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Published at: 13/12/11 17:00:00
Although our business is based in the online world, we fully support the direction of Mary Portas’s recommendations in her 28-point plan to save the high street.
Her proposals are well considered and we can understand why they have received the backing of the British Retail Consortium and the Federations of Small Business. We may not be retailers but we’re certainly a small business and so we have more than a little in common with them.
We particularly liked Mary’s ideas about co-creation because that’s the business we’re in. She told the BBC this morning: 'They're civic places, they're not private spaces, and therefore we as customers should stop being so passive and actually be co-creators, with the councils, with the landlords, with the businesses, with the retailers.”
We can help with that. Our Ideas Labs bring people with different skills and interests together to develop ideas and find solutions to big problems. And this sounds like a really big problem since, to quote Mary: ‘Many are sickly, others are on the critical list and some are now dead.’
Ideas Labs could, for very little cost and even less effort, connect all those with an interest in saving or reviving their town centre. How about bringing together landlords, retailers, community groups and shoppers in a creative and fully facilitated online space without the constraints of time or place to work together to ensure a bright future for their town centre?
We can’t guarantee to involve Mary but we can bring some of the country’s leading retail experts into the online Ideas Lab for any town that wants to find out how effective co-creation can be in solving problems and generating ideas.
We live in the real world and we would like to see Guildford, Godalming, High Wycombe, Slough and every town in the country live long and prosper. We’re so serious about it that we’ll run an Ideas Lab free for the first town to take up the challenge of co-creation.
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