North and Scotland
Mike Dowson
Director
Design Network North
Mike is the Director of Design Network North, a project which will increase the contribution of design to the regional economy of North East England. Mike has broad experience of product and service design, new product development and marketing in a number of global businesses, including Ford, Massey Ferguson and Draeger Safety. He has successfully developed and launched numerous new products as well as developing and implementing new strategies for marketing, branding and R&D activities.
Mike is currently creating and delivering a range of performance improvement tools and activities which are being rolled out to small and medium sized enterprises across the North East, with the aim of improving business performance and creating jobs.
Ted Matthews
Project Manager, Urban Ideas Bakery
British Council
Ted is Project Manager for the Urban Ideas Bakery as part of the British
Council's Russia and Northern Europe regional project, Creative Cities. Based in Oslo he was part of the design team that developed the international award winning Future City Game, a team-based process to create new thinking and action to improve the quality
of life in cities, now being played across Europe.
Ted instigated and co-designed the Urban Ideas Bakery process that brings together social innovators from across Europe to address challenges as defined and owned by locals in urban communities across Europe. Active in the debate around socially responsive design he also lectures and advises on how attributes relating to the sacred could be utilized to improve design and community engagement. Last year he published the short provocation ‘Sacred in the City’ as part of Norway's contribution to the Venice Biennale.
Martin Pallet
Managing Partner
Yorkshire Bank
Having spent all his career with Yorkshire Bank in various posts across the UK, Martin returned to his home region in 2003 to head up, and to help increase the Bank's presence in the Corporate and Private banking market in the North East. From small beginnings, he has now built a team of over 40 staff involved in Business banking, private banking, asset & invoice finance, Treasury & Independent Financial Advice Management.
Yorkshire Bank is part of the National Australia Bank Group (NAB). NAB is one of the world's top 30 financial services companies and serves 8 million banking and over 2.3 million wealth management customers. The Group is organised around regional businesses - National Australia Bank in Australia; Bank of New Zealand; Yorkshire Bank & Clydesdale Bank in the UK.
Being part of the regional board allows Martin to build on the national strategic partnership which Yorkshire Bank has made with BITC. This signifies the Bank's commitment to join BITC in seeking to make a difference in the local communities and markets in which we operate.
Professor Isobel Pollock
Royal Academy of Engineering visiting Professor in Engineering and Design in the School of Mechanical Engineering, University of Leeds
Audi Design Foundation Trustee
At the University of Leeds, Isobel is actively involved in design and engineering projects within the School of Engineering and the Keyworth Institute which promotes interdisciplinary working in engineering and business, and is a focus for the Knowledge Transfer Projects with local industries.
After 25 years as a senior manager in several multi-national manufacturing industries including ICI & DuPont, she has specialised in assessing and mentoring organisations in manufacturing excellence best practises.
Isobel was Vice President of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers from 1999 to 2006 and is currently Chairman of the Heritage Committee and a Pension Trustee. She is also a Board member of Engineering Council UK and Chairman of the Quality Assurance Committee. She is a Member of Court of the Worshipful Company of Engineers and a Trustee of the Audi Design Foundation.
Karen Stone
Director
Design Event
Karen is founder and director of Design Event, a not for profit organisation based in North East England. She founded the Design Event festival in 2005 which has since then grown to become a region-wide festival of innovative work across design disciplines, attracting over 20,000 visitors in 2009.
Karen has a background in marketing and business development and a strong passion for design. Prior to setting up the Design Event Festival she ran her own design store Space in Newcastle upon Tyne.
Laura Williams
Innovation Manager
Newcastle Science City
Before joining the team at Newcastle Science City as Innovation Manager, Laura successfully fought off stiff competition to gain a place on an International Leadership Placement for Creative Entrepreneurs, administered through the British Council. This placement saw her working in Hong Kong for a well-known retail company called Goods of Desire, undertaking customer service strategy and branding activities.
Previous to her stint in Hong Kong Laura co-founded Zest Innovation, the first Service Design Consultancy in the North of England, after successfully gaining £35,000 in seed-funding from Nesta. Through 3 years of successful trading Laura helped to pioneer and stimulate the market for Service Design in the North East, encouraging business leaders from many sectors to innovate their services, making them more customer-focused and efficient. Zest Innovation's clients included Designs of time (Dott 07), DigitalCity Business and Newcastle City Council. Prior to co-founding Zest Innovation Laura worked in a range of product-development organisations, undertaking activities which included both product and business development, she gained a BA first class honors on the Design for Industry Degree from Northumbria University.
Laura's work fuses together an unusual mix of creative, business and analytical skills and is currently one of the co-Directors of a pre-launch Mystery Dining company called Service Detectives.