Red Ninja Ltd

Company description

Red Ninja is a Liverpool-based design-led technology company, who collaborated on the Open Planning project with Liverpool University academics, Liverpool City Council and two Creative Exchange doctoral researchers.

Red Ninja provides a range of services such as big data analysis, software consultancy and web application development.

Project impact

When they started working with Creative Exchange they were, in their own words, 'a bootstrapped tech start up with 3 staff and little track record of working directly with local authorities and universities'. Not only did the Open Planning project develop an innovative app for new perspectives on engaging with the urban planning process, it caused significant shifts in the business practices of Red Ninja and their approach to collaborative work. Lee Omar, the CEO, describes the impact on the company as follows: "Having direct access to work with a local authority in a paid capacity gave us confidence and credibility, which enabled us to design and develop a solution that enables more visibility for citizens living in urban environments." "The Creative Exchange process was fantastic for us as we invested much more of our own time into the project to enable us to produce IP that we could commercialise. The learning of working with the city data sets as part of the Creative Exchange has enabled us to design and develop commercial products with a multinational energy company on a smart energy platform that will enable sustainable urban developments. Commercially this was valuable to us and is worth ten times the financial reward than the Creative Exchange project. This validates the extra work we did on the Creative Exchange project." Since engaging with Creative Exchange, Red Ninja employs five times as many staff and their turnover has increased six fold. The company is also continuing the collaborative approach to work, sponsoring a programme of PhD students embedded within their practices and developing their own research arm. Additionally, as a direct result of things learned from the Open Planning project, Creative Exchange is funding a new twelve-month collaboration to develop a new platform by which public data (such as that held by city councils) can be held and provided back to relevant parties in a way that can be truly open and beneficial. It will involve working with current data handling companies to develop a new system, with the aim of scaling it across the country. It will initially be trialled in three cities: Manchester, Lancaster and Liverpool.