Evolving support for entrepreneurship at the University of Cambridge

(The full version of this article appeared in the Cambridge Business Magazine (June 2016).

Image: Chris Williamson / CUE Finale 2016

Back in 1999, a group of us organised a panel discussion on finance for start-ups, targeted at students and researchers in the University of Cambridge. We invited excellent speakers from the business community, promoted the event widely, ordered plenty of drinks, and arrived at the venue looking forward to an informative, interactive and lively discussion.  To our dismay, we had more people on the panel than there were in the audience. 

Scroll forward 17 years and the situation is somewhat different. There are now over 30 initiatives supporting entrepreneurship across the University, each of which contributes to making Cambridge one of the most entrepreneurial universities in the world. The outputs of this activity range from the formation of billion dollar corporations to social ventures that aim to transform the lives of millions.

So how did we get from entrepreneurship being an almost invisible, sometimes frowned-upon activity within the University to something that is widely encouraged, celebrated and supported?  It’s hard to tell that story without also describing the wider ‘Cambridge Phenomenon’, but that is something that has been much better done elsewhere (not least through the books and reports of the same name – see www.cambridgephenomenon.com). Just focusing on activities within the University, the story can be told through three broad phases:

Experimentation

2000 launch of CU Entrepreneurs (Image: Tim Minshall)

In the late 1990s, the UK government got very excited about how US universities such as Stanford and MIT were acting as the catalyst for the creation of hundreds of new ventures (creating thousands of jobs) either based upon university-generated idea and/or founded by university alumni and staff. To help stimulate similar activities in the UK, a series of competitions were held to award funding to universities to set up their own programmes to support entrepreneurship. Cambridge successfully bid for some of this funding, and used the money to establish the Cambridge Entrepreneurship Centre and the University Challenge fund to complement the activities of its long-standing Wolfson Industrial Liaison Office.  The Cambridge Entrepreneurship Centre focused on developing entrepreneurial skills, particular for scientists and engineers, while the Challenge Fund provided seed funding for new ventures. A student-led Cambridge University Entrepreneurs (CUE) society was also formed to run a series of business plan competitions.  Somewhat out of the blue, this period also saw Cambridge receive substantial funding to set up a major collaboration with MIT (the Cambridge-MIT Institute), part of which was focused on entrepreneurship programmes.   All of these initiatives provided different routes by which students, staff and researchers could be inspired, learn skills, and get support for developing their ideas. There was huge support from the local business community through sponsorship of events and prizes, and provision of competition judges, business mentors and expert speakers.

Consolidation

Cambridge Enterprise website c.2004

After the pioneering activities of the early 2000s, by the middle of the decade things started to get more organised and embedded. Cambridge Enterprise was formed to act as a focus for start-up support activities (particularly advice and investment) and the Centre for Entrepreneurial Learning was launched to draw together and expand the range of practically-focused entrepreneurship training programmes. This period also saw an increase in entrepreneurship and innovation as a part of core curricula for a range of undergraduate and graduate programmes to complement the existing largely extracurricular activities. Thankfully consolidation of these core activities did not lead to ossification: new initiatives (particularly those driven by students) continued to spring up, and this was actively encouraged. 

Institutionalisation

Today, entrepreneurship is an integral part of the education, research and engagement activities of the University.  Cambridge Enterprise is one of the UK’s most successful university-based IP commercialisation organisations, with a substantial and successful range of investment funds to support its activities. The development of entrepreneurship skills now sits with a range of organisations, key among these being the Cambridge Judge Business School EntrepreneurshipCentre. The stimulation of interest in entrepreneurship is fuelled by numerous business plan competitions. Not only are there the large-scale and long-standing activities CU Entrepreneurs, but there are also now several college-based competitions and a recently launched competition targeted at post-doctoral researchers. The early-stage development of new ventures is supported by organisations including ideaSpace and Accelerate Cambridge.

Reflecting on what has enabled the development of these entrepreneurship support activities within the University, some key characteristic can be observed:

• ‘Let a hundred flowers blossom’: Perhaps as a result of the federal nature of the University, there have been no (successful) attempts to centrally control the development and delivery of entrepreneurship support activities. While this has for sure resulted in some redundancy and overlapping of activities, the positive impact of having a demand driven, entrepreneurial attitude to entrepreneurship support has been huge.
• Things could always be better: At no point in the development of all the initiatives described above has there been any sense of complacency. Though frustrating at times, there is a constant and pressing demand to innovate and improve in response to the ever-changing context. 
• Blurring of ‘Town and Gown’:  A very commonly used and heard phrase in Cambridge is: “Hmm, not sure, but I’ll put you in touch with someone who can probably help”. This is exemplified in the substantial two-way flow of expertise, resources and people between the entrepreneurship programmes within the University and local business community.
• Altrusim: No names of individuals have been mentioned in this article (partly because it is too easy to cause unintentional offence by not mentioning someone who played a pivotal role), but more importantly because those who have been involved in developing entrepreneurship activities in Cambridge seem to typify what Harry S. Truman said: ‘It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit’.  This attitude, coupled with a common sense of purpose to ‘make things better’, seems to be what continues to drive the growth of entrepreneurship at Cambridge.

