Richie runs incubation and graduate entrepreneurship services for the University of South Wales and manages the Startup Stiwdio at their Cardiff Campus, where he supports mainly creative industry and digital startup companies. He also lectures at the Royal Welsh College of Music & Drama MA Arts Management, and is an arts, innovation, equality and diversity consultant, currently working for National Museums Wales and the Arts Council of Wales. Richie is a Non- Executive Board Member of Creative Wales, a Trustee of Newport Live Chairing their Arts Committee and a board member of Gentle Radical (a culture and social change organisation based in Cardiff). He is also an inaugural member of the Creative Cardiff Advisory Group, set up in 2020 to inform our work and plans, challenge us, fire our ambitions and aspirations, and help spread the word about Cardiff’s creative economy, at home and further afield.
Richie writes:
In my role supporting entrepreneurship at the University of South Wales (USW), I only need look at the creativity, passion and innovation of new business ideas I have been able to support in the past year and those startups just beginning their journeys, to know that we can achieve even more than we did before the COVID-19 outbreak.
For example Startup Stiwdio newest member is Llusern Scientific, who have developed a rapid and affordable COVID-19 point of care test which can produce results within 30 minutes. This innovation could mean people being tested before they arrive in work or college and the results known by the time they’ve sat and waited over a morning coffee.
But we must remember that 2020 was also an incredibly difficult year for most of our South Wales based creative freelancers and startups. Members of the Startup Stiwdio lost their customers almost immediately when the first lockdown occurred. Yet their ability to never give up by constantly developing new products or services, relevant to a changed COVID-19 society, has also inspired me throughout the past year.
The pandemic has also been a catalyst for USW to establish its first Entrepreneurship Summer School (with over 50 graduate participants) and its first dedicated graduate startup fund enabling four new startup companies to begin trading. In an economic situation where finding a job has become significantly harder many people have realised they can rely on their own creativity and make their own work.
Adversity does lead to greater levels of innovation and creativity, as we have also seen from the response both globally and across Wales to the Black Lives Matter movement and the ‘We Shall Not Be Removed’ campaign. The arts and creative industries sectors in the Cardiff Capital Region, in particular, need to lead the response to the multiple threats of COVID19 (health inequalities, mental health impacts, reductions in economic and social development) coupled with increasing social divisions from a lack of diversity and equality plus the ongoing climate emergency. It was therefore encouraging for me to support Creative Cardiff’s project Our Creative Cardiff which commissioned 14 local artists and creative producers to tell stories which clearly demonstrated the wide range of talent and diversity the city has to offer.
If this pandemic has shown us one thing it must be that we have more in common with each other than we realised. Initiatives such as Creative Cardiff will have an increasingly important role in bringing isolated people and separated communities together, throughout the region, to share experiences and collectively and creatively tackle these threats with positivity and confidence that 2021 will end much better than it has begun.
