay aligned to customer and market needs and develop Switch accordingly.
Ross also believes strongly in flexible working and is proud that Dispace is a distributed team that is focused on output and inclusivity rather than offices and rigid working hours.
Beyond work Ross coaches both his children’s football teams (or did until his daughter upgraded to the professionals at Derby County) and is the commercial lead for his village community trust that acquired the local pub and has seen it thrive beyond their wildest expectations!
Title: Ideation: using design thinking to define and solve your problems
It’s the morning after the night before. So, we need a high energy, high participation session to fire everyone into life. Hold onto your lanyards…
Design thinking is essentially the process of looking at a problem with a ‘beginner’s mind’ to find answers without prejudice, so that we can open our minds to possibilities without a pre-formed expectation of the outcome.
It’s a set of tools and techniques that help us rationally define a problem or opportunity, develop ideas to tackle it, and quickly test and learn from solutions so that we end up with valuable products and services that meet people’s needs.
What better way to engage everyone than by taking something that you collectively acknowledge is a challenge and collaborating to come up with some powerful ideas about moving forward.
We’re going to focus on a topic that AVS members have regularly raised as a challenge for them – how to handle enquiry volume when everyone is so stretched for time?
Ross will use his experience from the development of Switch to give everyone an insight into design thinking, and run an ideation exercise on the topic above.
This session is a great opportunity to work together and come up with some new perspectives on something that is impacting you and your teams back by using some simple but powerful Ideation techniques.
Definitely worth the early start!
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