Innovate Malvern
Innovate Malvern is a social enterprise that promotes all aspects of innovation at a grass-roots level in and around Malvern with the aim of highlighting the importance of science, technology, engineering & mathematics (STEM) amongst people of all ages.
With a buzzing series of events that are interesting, engaging, and informative, Innovate Malvern encourages rail travel to venues and myriad collaborations between attendees, organisers and visitors.
The annual Malvern Festival of Innovation marks its 10th edition in 2021 and the 4th-10th October 2021 Great Malvern comes alive with Next Generation Innovator schools’ days, business-themed symposia, evening talks, and Family Events.
The overall aims of the project have been to promote and showcase STEM, attract visitors to the town by rail, and encourage entrepreneurship and collaboration through community networking.
The overall CCIF project also included the associated Malvern Science in the Park, staged in Priory Park on Saturday 26th June 2021. This series of open-air exhibits and demonstrations relating to physics, chemistry, biology, materials, geology and astronomy attracted an audience of over 2000 people.
This series of open-air exhibits and demonstrations relating to physics, chemistry, biology, materials, geology, astronomy and more, attracted an audience of over 2000 people.
The project certainly lived up to its title to INNOVATE MALVERN.
Copy of post-event communication from 26 June Science in The Park:
Thank you so much for supporting Malvern Science in the Park this year; whether financially, with setting-up, exhibiting, demonstrating, science-busking, marshalling or packing-up (or in many cases most of the above!). Please pass this message on to your colleagues who helped out too.
Here are some comments from the event:
“We all had a fantastic time, had to drag E away after 5hrs, she loved it and so did her friends. Thank you.” J.K.
“My son, who told me science was his least favourite subject, had a great time, thank you.” J.W.
“Thank you for an amazing Science in the Park. We ended up staying for 6 hours! The boys really enjoyed it and learned so much – we discovered T who is 6 loves microbiology and was good on the Periodic table whereas his 8 year old brother has always liked Geology and rocks and the cyber security challenges.” H.O.
Footfall is usual very hard to estimate in a public venue with multiple entrances like Priory Park, but one silver-lining with all the COVID-safety measures is that we have a much clearer idea this year:
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We ’sold-out’ all 2000 half-hour time-slots available by the afternoon before.
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There were ~200 unique bookings with an average party size of 3.75 people.
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This meant 750 different people had pre-booked tickets for sometime during the day, planning to spend on average 1-1.5hrs at the event.
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Of course not everyone with a ticket turned up, but equally we know there were quite a few without tickets who did turn up, and others that had only booked one time slot thinking this was an entrance time and they could stay longer. So our marshals used discretion to let as many in without tickets as well.
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Analysing the marshal records we see that we processed just over 2000 people through the zones, averaging 335 people per zone (29 per zone per half an hour on average) which was very much as we planned it. And given that there were people outside the zones at any given time as well doing the trails, walking between zones, buying ice cream, talking to us at the information desk, we estimate about 1040 different visitors attended the event on Saturday.
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On top of that, we had just over 100 of you participating as exhibitors/buskers/helpers.
A really great event and a credit to the organiser.
Dr Adrian Burden
Managing Director | Innovate Malvern CIC
Wyche Innovation Centre, Walwyn Road, Malvern