Conference theme: STEM Innovation at the heart of wealth creation

I’ll try and live blog here a bit today.

Hearing about current challenges in the engineering sector.

Mike Pilbeam – Cloud Computing

Every single business relies on IT and it has become mission critical for many.

Cloud Computing offers the opportunity to create what you need.

Cloud is essential to the next generation workforce. We need a symbiotic relationship between young and old – conscious incompetence (old) and unconscious incompetence (young) need each other.

Cloud brings the opportunity to ‘pay as you grow’ – it really is the panacea!

Eg. A small business will have an accounting system that grows with them rather than having to buy a small accounting system, then a bigger one etc.

The impact of this is that people will move jobs more regularly – younger people can use their social networking skills here.

ICT has to be an essential part of the curriculum to support cloud computing.

We need to incubate the attitude of value added in education.

Colleges are a mine of innovation – they need to leverage their IP and trade it rather than keep it to themselves.