Do you work in a business, or any other kind of organisation, that would benefit from increased: innovation, creativity, insightfulness or intuition? Then book a day’s planning or training at the College of St Mark & St John innovationsLab. We have the tools and the expertise to help groups define the difficult problems, issues and situations that they face, to design appropriate solutions, and convert to a rough idea into a time-tabled plan for action.

Around the UK, the iLab concept is becoming increasingly popular. In league with other popular innovationLabs, the Marjon’s iLab provides both space and expertise that is dedicated to assisting teams of decision makers to work quickly and efficiently towards the goals which they have set. In the iLab, groups use tried and tested techniques, combined with cutting edge technologies, in a bespoke environment, to by-pass the common psychological and social ‘blocks’ that often accompany the early stages of planning in many organisations.

In addition, with staff who are specialist in a wide range of Cognitive techniques and technologies, from Neuro-Linguistic Programming and Graphic Facilitation, to Soft Systems Analysis and Scenario Planning, not only can we provide a customised environment to meet your needs, but we can also input, with regard the ways in which our experts anticipate the future will unfold…thereby helping you anticipate opportunities and hindrances before they occur. And, enabling you to include appropriate caveats and contingencies into any plan that you formulate.

For best viewing, ensure that you have the appropriate Adobe Acrobat ClearType settings applied. These can be accessed from the menu item Edit/Preferences/Display. And if you have problems with dyslexia, you might like to experiment with the background colour, which can be adjusted from the menu item Edit/Preferences/Full Screen. There are many settings with which to experiment.

Some ‘readers’ might like to make use of the Acrobat facility to read text aloud, which can be found under menu item View/Read Aloud. The settings for this are under the menu item Edit/Preferences/Reading.  We use the AT&T Natural Voices, US Mike voice, which we purchased from nextup.com, in conjunction with stereo earphones.

Last, but by no means least…when printing from Acrobat Reader, you may notice that the reader tries to shrink the size of the printout to fit the bounds of your printer, rather than print to the full size of the paper you are using. This can be very frustrating! However, if you select the File/Print menu item, you will see a drop down box, labelled something like Page Scaling (depending on the version of Acrobat you are using). Set Page Scaling to None, and our work will be printed as it was intended to be read.

You can download many books and articles from the Reading Room section of our web site, along with complementary software, which is available from the section entitled BrainBox Software Downloads. In addition, you might also like to look in our Art Gallery and VideoDrome, which contain mind map and concept map posters and powerpoint presentations. And if you like what we do, then check back every few months, because we regularly update our work in response to any feedback that we receive.

With regard distribution, you may freely print and/or electronically copy any of our book files, in their entirety, as long as copyright and sponsorship acknowledgements remain fully visible in any ‘resource pack’ that you create.

Please note that we retain full copyright of our work, and so it is important that you make clear that you have sourced materials from us, under sponsorship from gutdoctor.co.uk, and in association with the College of St Mark & St John, Plymouth, Devon, in the UK.

For extracts of less than a page, we suggest the following kind of reference:

Xxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx

(Dr Peter EH Smee, Linda M Smee, September 2005,
sourced from circle-of-excellence.com,
distributed under sponsorship by gutdoctor.co.uk
in association with the College of St Mark & St John, Plymouth )