If you have a moment, take a look at the website of the University Enterprise Network. This will give you a flavour of the range and diversity of activities now available to help students, researchers and staff Cambridge ensure that the ideas being generated at the University are used to improve lives across the world.

Once the cranes have gone, what will the new 'steady state' be for Cambridge?

If you've not been to Cambridge for a while, one of the first things to strike you when you arrive by car or train is the skyline defined by cranes. This is one of the most visible indications of the growth of the technology cluster, driven by demand from firms of all sizes for commercial/R&D space, along with the linked need for residential accommodation across the price range.  Carter Jonas have published their latest report on commercial property in Cambridge, which provides a useful summary of the scale, availability and costs of space now and in the near future.  Cambridge also recently made the national news when it was noted that house price rises in Cambridge were the highest in the country.

These figures are fuelling the debate on whether there are limits to the growth of the technology cluster: at what point could a tipping point be reached whereby the quality of life that attract people to Cambridge starts to be diminished by impact of congestion and rising costs? It will be interesting to see how the cluster adapts and reaches a new steady-state once major developments such as CB1, North West Cambridge, and the Biomedical Campus are all completed.

Has it got easier for start-ups and large firms to partner?

(Post originally published at http://openinnovationblog.blogspot.co.uk/)

In 2006, we started publishing the results of our research on how to make ‘asymmetric’ partnerships work. Our work was focused on the asymmetry of company size, age, and technical and commercial maturity between two organisations seeking to work together on an innovation project, i.e. a situation exemplified by technology-based start-ups seeking to work with large, long-established firms.  This research had been kick-started by first-hand observations of the challenges faced by technology start-ups within the Cambridge high-tech cluster that were seeking to partner with large, mature firms.  We took an engaged scholarship approach [1] to the work, and the results were disseminated via academic conference papers [2-4] and journal articles [5, 6], and a series of events and other practitioner-focused outputs [7-9]. 

Nearly 10 years on, it is interesting to observe whether things have changed.  Firstly, there has been the diffusion, maturing and refinement of open innovation as a concept [10-15], and widespread recognition by larger firms of the implementation challenges that need to be overcome. When we began our work, many multinationals viewed working with start-ups as a novelty, and approached such collaborations with (what they admitted themselves) was a pretty high level of naivety. It seemed so simple:  big companies were being driven to – or were choosing to – open up their innovation activities and draw upon a wider range of sources of innovative ideas; start-ups with innovative ideas were lacking the resources they needed for commercialisation, and so collaboration seemed like an obvious and effective strategy. Our research showed the implementation of such an approach to be much more complex and risky for both parties than anticipated [6].  Today, there seems to be a greater level of awareness on the part of larger firms of the challenges of making such asymmetric partnerships work.  Attitudes to working with start-ups seem to have followed the shape of a hype cycle[i]: huge enthusiasm coupled with unrealistic and then unmet expectations, re-thinking, leading to a more balanced set of exploration (i.e. looking for new ideas) and exploitation (i.e. creating and capturing value from current ideas) activities.  Organisationally and operationally, the set-up and management of these partnerships has moved from being a predominantly corporate venturing-focused activity (and thus affected the ups and downs of senior management enthusiasm that mirrors the wider venture capital investment cycle) to something more integrated with R&D, procurement, legal, and dedicated open innovation teams.  As a somewhat peripheral issue, it has also been interesting to observe the affect how the increased digitization and servitization of technologies seems to have enabled partnerships:  smaller firms providing various digital technologies (especially mobile apps) to add more customer benefit based around the core technology.

Secondly, have start-up firms become more proficient than their predecessors at setting up and managing partnerships with larger firms? This is very hard to judge, but given that their potential partners now seem to have more sophisticated mechanisms for engaging with them, it could be expected that more start-ups will be forming such partnerships and consequently refining their own partnership skills.  Emerging concepts in entrepreneurship  - –such as the Lean Start-up methodology [16] – may also being playing a role  (though the complexity and slowness of setting up partnerships may be in conflict with the minimal viable product / pivot mindset).   There may also be differences in partnership activities between start-ups focused on the commercialisation of a physical product, as opposed to those based on software. The partnership challenges facing a start-up focused on the commercialisation, for example, of advanced materials [17, 18] compared to one focused on app development [19] are both significant, share some similarities but also have some major differences.

