Case Studies

2015 - present

Sheffield Digital is the association for the digital industries in Sheffield, with a mission to develop the best possible environment for setting up, working in and growing digital businesses in Sheffield and the surrounding region. It does this by connecting, promoting and representing the people and businesses of Sheffield’s digital industries.

Sheffield Digital provides a media platform to communicate to its audience as well as a jobs board, aggregated events calendar, community forum, newsletter and a range of membership services including a professional mentorship scheme, policy briefings and technology leadership networking.

Unfolding founder Chris Dymond also co-founded Sheffield Digital and has had an active role as co-director since its inception in 2015.

2017 - 2018

The Digital Island Programme is the digital strand of the Isle of Wight’s regeneration strategy, looking specifically at the role of digital technologies in the Island’s economic and social development.

Unfolding led the initial engagement and strategy work on behalf of smart societies consultancy Perform Green and Isle of White Council. This work involved in-person and online stakeholder engagement workshops, both around general shape and progress of the strategy development, and on specific elements of the strategy such as connectivity, as well as interviews and network-building. Unfolding also provided content support for the Solent Digital Conference, held in Newport in September 2017.

In April 2018, this digital regeneration strategy work was awarded Smart Island of the Year at the Smart Island World Congress.

2015-2016

BiDiS, or “Big Data in Sheffield”, was a project to investigate the shared issues around data among the city’s five major “anchor institutions”: Sheffield City Council, the two Universities (The University of Sheffield & Sheffield Hallam University), and the two major NHS Foundation Trusts (Sheffield Teaching Hospitals & Sheffield Children’s Hospital). These challenges related to significant increases in the volume and frequency of data these organisations were producing the resulting storage, management & analysis requirement, and, crucially, whether these organisations could work together to address their common issues and find ways to share and connect data in order to bring greater benefit to the city and it’s citizens.

This process involved stakeholder engagement, the development of a framework of challenges across the organisations, and the production of an all day “Actionable Data Workshop” involving local and national stakeholders who engaged on issues surrounding health and research across the whole data lifecycle.

2014-2015

The SmartSheffield programme was commissioned by Sheffield First Partnership and the Sheffield Executive Board to explore what a local “smart city strategy” could look like. The core of this work consisted of establishing a ‘city room’ engagement space and collecting challenges along with historic, current and proposed technology projects from a broad range of city actors and organisations over a three month period.

The insight gathered during this process informed the draft exit report, which laid out a thematic framework to guide policy-making as well as a roadmap of current and future activity, and recommendations.

As a result of this work, Sheffield was listed as a “Challenger City” in the Huawei UK Smart Cities Index, 2016.

2011-2013

The XLR8 Innovation programme was a multi-stakeholder initiative developed by the Research and Innovation Office at Sheffield Hallam University, Creative Sheffield the city’s economic development agency, Gripple Ltd and Unfolding. The programme consisted of two parts: firstly a series of 1-day workshops that brought people from the city’s engineering and digital sectors, and students, together to learn about innovation methods and processes both theoretical and in practical exercises; and secondly the creation of a citywide network of innovation practitioners that met every two months.