We have a lot of smart young people in Cambridge. Our Universities, Anglia Ruskin and Cambridge, teach a population of about 30,000 students. Many of the roughly 120,000 employed in the town are young graduates from the best universities elsewhere in the world. Obviously our local universities employ brilliant researchers, teachers and support staff that make up about a tenth of the workers. Others come to serve the community in our Public Services, which employ around two fifths. Some are attracted by the fame of our vibrant High Tech and Services sector, roughly a quarter of our jobs. And the quarter of the people working here in Retail and Tourism just make sure the others enjoy life!
We also have a lot of wise old people here. Mothers whose insights and counsel still guide their children's steps. Emeritus academics who have handed on the torch for actually running the universities day to day, and can return to their research in the local libraries. Serial investors who made their money locally and want to help others make it too. Experienced managers who have built up wonderful facilities locally, and are now coaching their successors.
On Monday, I saw young and old celebrating together. The Cambridge University Entrepreneurs (CUE) run a business plan competition that draws together teams from the student and working population that are coached by local mentors and judged by a panel of preeminent local business investors. The competition is run by a volunteer student group and awards prizes for the best plans, emulating the best practice of our friends in MIT and Stanford. I had the honour of working with the team that set CUE up ten years ago, and they were kind enough to invite me back to present at the celebration drinks for one of their competitions. Standing on a wobbly bar stool and looking out over the sea of faces in the bar I saw a host of faces I knew. Angels I had first met as CEOs of the local companies that funded our first year, academics and administrators who had introduced me to them, and the senior management of the companies from Cambridge Network that I have been visiting in the past weeks. And there were a host that seemed familiar. Young African, American, Asian, Australian and European students, researchers and workers just like the ones I saw competing 10 years ago. Friends had advised me not to bore this crowd, happy and confident and hard to pull away from the free bar!
But I am afraid I had bad news to share. The credit crunch is cutting a swathe through companies and jobs across the region. This comes as a rude shock to us here. Despite our love of cycles and ecotransport, we haven't had recent experience with their economic cousins. Recent research by friends in the University shows that our Hi Tech businesses grew straight through the dotcom bubble. Businesses like Abcam and Ubisense occupied defensible niches that were little affected by the wave of creative destruction that inevitably followed the crowding of many small start-up companies into dotcom operations. But the latest cohort of micro businesses employing 1-4 people have fared less well. For the first time in over 15 years, the number of companies and jobs in High Tech have been falling locally.
Does it really matter? After all, all of those little companies were just not doing as well as the leaders worldwide - and now those brilliant people will go on to do other things which do bring something special to society. Well, yes, it DOES matter to us here. The same paper points out that once our indigenous firms grow big enough, they keep employing people here irrespective of who owns them. By contrast, the branches of multinational companies in our area have left us less of a legacy. For example, Kodak Research and Qualcomm both moved to Cambridge in 2004-5, Kodak by consolidating other European operations and Qualcomm by acquiring a successful local firm. The credit crunch has forced layoffs around the world, but while Kodak is closing its 30 person unit, while as far as we know the Cambridge community will keep its connection to the world markets served by Qualcomm. We are vulnerable in this region. We rank among the best innovators in Europe, with the impact of the University widely cited and praised, but much of our business R&D is concentrated among a few very large companies. We had better build some large native companies with strong R&D investment.
So we need to get even better at helping our young people build businesses in defensible niches, drawing on the wisdom of earlier generations and emulating the performance of their older siblings. We must help put old heads on more young shoulders. Nothing new to Cambridge - we've been doing it for 800 years.
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