Thirdly, there is the evolving role of clusters. Research on this topic shows that the location of the start-up may also impact their partnership capabilities [20, 21].  For a region such as Cambridge, the steady influx of large companies may have encouraged and made such partnerships more visible.  Having large firms locally whose staff are actively engaged with the networking activities reduces at least some of the transaction costs of partnership formation and management.   This is linked to another issue; that of the ability of the start-up to recruit talent from large companies and the willingness of experienced managers to join start-ups. This is in turn is underpinned by a range of factors, including both the actual and perceived impact that start-ups can have on changing industrial structures (e.g. everyone wants to join the next Uber).

Finally, there is the role of open innovation intermediary activities and actors that has become more common in the past ten years.   These range from platforms for matching ideas and needs (e.g. Innocentive, NineSigma, et al.) through to consultancy services targeted specifically at supporting open innovation [22]. 

These four issues highlight the changing context within which 'asymmetric' partnerships are formed and may be leading to more firms developing the capability to establish and manage these types of partnerships. 

1.         Van de Ven, A., Engaged scholarship: A guide fororganizational and social research. 2007: Oxford University Press, ISBN978-0-19-922629-6. 

2.         Minshall, T.H.W., et al. Development of a management guide for partnerships between technology-based start-ups and established firms. in International Association for the Management of Technology (IAMOT) EuroMOT Conference 2006, September 10 - 12. 2006. Aston Business School, Aston University, Birmingham, U.K.

3.         Minshall, T.H.W., L. Mortara, and J.J. Napp. Implementing Open Innovation: Challenges in Linking Strategic and Operational Factors for HTSFs Working with Large Firms. in 15th High Tech Small Firms Conference, 14-15 June 2007. 2007. Manchester Business School, Manchester, UK.

4.         Minshall, T.H.W., L. Mortara, and J.J. Napp, Open innovation: Linking strategic and operational factors, in R&D Management Conference 2007, 4-6th July 2007. 2007: Bremen, Germany.

5.         Minshall, T.H.W., et al., Development of practitioner guidelines for partnerships between start-ups and large firms   Journal of Manufacturing Technology Management, 2008. 19 (3): p. 391 - 406.

6.         Minshall, T.H.W., et al., Making 'asymmetric' partnerships work. Research Technology Management, 2010. May-June: p. 53-63.

7.         Minshall, T.H.W., Big Fish, Small Fish, in Catalyst. 2006.

8.         Minshall, T.H.W., Partnerships between Technology-based Start-ups and Established Firms: Making them Work, in IfM Briefing. 2006.

9.         Oughton, D., L. Mortara, and T. Minshall, Managing asymmetric relationships in open innovation: lessons from multinational companies and SMEs, in Open innovation in the food and beverage industry, M.G. Martinez, Editor. 2013, Woodhead Publishing: Cambridge, UK.

10.       Chesbrough, H., The era of open innovation. Sloan Management Review, 2003. Spring 2003: p. 35-41.

11.       Chesbrough, H., Open Innovation: The New Imperative for Creating and Profiting from Technology. 2003, Boston: Harvard Business School Press.

12.       Chesbrough, H., Open Business Models. 2006, Cambridge MA: Harvard Business School Press.

13.       Chesbrough, H. and K. Schwartz, Innovating Business Models with Co-Development Partnerships. Research Technology Management, 2007. 50(1): p. 55-59.

14.       Gassmann, O., E. Enkel, and H.W. Chesbrough, The future of open innovation. R & D Management, 2010. 40(3): p. 213-221.

15.       Mortara, L. and T. Minshall, Patterns of implementation of open innovation in multinational corporations in New Frontiers in Open Innovation, H. Chesbrough, W. Vanhaverbeke, and J. West, Editors. 2014, Oxford University Press.

16.       Ries, E., The Lean Startup: How constant innovation creates radically successful businesses. 2011, Penguin.

17.        Lubik, S. and E.W. Garnsey, Commercializing nanotechnology innovations from university spin-out companies. Nanotechnology Perceptions, 2008. 4: p. 225-238.

18.       Maine, E. and E.W. Garnsey, Commercializing generic technology: The case of advanced materials. Research Policy, 2006. 35: p. 375-393.

19.       Bharadwaj, A., et al., DIGITAL BUSINESS STRATEGY: TOWARD A NEXT GENERATION OF INSIGHTS. MIS Quarterly, 2013. 37(2): p. 471-482.

20.       Weiss, D. and T. Minshall, New perspectives on Open Innovation: The role of relative proximity on open innovation implementation in UK high-tech SMEs, in 26th International Conference on Manufacturing Research, 11-13 September 2012. 2012: Aston Business School, Birmingham, UK.

21.       Weiss, D. and T.H.W. Minshall, Negative effects of relative proximity and absolute geography on open innovation practices in high-tech SMEs in the UK, in 7th IEEE International Conference on the Management of Innovation and Technology (ICMIT 2014) 23-25 September. 2014, Received 'Best Paper Award': Singapore.

