Innovation is like motherhood and apple pie, in that everyone’s in favour of it. Specifically governments. They all want more of it. The only issue is that they haven’t the faintest concept of how to make it come about and so are suckers for any person with a Huge Thought about it.
A handful of many years in the past, an economist named Richard Florida found himself the beneficiary of this syndrome. He published a guide with the beguiling title of The Rise of the Innovative Class and the even much more beguiling subtitle “… and how it’s transforming work, leisure, local community, and daily existence”. Florida’s argument was that, as our economies are becoming transformed into understanding economies, creativity is to our century what accessibility to organic assets was to the 18th. Innovative occupations – an occupational class comprising knowledge-workers, intellectuals and artists – were growing to the stage exactly where virtually a third of the US workforce could be regarded as “innovative” and businesses, cities and regions have been bending over backwards to entice them.
As soon as, the fate of wonderful industrial centres was established by geography – their proximity to normal sources, navigable rivers, harbours, and so forth. But the “sources” of the new economic climate are footloose. The message of Florida’s book for urban planners and municipal authorities, consequently, was that if cities want to do well they have to attract the imaginative kinds. In order to do so, they should cherish the 3 “Ts” – talent (a extremely educated population), tolerance (cultural and sexual diversity) and engineering (the infrastructure necessary to sustain an entrepreneurial culture). In other words, they need to seem a bit like San Francisco.
As it happens, some of Florida’s insights were truly just modern articulations of the suggestions of ancient economists. Alfred Marshall observed numerous years ago that staff in experienced occupations have a tendency to cluster in locations exactly where their peers live and perform. But why did people individuals select to settle there in the very first area?
Which brings us to Cambridge, Marshall’s alma mater and the nearest issue Europe has to Silicon Valley. Inevitably, it has been dubbed Silicon Fen. The “Cambridge phenomenon” – the extraordinary ecosystem of science- and technologies-primarily based firms in and close to the town – has acquired close to-mythological standing. At the second there are some thing like 1,500 of these businesses in the area, some of which have turn into marketplace leaders in the Uk and the wider planet. Five of them have valuations in the billion-dollar region, and a single, ARM, is 1 of the UK’s most profitable firms and the dominant firm in 1 of the fastest-growing markets in the globe: that for the processor chips that power smartphones and other mobile products.
The Cambridge phenomenon has functioned as a honeypot attracting venture capitalists, big consultancy firms, bankers and other professional organisations that attend to the demands of expanding firms in complicated industries. Cambridge is now ranked as one of the top three “innovation ecosystems” in the world, in accordance to a recent worldwide survey. It is in which Microsoft chose to set up its major European research lab. Ditto Toshiba. And it truly is where AstraZeneca has chosen to locate its global R&D and corporate headquarters, a selection that will involve investing upwards of £300m and carry about 2,000 researchers and help staff.
Just down the road, in the village of Hinxton, is the Genome Campus, at the heart of which sits the Sanger Institute, named after the only British scientist to win two Nobel prizes, where Sir John Sulston and his colleagues first sequenced the human genome. And not far away is the Babraham Analysis Campus, which specialises in the incubation of bioscience businesses and into which the government not too long ago injected £44m of public funding.
For decades, policy-makers from Europe and beyond have been coming to Cambridge, wistfully eyeing its “engineering cluster”, shaking their heads at the record of vibrant companies that it has spawned, interviewing academics, executives, planners and venture capitalists and pondering what its secret formula is.
There is no formula. Nobody planned the Cambridge phenomenon, just as no person planned Silicon Valley. The two designed organically. That doesn’t mean that similar phenomena can not happen elsewhere, just that they can’t be delivered to purchase. And they consider plenty of time to evolve and mature.
In Silicon Valley’s situation, the story goes back to 1939, when two Stanford-skilled engineers, David Packard and William Hewlett, set up a small electronics firm in a Palo Alto garage. In the situation of Cambridge it also goes back a long way. Simply because of lobbying by the university in the early component of the 20th century, the town had no “legacy” industries – no mass manufacturing, no auto manufacturing (not like Oxford), no smokestacks. Insofar as Cambridge had any industrial sector at all in the 1st half of the 20th century, it was in reasonably clean locations this kind of as customer and broadcasting technological innovation (Pye, founded in 1896) and scientific instrumentation (Cambridge Scientific Instruments, co-founded by Charles Darwin’s fifth son, Horace, in 1881).
