Bringing Silicon Valley to the UK
Silicon Valley comes to the UK (Photo credit: Cabinet Office)
Looking out at an another chill autumnal morning, the lure of Silicon Valley’s sunshine is increasingly powerful. But there’s a lot more to the success of tech companies in the US than simply climate. The question is what is it and can we in the UK learn how to replicate that success here?
That’s one of the key missions of Silicon Valley Comes to the UK (SVC2UK), a programme of events across the UK that brings across leaders from US companies such as Google, LinkedIn and Facebook to help, nurture and assist local entrepreneurs and their companies. Originally a Cambridge event it has now spread across the UK, covering London and Oxford as well. The theme of this year’s programme is scale – addressing the fact that while the UK and US are pretty evenly matched when it comes to starting up businesses on a per capita basis, the UK’s scale up rate is less than half that of the US.
Another strand of the programme is looking to uncover the next generation of startups through intense bootcamp events. The most interesting one of these is the Future Business weekend being held in Oxford and running in collaboration with SVC2UK.
It is looking to build on the research strength of the UK by providing access to existing patented technologies and essentially allowing teams to generate new ideas and innovative businesses around them. It’s often said that not enough research makes it out of the lab, and the event aims to change this by taking scientific intellectual property and making it available, along with support and mentoring.
Held between 9-11 November the weekend will be run by the Oxford Centre for Entrepreneurship and Innovation (OxCEI) together with the Future Business Pre-Incubator (FBPI) and Silicon Valley Comes to UK (SVCUK). The aim is bring together entrepreneurs, scientists, technologists and mentors to generate ideas and new companies to take existing patented technology to market.
The event uses the proven Idea Transform methodology, which underpinned the extremely successful Idea Transform weekend in Cambridge back in April 2012, providing structure and support to teams through mentoring, team creation, inspiring speakers and networking. And the good news is that selected projects from the event will then be supported through the Future Business Pre-Incubator with access to facilities, resources and ongoing mentoring.
Silicon Valley Comes to the UK starts on 15th November with an event at the Houses of Parliament – to find out more visit the website at http://www.svc2uk.com/
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Where’s the money going?
In a week that saw the publication of the long-awaited Cambridge Phenomenon book, celebrating 50 years of innovation in the area, some more sobering figures concerning continued investment have been published.
Punting in Cambridge, UK (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Research from tech-focused investment group Ascendant found that while generally VC investment is up in Q1 2012, money doesn’t seem to be coming to Cambridge. £307m was invested in tech companies in the UK and Ireland – with £188m going to London-based outfits, and £27m to Irish ones. Cambridge (and Oxford) saw very little new money.
While it can be misleading to generalise based on three months of data this could be a worrying trend as centralised government action to boost London’s Tech City draws potential funding (and talent) away from the Cambridge ecosystem. After all, as Rory Cellan-Jones points out in his BBC Blog, Cambridge has potentially a better chance of creating world-class tech companies than London as it has already developed an ecosystem with research at its heart to feed innovative ideas to the market. But investment funding for Cambridge is key – not just in ‘scientific’ spinouts such as Owlstone and ARM but the more internet-style businesses and the thriving cleantech sector that Cambridge also supports.
So how does Cambridge compete against the media-savvy Tech City community when it comes to gaining funding? I may be biased as a marketer, but really feel that public relations has a strong role to play. There is still a tendency amongst Cambridge startups to treat PR as an afterthought rather than an intrinsic part of how you create a company and drive its success. You need to know your audience and deliver the right message to it at the right time using language they understand to succeed. Otherwise the risk is that Cambridge will become seen solely as the domain of technical wizardry rather than as a driver of customer-focused innovation that leads the UK tech scene.
Related articles
- VIDEO: Views on the ‘Cambridge phenomenon’ (bbc.co.uk)
- Start-up Britain – Cambridge v Tech City (bbc.co.uk)
Starting up in Cambridge and London
Image by Ben Terrett via Flickr
Last Saturday I was down at the London Startup Weekend, helping to mentor participants and hone their raw ideas into (hopefully) winning projects. Having been one of the organisers of the Cambridge Startup Weekend earlier in the year it was good to be see the event from another side (with a lot more sleep).
Firstly, a quick explanation of what the Startup Weekend concept entails. Essentially it is a 56 hour event that brings together people with ideas and skills to create some sort of application, product or business idea over the course of the weekend. People pitch their ideas on Friday evening, everyone votes on those they’d like to work on, groups form and they then frantically develop their projects ahead of judging on Sunday evening. The role of mentors is to provide encouragement, advice and occasionally a reality check.
Having now been to two Startup Weekends what conclusions have I come to? Here are five points that stood out for me:
Firstly the energy and enthusiasm of the participants never ceases to amaze me. These are people who believe in what they are doing, enjoying the experience and learning while they do it. While their current ideas might not make it, these are the entrepreneurs of the (near) future, which is heartening to see.
The range of ideas from both events was staggering, covering apps and websites from all sectors. I’d say there were more ‘physical’ services amongst the groups I talked to in London (such as lunch deliveries and pamper boxes for pregnant women/mothers), which is an interesting development from the normal software based businesses.
Scale – the Cambridge and London events were light years apart in size. Cambridge had around 110 participants, and London 200+. Due to space constraints London was split across two sites (Ravensbourne College next to the O2 Arena and Club Workspace in Clerkenwell). Obviously this meant more mixing between different groups in Cambridge (where everyone was in one, smaller space) and I think this benefited ideas development and networking. However I’m sure the Sunday evening judging and party brought everyone back together in London.
Hearteningly everyone realised they need marketing. Rather than thinking that the world will come flocking to their door, London participants factored in the need to identify and reach target audiences, with many considering quite sophisticated marketing approaches. London companies seemed to be ahead of Cambridge in this area.
The mix of people. As I said I didn’t talk to all 200 people in London but they seemed to be a bit more of a homogenous bunch in terms of age and where they were based. Cambridge participants seemed to have travelled further (such as from Finland) and spanned the age groups from twenty something to fifty year olds.
But all in all these differences are part of the appeal of Startup Weekends – everyone is different. So, if you’re interested in new ideas I’d urge you to sign up and go along to one as soon as you can – it is a great use of a weekend.
Chris Measures
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