22.       Mortara, L., Getting help with open innovation. 2010, Institute for Manufacturing - University of Cambridge, 978-1-902546-91-9, http://www.ifm.eng.cam.ac.uk/service/books/form_intermediaries.html.: Cambridge, UK.

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[i] http://www.gartner.com/technology/research/methodologies/hype-cycle.jsp

'Magic' matters

Last week, IfM hosted a visit to Cambridge by a group of young Japanese technology entrepreneurs who wanted to learn about the Cambridge Phenomenon. The visitors were part of a Japanese government-sponsored programme (GTEP) that aims to encourage academic researchers to think about ways of using the outputs of research to create social and economic value through entrepreneurship.  As part of the programme, they visited ideaSpace at West Cambridge to learn about the role of this important part of the Cambridge innovation ecosystem. The visitors asked the usual questions about ideaSpace entry requirements, costs and services, number of members, etc, and the ever-helpful Belinda and Jess (the office managers for ideaSpace City and West, respectively) addressed all these questions professionally and clearly. The visitors were clearly impressed by the popularity and success of ideaSpace, especially when contrasted with their observations of less successful innovation support facilities elsewhere in Europe. So someone asked 'What makes ideaSpace work?'.  The answer? Many things, but among the most important are Belinda and Jess. Every day, by listening, connecting, cajoling, guiding, and reminding – and (from time to time) partying – with the ideaSpace community members, these two ensure that ideaSpace is able to provide a really effective link in the chain of local innovation support activities.
Cambridge is full of people like Belinda and Jess who play this vital -  frequently hidden - role in adding 'the magic' that makes so many elements of the Cambridge phenomenon work.  Without them, Cambridge would not be so phenomenal.

AlertMe and British Gas: Glass half full?

CC: Bart Cayusa

At the end of last week, British Gas (BG) announced that it was going to acquire the Cambridge 'smart home' start-up, AlertMe, for £65m ($100m).  BG had been an investor in AlertMe since 2010, and had been using the start-up's technology in its Hive offering, but this acquisition now "sets up British Gas to become a much broader player in the burgeoning smart home space".

Putting this in the context of what this means for Cambridge, the debate is likely to split along two lines of argument: 'Oh no, not again' and 'This is great!'

The 'Oh no, not again' camp will talk about what a shame it is that another Cambridge start-up has been unable to remain independent and has had to be acquired (adding to the long list of sales that include Neul (to Huawei), TTPCom (to Motorola), CSR (to Qualcomm), CAT (to AstraZeneca), Autonomy (to HP), and many more). They will ask why so few of the Cambridge start-ups can be as successful at scaling as ARM, AbCam or Domino. 

On the other the 'This is great!' commentators will talk about how this deal will allow AlertMe's technology to be scaled using the vast resources of BG and its parent Centrica. It also sends another strong signal that Cambridge as a whole is great incubator for the commercialisation of technologies that can have major impact. This will support on going investment from funds and large companies seeking to help create and capture value from the 'open innovation ecosystem' that this region has become. 

But some might also refer to a report on the growth strategy for Massachusetts which famously stated that: “[..] we run the risk of turning into Cambridge, England: we’ll have isolated clusters of the very best university research and a number of small R&D firms but not the downstream production, service and support jobs that make a vibrant economy. We’ll create all the new ideas – but others will get too much of the benefit”.   But is that really true?

AstraZeneca coming to Cambridge: A sign of the times?

Earlier this week, planning permission was granted for AstraZeneca's new Global R&D Centre and Corporate Headquarters at the Cambridge Biomedical Campus.  The initial announcement of this plan in 2013 attracted great interest and excitement as it represented a major coup for the region. This seemed to show that Cambridge can not only build £bn companies on the back of its strengths in science and technology, but it can also attract significant direct corporate investment.
Several major corporations have had R&D facilities in Cambridge for many years (Philips, Rolls-Royce, Microsoft, Nokia, to name a few) but the scale of the AstraZeneca facility - £330m investment, 2,000 employees - dwarfs many of the earlier investments by large organisations.

The site of the planned AstraZeneca facility at the
Cambridge Biomedical Campus

AstraZeneca states that it believes Cambridge will provide them with "[..] invaluable access to world-leading scientific expertise and provides excellent opportunities for collaboration with renowned academic research institutions, pre-eminent hospitals and cutting-edge biotech companies". This reflects a widespread trend towards more open models of innovation that draw upon the strengths of specific regional clusters. It also reflects a response to specific challenges facing the pharmaceutical industry, where massively increasing R&D spend has not been leading to 'blockbuster' successes in the market. Establishing R&D activities within a thriving regional innovation clusters is one way for firms to form and manage partnerships that allow them to share the risks (but also the rewards) of research commercialisation.