The initial stirrings of modify came in the early 1950s, when Cambridge University embarked on the development path that has turned it into one of the world’s intellectual powerhouses. In 1949, in what was then known as the Mathematical Laboratory (and at some point became the Pc Laboratory), Maurice Wilkes and his colleagues had constructed the Edsac, one of the first common-function electronic computers. Not like other researchers who have been creating equivalent machines in other locations, Wilkes & Co produced theirs right away obtainable as a computing device to colleagues in a variety of disciplines. This had two results: it led to a series of scientific breakthroughs (for example, plate tectonics in earth sciences) and it established Cambridge as a leader in details engineering and computing.
A 2nd supply of innovation was the discovery in 1953 by Watson and Crick of the structure of the DNA molecule. This was the initial link in a chain that led to the sequencing of the human genome in 2000 – and sooner or later spawned a entire ecosystem of biotechnology organizations.
A third considerable improvement was the founding, in 1960, of Cambridge Consultants, one particular of the UK’s initial technology-transfer organizations. It was set up by three Cambridge alumni to “put the brains of Cambridge University at the disposal of the problems of British market”. As far as the IT section of the ecosystem is concerned, Cambridge Consultants played a vital part, simply because 1 can trace links from a lot of of today’s successful companies (for instance ARM) that stretch back to it.
A fourth element was the change that took spot in the 1960s in the university’s and the regional authority’s mindset to industrial growth in the town. Inside the university, significantly of the pressure came from researchers in physics, engineering and computing who came to see neighborhood industrial growth in their fields as desirable for different reasons: as a way of exploiting their study via startup ventures as a likely source of investigation collaboration and funding and as a way of boosting the employability of their college students. These pressures were amplified by the university’s liberal – some would say relaxed – frame of mind to intellectual property.
On the planners’ side, there were pressures from central government to reverse their earlier anti-industrial bias for the region. A specific cause célèbre had been their refusal to permit IBM to find its European R&D laboratory in Cambridge. In the finish, the planners transformed their minds soon after a commission led by Sir Nevill Mott, head of the Cavendish Laboratory, signalled a radical shift in the university’s mindset to industrial advancement. From that minute, the die was cast.
What we see in Cambridge and Silicon Valley today are complex industrial ecosystems. But although a formula is unattainable, we can see that this kind of ecosystems need specified crucial elements if they are to thrive.
Very first of all, the ecosystem demands to have a considerable investigation university at its heart. It has to be in a pleasant urban atmosphere that has a excellent housing stock, affordable transport links, very good state and personal schools, great healthcare and a lively cultural existence. And the local planners have to be sympathetic to the demands of tiny tech-based mostly organizations, particularly in their early phases of their corporate life.
It’s critical that the university at the heart of the ecosystem must be one particular that gives considerable freedom to its academics and has a liberal attitude towards intellectual home. Also essential are legal firms that comprehend IP, and outposts of the global accounting and consulting companies simply because venture capitalists do not truly feel relaxed funding ventures which are audited by nearby firms. And there even wants to be a range of various kinds of hotel – which includes boutique ones – to cater for visiting researchers, financiers and conference attendees.
The ecosystem demands a good deal of tiny specialist firms that can swiftly tackle certain commissions together with a networking method that allows people rapidly to locate a particular specialist when they want him or her. Most critical of all, it needs a considerable population of “angel” investors – experienced entrepreneurs who have acquired wealth through building productive businesses and who are prepared and in a position to invest in, and mentor, companies at the startup stage, lengthy prior to any venture capitalist would deign to look at them.
Cambridge has a club of such angel traders. Membership demands include a net worth in extra of £15m and a track record of at least 1 effective “exit” from a startup. At present, the club has 56 members. It functions as an arena in which innovators and entrepreneurs can pitch suggestions to an audience that is seasoned, sympathetic but essential and exceedingly well-informed. Not each and every pitch that succeeds in this forum outcomes in a profitable new business. But it supplies a valuable reality examine on scientific and technological dreams.
At one more degree, the “Cambridge phenomenon” tells us that innovation ecosystems cannot be bought off the shelf and put in wherever governments want to locate them. Innovation is a complicated and delicate plant. You have to put together the soil carefully, be prepared to wait for the fruits and accept that your administration will be lengthy gone prior to they materialise. Even in swiftly moving technologies, patience is a virtue.
They call it Silicon Fen. So what is the special draw of Cambridge?
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