100K for incubator

There is a great need for a creative incubator, said Bart Bikkers, a Stip city council member: “YES!Delft has proven to be huge success for techno-starters, creating more than 1,000 jobs. A YES!Delft study has now shown that there’s also a need for a similar incubator for creative start-up companies.” Graduates of TU Delft‘s faculties of Architecture and Industrial Design Engineering would especially benefit from such an incubator.
Thanks to the city’s 100,000 euro in funding, steps will now be taken to set up this creative ‘sister’ of YES!Delft, Bikkers confirms: “YES!Delft is now making a business case, from which a solid plan for setting up the creative incubator will be drafted. The incubator could fall under the banner of “YES!Delft, but it doesn’t have to.” Once this plan is formalised, the roles of TU Delft, various faculties and their graduates will be determined.

The city council also voted last week to invest in the Schie Halls, situated in the Schie River Bank area. “These buildings have been vacant for years now, yet there’s a huge demand for affordable and temporary spaces where TU Delft students and others can work on projects”, Bikkers says. This demand is partly owing to the fact that many projects now being pursued at YES!Delft on the Rotterdamseweg will have to relocate. This includes rooms currently used by Stylos, the faculty of Architecture’s study association.
These project groups must relocate because YES!Delft is moving to the Bandridge building in Science Park Technopolis, which is currently under development. Last week this building was officially purchased, and YES!Delft expects to move in around June 2010.
Bikkers says that an added benefit of this investment plan is that all the new activity in and around the Schie Halls could reinvigorate the old and somewhat dilapidated Schie River Bank area: “It would then also become an interesting area for redevelopment.”

Imagine Picasso sketching the silhouette of a beautiful woman in a Paris café. Or entrepreneur Rollin King, who used the back of a bar napkin to sketch a business idea – a simple triangle connecting Dallas, Houston and San Antonio – that would ultimately become the world’s most profitable airline – Southwest. Or ever seen the first sketches of Walt Disney’s Space Mountain? That’s right, all true stories of successful napkin sketches. As it turns out, there’s a way we can all become proficient napkin sketchers to express and set our visual thoughts free.
And so it was that I recently found myself pitching an idea to some friends over dinner at the Aula. The handiest communication device I had was a ‘Sodexho’ napkin, which I enthusiastically proceeded to sketch my idea on while talking. The sight of napkin and pen drew my audience closer to see what I was drawing. This is how the napkin sketch shown here came to be. AS the idea of my napkin sketch had sparked some interest, I decided to explore it further, only to find out that other napkin sketches had already been made famous.
My sketch shown here is about a mobile phone application: a virtual mouse for the real world that allows a user to click on a building and get information about it. The bottom of the sketch shows a virtual bullet that is fired when a user clicks in the direction of a building. Each numbered step on the sketch tracks the path of this virtual bullet until it hits a building, the point at which coordinates are looked up and relevant information is returned to the user (e.g. a webpage). The upper part of the sketch shows a user who is having dinner at Aula and ‘clicks’ on the library to see at what time it closes during exams.
After about twenty napkins and many baffled looks from the Aula cashiers and my friends, my napkin masterpiece was finished. I then decided to find out more about napkin sketches.
My starting point for researching napkin sketches was a Youtube clip of Dan Roam’s ‘Authors
So now we would like to get you – TU Delft student – involved in the fun by inviting you to join our great napkin sketch contest. All you got to do is send us your best napkin sketch (preferably on the back of a ‘Sodexho’, but we accept other brands). Scan and email your napkin sketches to d.mcmullin our limit is one napkin per person.