But there are some potential downsides to this move. There is something of a Catch-22 problem: people want to work and live in Cambridge because of the perceived high quality of life. But the sudden arrival of 2,000 new workers (plus dependents probably doubling that number) in a city with a population of 124,000 may start to put strains on the infrastructure (especially transport and housing), thus lowering the very quality of life that made the move attractive in the first place.

As the Cambridge Technopole continues to build upon its success with more successful start-ups and more inwards investment (most recently from Apple and Amazon), the importance of the joined-up long-term strategy for the city's development within the wider region becomes ever more important.

Attitudes to failure

Delegations to Cambridge from near- and far-flung corners of the world who are seeking to develop their innovation ecosystems often have a clear idea of what they want to investigate during their visits. They typically want to know what institutions have supported the growth of the cluster, how they have done this, and who the 'key influencers' are.  What attract less attention are the softer issues of culture and attitudes.  Key among these is the attitude to failure, neatly summed up by Andy Richards who said Cambridge is "a low risk place to do high risk things".  Recently completed research at the University of Cambridge Institute for Manufacturing sheds some more light on this issue.  Keith Cotterill, himself a serial entrepreneur and investor, recently completed his PhD comparing attitudes to failure in three successful innovation clusters:  Silicon Valley, Munich and Cambridge.   A summary of his research can be accessed here.

Cambridge from the outside looking in: weird and wired

The Institute for Manufacturing recently hosted a visit by group of managers from major German corporations. Their programme included talks from academics, business networking organisations, business incubators, innovation-related student societies, investors, and visits to a wide variety of local firms.  I thought that viewpoints captured during the final day of their two-week visit were worth sharing as they reveal interesting trends in the cluster from the external perspectives of large, technology intensive multinational corporations. 

People: While the stories of serial entrepreneurs such as Hermann Hauser and David Cleevely were impressive, and the high energy activities of the students were inspiring, the visitors were particularly interested in the 'second-timers'. These were the highly technically competent engineers in the 30-40ish age range who had set up one company and were now on their second. There was remarkable commonality with many of their stories. The first venture had typically been very 'technology-push', requiring large amounts of funding for product development (based on some terribly clever but often low readiness level technology).  By the time potential customers had been persuaded to recognise the value of the product, the funding had been exhausted. The second venture was much more market-pull, with close involvement of potential customers from the outset.  Engagement of users in the early concept development, the recognition that the technology only needed to be 'good enough', and that the business model was key were all features of these second ventures.

Business models:  The visitors had anticipated hearing the typical generic VC-backed start-up story repeated throughout the visits.  What they actually saw were companies that mostly had no VC backing. Some had Angel funding, but most had started with a combination of grants, personal funds (in some cases the gains realised from successful previous ventures), and revenues from customers. They were mostly targeting a niche where the entrepreneurs' specific knowledge and resources could be targeted.  Many had followed the path described by Eric Ries of getting the minimum viable product in the hands of customers and then adapting in response to feedback from these initial users. Extensive planning, plotting of scenarios and Excel wizardry had been replaced by customer engagement, rapid prototyping, and flexible scale-up.

Cambridge is weird and wired:  There was a level of on-going befuddlement throughout the visit. Our attempts to illustrate the complexity of Cambridge may have resulted in more confusion than clarity: Who was in charge of Cambridge? What is the plan for Cambridge? Why are their so many networks? What is the role of the local government?  But one message did stick clearly: Cambridge is an extremely networked community - and it is that connectedness that provides the fertile ground from which successful ventures can start.  In so many presentations, multiple connections could be clearly seen. That student winner of the business plan competition was also actively engaged in this networking group, and had received funding from that business angel, who was also mentoring this new venture, which was connected to .. etc.  But what could have looked like quite an incestuous community was also shown to be open to outsiders, as reflected in the number of start-ups whose founders had come from outside the region.

Cambridge continues to be held up as an exemplar of an innovative cluster (or 'innovation ecosystem' as seems to be the new label of choice) but the complexity of its activities can be hard to explain to those outside - and for that matter to many inside  - the community.  Cambridge can provide lessons that could be helpful to others, but those lessons are not simple to extract.  If Cambridge wants to continue attract the resources of external organisations, more efforts need to be made to communicate what Cambridge is, what it does, and how those from outside can work with this networked and highly innovative community for mutual benefit.

TEDxGranta 2012 - Inspirational

The 2012 TEDxGranta event was a joy to attend.  The event, one of many independent events organised around the world as part of the wonderful TED network*, managed to delight, inspire, amuse and cause jaws to drop. I was lucky enough to be one of the speakers at this event (wearing my 'We need more children to be interested in engineering!' hat; and if you want to know more  - with apologies for the shameless plug - come along to my talk at the Cambridge Science Festival on 24 March).  

