Rory O'Connor from The Creativity Hub is the man behind Rory's Story Cubes. Here he gives us the lowdown on what the Creativity Hub is all about and its plans to be a global business.

You’ve been in Germany at the International Toy Fair — what’s been the response to your products?

There's been an incredibly positive response received from distributors and retailers across Europe and Israel. They have all commented on the great concept and high production values, which really means something when you see the quality of the games coming out if Germany in particular.

A few people were also incredibly disappointed to miss out on distribution opportunities in Australia and the US where Rory's Story Cubes have already been licensed to Gamewright.

What has been the highlight for the company to date?

The highlight has probably been signing the deal with Gamewright after being courted by two other US companies, all of whom I have great respect for their approach to business and emphasis on quality products.

What makes this a highlight is that it’s not just friends and family saying they like the game, but hard-nosed businesses thinking that it will help them to make money.

What are the long-term hopes for the company?

Our hope is to continue to design beautiful, easy to learn, creative game tools that blur the lines between play and serious learning.

And we hope to see these in use in schools across the globe.

At the same time, we would like to use the revenue generated from sales to initiate meaningful social projects that would benefit from our unique skillset.

Local entrepreneurs are often criticised for not thinking globally. What new markets are you targeting?

With Gamewright launching Rory's Story Cubes at the New York Toy Fair on February 14, the US will be our biggest market.

We hope to trump this by identifying distribution partners for Germany, France, Switzerland, Italy and hopefully parts of the Far East at Nuremberg.

You’ve entered the Apple apps market with a version of Rory’s Story Cubes — what potential do you see in this for the future?

Anita Murphy, co-founder of The Creativity Hub, and I both have a background in digital media, so we enjoy discussing the implications of new technology.

We plan to extend the Rory's Story Cubes app so that people can record their story in text or using a voice recorder.

They will then be able to upload it with minimal fuss to our website or send directly to their child, grandparent or friends.

We will be adding extra sets of Story Cubes, allowing users to customise their set of cubes on their iPhone/iPod touch and iPad.

We also have one or two iPhone app projects up our sleeves.

Have you any new projects or variations on your original Story Cubes in the pipeline?

One of the challenges we face is that of copycats from China. Instead if trying to fight it, we have chosen to focus in innovating faster than they can. So yes, we are working on designs for our 3rd expansion set for Rory's Story Cubes.

We are also working with a graduate student from the Industrial Design faculty at the ITC to explore different forms and materials.

A new project that has us both really excited is a creative toolkit that fosters design thinking, for use in primary schools. We are working with Elaine Sutton, ex-principal, educational consultant and founder of Digital Dimensions on this.

What impact has the recession had on your business?

It hit us hard in terms of providing training and group facilitation which was our bread and butter. Again, instead of fighting it, we asked ourselves in January 2009, what is being ‘called for' here? It seemed to make sense to us to push Rory's Story Cubes. If we can keep our cashflow in check we expect to start to reap the rewards later this year.

How hard was it to get the business started and what support did you receive?

The business has evolved from me being self-employed to forming a partnership with Anita, to a limited company this year. So in my mind the company has been around since 2002, but on paper, it's July 2009.

While it might be tempting to say we did it ourselves, that would be a lie. And while all the support may not have been financial, we have benefited from some great mentors from UnLtd, the Arts Council CIIF award. We have only recently become an Invest NI client.

Do you see the business remaining in Northern Ireland in the long-term?

This is a tough call, as it is tied up with the decisions we make as a family. Northern Ireland has been good to us, and I would hope that we can honour that in our future plans.

What is the best bit of advice you have ever been given?

It was from Michael Pyner of the Shoreditch Trust. He said that we had a great idea but that we needed to be much more ruthless if we wanted the product to reach |its full potential. This became a running joke when I qualified it by saying “ruthless but nice”.