News
Dr Joanne Tippett turns University research into social enterprise with the launch of Ketso
On February 18 2010 SED lecturer Dr Joanne Tippett launched Ketso, a social enterprise born out of fifteen years of development. Ketso was invented in Southern Africa and has been tested in Joanne's research within the School and supported by UMIP. This research was shortlisted for the 2007 Michael Young Prize for impact from ESRC funded research.
Supported by the Manchester Beacon for Public Engagement, the launch of Ketso was held at Manchester Museum. Over 100 participants from varying occupations and backgrounds came for these experiential workshop sessions. Participants came from organisations as diverse as City Councils, the NHS, the Environment Agency, the Forestry Commission, Groundwork, northern universities and private companies.
The event was hugely successful, demonstrating Ketso's ability to be used by a wide and diverse audience.
Ketso is a hands-on kit for creative groupwork. It offers a 'workshop in a bag' with the tools needed to facilitate engaging meetings, including a simple-to-follow user guide, best-practice workshop principles and highly visual training aides. Due to its hands-on and visual nature, it enables input from a wide range of people, including people with different languages and levels of experience.
The package provides a set of tabletop tools that can be used to capture and display people's ideas as they form. It consists of colourful 'branches', 'leaves', and other materials, which can be placed on a felt workspace and easily moved around in response to changing discussion. Ketso is re-usable, and comes in a handy carrying bag, which is made by an Ethical Trading Initiative certified jute factory in Kolkata.
Ketso was commended for the best plan from the social sciences, arts and humanities in the 2008 Research Council UK 's Business Plan competition.
Further Ketso launch events are being held around the UK in March and May 2010. For further information please see www.ketso.com or email holly@ketso.com.
26 March 2010