David Constantine
Co-founder of Motivation
(Photo: vandym2002)

The topics of this year's TEDxGranta talks spanned music, homelessness, animation, Kung-Fu, linguistics, preserving culinary history, computer literacy, and design. (Reviews of all the talks can be found on Doug Shaw's blog, and videos of all of them will soon be available on YouTube).

This event illustrated the best of what Cambridge can do; it drew upon both the strength of the wonderfully rich Cambridge creative and innovative ecosystem, and its wider national and international network connections.  The TEDxGranta team did a superb job in bringing everything together; the venue (The Junction J2) was very appropriate; and the content wonderfully diverse and well-orchestrated.

Merlin Crossingham of
Aardman Animation
(Photo: vandym2002)

But attending this event reminded me of the dangers of getting stuck in a rut.  In common with many others in Cambridge, I am a regular attendee at the numerous high quality technology entrepreneurship related events that run every week across this city.  These events are a key ingredient in the success of the Cambridge high tech cluster, and are great at building our communal understanding and ability to accelerate science and technology to market to address new opportunities. But the majority of such events are, intentionally, deeply business and/or technology focused.  What events like TEDxGranta do so well  - and in fact what all TED events aim to do - is to bring together the worlds of technology, entertainment and design, to paint a bigger picture, using a much richer palette. Attending TEDxGranta was a day very well spent, and I suspect that the impact on me will last a lot longer than most other events I have attended in recent months. 

*If you don't know about TED, click here to access a staggering range inspirational videos.

Cambridge Cleantech: An idea whose time has come?

Last Friday saw the launch of 'Cambridge Cleantech' at the great new lecture hall at the redeveloped Cambridge campus of Anglia Ruskin University.  The turnout was impressive: 300+ attendees at 07:30 in the morning is quite an achievement for any event.  The success of this launch event  - bringing together investors, entrepreneurs and academics - did seem to point to the notion that a network dedicated to clean tech in the Greater Cambridge (broadly defined) could be bang on the money. But why has this only happened now?

www.enecsys.com

There have been numerous 'green' related local and regional initiatives in the past but none has really managed to bring together the diverse geographic and sectoral interests to act as a voice for the wide range of cleantech organisations in the same way that OneNucleus has done for the life sciences and Cambridge Wireless has done for those commercialising wireless technologies.

www.breathingbuildings.com

This diversity of needs and interests may be one reason for the lack of a single voice for cleantech to date, coupled with the fact that there are so many other business networks into which cleantech, and cleantech-related companies have been able to fit.
Some prior attempts at bringing together 'green' companies have been more publicly-funded push activities, with limited private sector, business-driven pull, and hence lacked market traction.
There has also been the dilemma of the 'C-word'.  While 'Cambridge' is a superb national and international brand, using it (even in its broader 'Greater Cambridge' version) to represent a region that stretches from Bedford to Ipswich, and King's Lynn to Harlow has, for some, stretched both the brand and the patience of those far from Cambridge.

http://green-tide.org/

Then there are also changes in the cleantech sector itself (which is not really a sector but rather a collection of technologies applied to deliver some specific benefit but minimise impact on the environment).  This multi-faceted sector is increasing in maturity in terms of consumer uptake, investment readiness, and refinement of available business offerings. But there is still a long way to go in getting the best solutions to market to address the sustainability opportunities presented by the huge range of needs of individual and business consumers.
And this is why a network  - leveraging the power of the Cambridge brand for regional benefit - that represents and lobbies on behalf of this diverse range of organisations, facilitates value-adding connections between these firms, and supports the development of its members is so timely and important.

Phenomena in Cambridge and Kyoto, and the need for a Japanese Hermann Hauser

"We don't have a 'Kyoto Phenomenon' because we don't have a Japanese equivalent of Hermann Hauser".  I heard this statement at a recent meeting in Japan attended by a small group of academics, entrepreneurs and investors, and it triggered the following thoughts.

There are, of course, numerous outstanding entrepreneurial role models in Japan, individuals who have driven major transformations in industries and defined whole new product categories.  For example, Akio Morita of Sony (who co-founded the company and introduced the famous pre-cursor to the iPod, the Walkman), Masayoshi Son of Softbank (an outspoken multi-billionaire who built Softbank into one of the country's leading internet and mobile phone companies) and Tadashi Yanai of Uniqlo (another of Japan's richest men, who built a global clothes design and retailing empire).
Despite such notable successes as these (and others), commentators highlight the absence of a thriving startup culture - in part a result of the comparatively weak domestic VC industry -  as a key reason for Japan's 'lost decades' (the period since the early 1990s during which Japan's economy has stagnated).  But what about alternative models of recovery?  Though there are plenty of good arguments that point to embedded structural problems with Japanese companies and their strategies, there are also quite a few that point to their ability to respond to and cope with change.   Kyocera's growth from 3,000 to 60,000 employees up to and through the lost decades is an example.  The strategy of Japanese firms in India is another one. But the role of Japanese entrepreneurs in stimulating economic recovery in Japan is, as Ben Goldacre would put it, 'a bit more complicated than that', and so this topic will be the subject of a longer post later in the year.

