EXECUTIVE SUMMARY Q&A WE NEED QUICK WINS
Kevin Wake from Suffolk Country Council, UK was a first-time delegate at the AAL Forum and he had come to find solutions that would enable his authority to continue to deliver top class social and health services but at a lower cost. After attending a session on taking an AAL product to market, he answered a few questions about his overall impression of the Forum and AAL in general
As this is your first visit to the AAL Forum, what are your impressions so far? I am very impressed. It is very well organised and I found the first speaker very inspiring. For me, this is a huge learning curve. We have not been involved with the AAL before so I am here to learn and soak up as much as I can, ask lots of questions and I will then go back and examine the way in which we may be able to use this knowledge to take our services forward. I am involved in the external funding
team at Suffolk County Council and my primary role is to identify ideas and potential projects and look to attract funding and partners for these projects.
“When we started, we had no real idea about what to develop. We knew we wanted to develop something - a stick, an app, a wheelchair . . . we just wanted to help people move outdoors.” Marion Schoone of Happy Walker
Kevin Wake attended the Business as Usual session, part of the Education and Training track, during which there was an honest and open appraisal of some of the pitfalls many projects face when proper business planning does not take place and the user is not fully engaged with the design process.
54 | AAL FORUM 2014
You attended the session on taking a potential product developed by an AAL project to market and the problems that project encountered (see panel, left). How did you find their approach to this aspect of their work? They were very honest and open about the fact that they were learning as they were going along and that they had made mistakes on the way. So it was refreshing to learn about what they had tried and what they had learnt, what had worked and what hadn’t. But I was
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