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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California Dreaming
Silicon Valley (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
There have been innumerable attempts to understand and replicate how Silicon Valley has become the centre of the tech industry – with Tech City being the latest one in the UK. What is the secret sauce that makes California in particular and the US in general such a fertile breeding ground for innovation?
It’s something I’ve often wondered about, so it was great to hear a first hand account of a learning journey to Silicon Valley. Speaking last week at CamCreative, Liz Weston of Weston Marketing talked about what she’d learnt on an organised trip that saw her visit the likes of Google, LinkedIn, Salesforce.com and Stanford University. She shared four big lessons from the tour:
1 The difference between an opportunity and an idea
Everyone has a different take on what makes an idea viable, from an addressable market to a strong founding team, but the big difference between the UK and US is the willingness to have a go, fail and come back stronger. If we can change attitudes in the UK to say it is better to try and then fail rather than fail to try at all, it will radically shift how companies operate for the better.
2 Four key opportunities for business development
Execs in Silicon Valley outlined the environment, security, human health and digital/infrastructure as key markets for growth. Anything that reduces complexity in these areas and makes people’s lives easier has potential. Probably not a surprise to most people but worth bearing in mind when pitching any business ideas to investors.
3 Look at the relationship between the customer and your product/services
It isn’t about the technology per se, but finding an emotional trigger with your customers. Serve a purpose and do it in a way that delights your customers and turns them into your advocates. So, in the same way that when Orange launched in the UK it positioned itself as the cool brand you wanted to be part of, LinkedIn offers the chance to be part of a cloud of intelligence, rather than simply positioning itself as a jobs site.
4 The importance of innovation
Next year’s revenue won’t come from this year’s cash cow. So everyone in the business needs to be innovating – which can involve changing people’s mindsets. Encourage ideas and capture them – while they may not be immediately useful, they could be in the future.
I’m sure most people have either heard or tried to put into action some of the lessons above. For me, the main takeaway (and potentially the big difference between the US and UK) is always be open, always be learning and don’t be afraid to take risks. This may not be Silicon Valley’s secret sauce but it is a better way to run a business.
There is no private life anymore
Image by Judge Business School / judgebusinessschool via CrunchBase
I’ve previously blogged about how social media is leading people to give away a lot more of their personal details than in the past, often unknowingly. This then triggers a backlash (such as with Facebook’s recent face recognition update), but the general trend is towards openness/lack of privacy (delete depending on your viewpoint).
Discussions at last week’s CUTEC Technology Ventures Conference brought this topic to the fore. Serial Silicon Valley entrepreneur Ted Shelton shared his views on innovation, pointing out that the three driving forces of social, mobile and cloud are driving true market disruption. But what caught my attention was his later, bold statement – There is no gap between public and private life anymore. Ted sees this as a force for good – making people more reflective about their private actions as they directly impinge on their public persona. And the more you share, the more people will share back and the faster you will learn.
I agree with the positives, but there are a number of issues that trouble me. First off, I think people are becoming less, rather than more reflective – happily sharing private information that either directly, negatively impacts their lives or alternatively bores people to death. And current technology doesn’t give you the ability or time to build and demonstrate your complete persona online. You have to show just parts of it – your Twitter profile is a few lines, not the length of War and Peace, meaning that by default you need to focus different social networks on particular traits or areas of your life. So, for now at least I’ll stick to partitioning my public and private life – to avoid embarrassment if nothing else.
Related articles
- Where’s the best place for Innovation? (measuresconsulting.wordpress.com)
- Privacy worries? Google shouldn’t be your biggest fear (zdnet.com)
Where’s the best place for Innovation?
Image via Wikipedia
Yesterday’s CUTEC Technology Venture Conference (TVC) in Cambridge provided a lot of interesting talking points. One of the world’s largest student organised business events, it brought together over 400 entrepreneurs, businesspeople, investors, students and start-ups to discuss The Ideas Economy and how it could develop.
Doing justice to all the speakers and activities on the packed programme would require much more space than in my blog, so I’m going to pick a couple of key topics and focus individual posts on them.
The first is the long running debate on the differences in entrepreneurial culture between the UK/Europe and the US. BBC technology correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones pointed out that there had been a sea change in UK attitudes over the last 30 years – when he left Cambridge in 1981 neither he nor his contemporaries would have dreamed of setting up their own business. But the first dotcom bubble showed people what could be achieved on their own and made entrepreneurship a viable alternative to corporate life. And this has continued with the current bubble enabling braver, disruptive ideas to be tried.
However a panel of US entrepreneur Ted Shelton and adviser/investor/entrepreneur Sherry Couto, chaired by David Rowan of Wired pointed out there are still areas for the UK to work on. Failure is still seen as unremittingly bad, rather than a learning experience, short-term thinking means that entrepreneurs are likely to sell early rather than chase the investment needed to build the next tech giant and there are a lack of public role models to show people what can be achieved with an idea and hard work. Given that the highest profile business leader in the UK is probably Alan Sugar, this final point is definitely one I agree with.
Talking to start-ups and students at the event backed up these points – rather than rushing off to become accountants or consultants many were seriously looking at either starting up their own companies or working for smaller, fast growth businesses. Now we just need to extend that attitude to drive longer-term thinking, unlock investment and maybe, just possibly, the UK can create the next generation of tech businesses to sit alongside Facebook and Google as global household names.
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- CUTEC Technology Ventures Conference 2011 (fakeiitian.com)
Chris Measures
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