In the meantime, to find out why Hermann Hauser (and the numerous other successful role models) have been so important to the birth and growth of the Cambridge Phenomenon - and why the absence of a local version of him in clusters elsewhere is perceived as a handicap - come along and hear his views in person at this week's Cambridge Network meeting at Robinson College at 17:30 on12th October.

Hardware, software, monozukiri, and Cambridge

Last week I went to a talk given at ITEC in Kyoto by Bob Cole from UC Berkeley on the topic of Japanese software. This triggered a number of thoughts relating to my last blog post on the topic of the role of manufacturing in innovative regions. Two key points relating to Bob Cole's talk were:

• Japan's ICT and consumer electronics industries were built predominantly on innovative hardware solutions, supported by bespoke software. This hardware focus plays to, and helped build upon, Japanese strengths in designing and manufacturing precision goods (the term often used to describe this is monozukiri - the art of making physical things).
• The world of ICT has moved to being much more software intensive. The recent activities of HP and IBM provide ample support for that point. Japanese companies have been losing competitiveness, and do not seem able to make the transition to a more software intensive approach (but caution is needed in terms of causality and correlation there).

During the talk, the question was asked of the Japanese technology managers in the room 'In your development activities, do you start with hardware then bring in software, or is it the other way round, or do you do both together?'. The response was ~80% for hardware first, software second. A lively discussion ensued, part of which focused on Japanese management structures where seniority rules. The older employees are more likely to be hardware specialists, and software will larger be the domain of younger - and hence more junior - engineers. As a result, hardware dominates. If this is the situation (and there are many other factors to consider before leaping too quickly to conclusions) then for Japan’s ICT firms to transform themselves, different approaches are needed. One idea put forward was for Japanese ICT firms to partner with (or buy) innovative start-ups and use these external organisations to stimulate internal change. This is possible, but research shows that getting very large, old, complex firms to partner with small, new, agile start-ups is very challenging. Also, partnering for collaboration is one thing; expecting culture change within the larger firm as a result of the partnership is a much bigger issue. 

So, what's all this got to do with Cambridge? Cambridge has developed strong local strengths in software (Autonomy, RedGate, etc.) on the back of historical strengths in hardware (Acorn, Sinclair, etc). Cambridge firms have not lost their integration with the hardware side (see ARM, CSR, etc.) and this has been built in part upon collaborations with Japanese hardware firms). Going forward, it is interesting to see how new initiatives are seeking to build on some of these long standing Japanese connections. ideaSpace is building links with a business incubator in Japan (Innovation Jungle, based at the Advanced Scientific Technology Management (ASTeM) Institute in Kyoto). It will be interesting to see how this nacent partnership can help play to the strengths of both Cambridge and Kyoto (which is, by the way, the home of Nintendo – a pretty good example of an integrated and very successful hardware and software company).

Entrepreneurship, manufacturing, and things you can drop on your foot

On a recent business trip to California, I met with some of my former students who are now entrepreneurs and investors in Silicon Valley, predominantly working in consumer internet and mobile apps. These sectors are typified by low capital costs, rapid prototyping and customer engagement, flexible business models, scalability, and potentially (and frequently actual) significant returns to investors. But this success prompted thoughts of whether we could be doing more to support entrepreneurship based around creating value from tangible "things you can drop on your toes" as opposed to the more intangible worlds of software and services.

This opens a whole debate that is way above my pay grade. On the one hand there is the rational but complex debate on what manufacturing actually is, its role in an economy and its impact in growth. There is also the less rational debate about it being somehow 'better' to create value from 'real things'. This is an issue of great interest in Japan at the moment, where the culture of monozukuri (making things) underpinned the phenomenal post-war recovery, but which some believe now hinders Japan's ability to renew itself ("A Samurai would never write software" as one Japanese manager put it in a recent article on Japan in The Economist).

But if we put that debate to one side and take the view that there is a role for creating value from addressing customer needs through the provision of physical devices, then we should make sure that 'manufacturing' entrepreneurs have access to the resources they need to get their ideas to market. One of the most common needs is access to prototyping equipment, the cost of which is typically way beyond any individual inventor or start-up company. The provision of publicly accessible tools (a part of what academics sometimes grandly call 'industrial commons') can therefore be a key enabler for manufacturing entrepreneurs.

There are many examples of organisations providing access to such tools (e.g. for life sciences, the Babraham Technology Development Lab, and for advanced engineering, the Hethel Engineering Centre). These organisations typically combine public and private investment and leverage existing infrastructure to provide support to entrepreneurs. But there is still a need to provide advice, a place for experimentation, and a supportive community for those at the very earliest stages of the development of ideas. It was therefore very pleasing - during the same trip to California where almost everything seemed to be web and mobile focused - to meet with the CEO of Tech Shop in San Francisco. Tech Shop provides a great example of how tools can be provided to support manufacturing entrepreneurs at the very early stages of the development of business ideas. As the CEO put it: "We provide access to tools to help people accelerate their projects". This is not a contract R&D service; it is about providing access to tools and support to help people experiment, explore and develop their ideas. Examples of businesses that have been developed through Tech Shop included Square, Solumtech, DripTech, Clustered Systems and Embrace.

And this is why it is so exciting to see that the MakeSpace project is really gaining momentum in Cambridge, and is about to set up in its new home in - very appropriately - an old factory in the city centre.

Silicon Something: Necessary but not sufficient

In late 2010, David Cameron unveiled plans to support the continued development of London's 'Silicon Roundabout' - the cluster of predominantly web-related start-ups that have grown up in east London - to help make it "one of the world's great technology centres" (wired.com). Following this announcement, The Economist noted that: "Measured by the concentration of technology firms and the availability of generous and informed investors, California’s Silicon Valley is still in a league of its own. But in the second division of hubs, this chunk of east London is near the top, along with the likes of Boston and Tel Aviv. That its growth took place so quickly, and during a recession, is remarkable enough: the high-tech zone in Cambridge has taken decades to evolve. But the fact that Silicon Roundabout also emerged without government support, or even direct links with universities, should pique the interest of countries that have tried to cultivate technology hubs without the same success" (economist.com).

This can be seen as an interesting illustration of the role of innovation journalism and the use of metaphors in focusing attention onto a particular region and helping attract resources to support growth. This effect was described in an interesting article by Uskali and Nordfors on the role of innovation journalism in developing regional innovation ecosystems such as Silicon Valley (tweeted by Sherry Coutu of, among many other things, Silicon Valley Comes to Cambridge) . The key conclusion of the article is that innovation journalism: "[..] is essential in innovation economies, since a) an innovation is the introduction of something new b) it is difficult to discuss new things if there is no common language for them and c) journalism is a key actor for introducing common language for innovations, so that they may be discussed. " (Uskali and Nordfors, 2007).

For Cambridge, there have been two key 'labelling moments'. The first was the publication of the "Cambridge Phenomenon" report in 1985 by Segal, Quince and Partners (now SQW). The second was the 1998 article in the New York Times entitled "In Old England a Silicon Fen: Cambridge as a High-Tech Outpost". Both the 'Cambridge Phenomenon' and 'Silicon Fen' labels have proved remarkably effective at providing a hook onto which numerous innovation-related news stories can be neatly hung which, in turn, help attract the interest of policymakers, investors, and entrepreneurs.

Innovation journalism seems to play an important role in the development of a regional cluster, and the catchy labels or metaphors may provide a useful focal point onto which the interest of investors and entrepreneurs can be targeted. But the wonderful list of 'Silicons' published at http://tbtf.com/siliconia.html show that a memorable name may be necessary but is not sufficient to ensure the development of a great technology centre.

Help wanted: Cambridge Museum of Technology and Cambridge Phenomenon

Posting from Dr Peter Long, Cambridge University Engineering Department:

The Cambridge Museum of Technology is using the Science Festival to put on an initial exhibition about the High Technology Industries of Cambridge. The museum plans to keep the exhibition open during the summer period and to continually develop the exhibits with feedback/input from visitors and interested parties during the period.

The initial displays will hopefully include displays, posters and exhibits (photos, documents, products, bits of tech, etc), about:

1) The industries that were active around Cambridge in the 40s, 50s 60s which acted as a foundation of the subsequent technological boom and source of skilled staff;

2) The consultancies, large and small that have been built up in the Cambridge area;

3) Computer related industries, including those in the microcomputer boom;

4) Computer games industry;

5) Biotechnology;

6) Inkjet printing;

7) Computer Aided Design (CAD);

8) Geographic Information Systems (GIS);

.. and many others.

If you were part of the recent industrial growth of Cambridge either as an inventor/employee/owner/investor, the museum would be very interested to hear from you. In the first instance, please can you email Dr Peter Long (pjgl2@eng.cam.ac.uk) to let him know what you might be able to lend the museum.

With thanks in advance for any help you might be able to provide.

If you know anyone who may also be interested in loaning/donating information/exhibits or assisting in the development of the exhibition, please point them to this page.



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Peter J G Long PhD
Senior Design Engineer
Cambridge-MIT Engineering Exchange Coordinator

Cambridge University Engineering Department
Trumpington Street
Cambridge CB2 1PZ

Tel 44 -(0) 1223 -332779