The Cambridge Network Blog

Chinese whispers

ONCE did She hold the gorgeous east in fee;
And was the safeguard of the west

Last night I learned how some of our companies are engaging in China at the Finance Directors Special Interest Group dinner. Finance Directors from Biocair, CDT, CSR, Cambridge Consultants, and Xaar and others were there to share their experience. The presentation by Deloitte highlighted the tight control achieved by the Chinese tax authorities, very different levels of taxation levied on services compared to Intellectual Property, as well as the great range of negotiating styles in different sectors and age ranges of Chinese executives.

It was clear from conversation around the table that Members are helping each other into China. Biocair have just established a Chinese operation, which will allow their pharmaceutical customers there to pay locally to ship samples to other global locations, and they praised the support the Shanghai office of TTP had given to helping them work out how to contract to hire employees there. The informal accounts that participants felt free to give in a closed forum of their peers makes more such collaborations likely.

It is good to see companies sharing experience. It doesn't necessarily happen everywhere. One of the participants had served a company in another town in the region for the past couple of years. He commented that the only networking he had experienced during that time was going into events in London - and said he was very glad to get back to the Cambridge community. We need to find more ways to bring together peers in this way.

up and doing

Let us, then, be up and doing,
     With a heart for any fate;
 Still achieving, still pursuing,
     Learn to labor and to wait.

My editor tells me that over 200 jobs have been posted or renewed on our jobs board in the last week. Almost half the vacancies are in the software, web development and engineering disciplines, and scientific, research and technical jobs account for almost a further quarter of jobs offered.  Roughly equal numbers of openings in sales and marketing, and in financial, administrative and professional roles - in human relations or quality assurance, for example - make up the total.

The Members who are hiring cover a wide range of industrial sectors: software, electronics, Life Sciences, and scientific instrumentation among others. Clearly the skills required to make these products have a high overlap, or all these different sectors could not fish from the same pool. The jobs they are offering are highly skilled and keep a diverse community busy here. Members can post up to 20 jobs a week for free - but I am sure they wouldn't be doing so if they weren't ready to hire. These companies generally export their products, so if they are anticipating growing markets, that means new money coming into the country and the region.

It is good to be able to share people between such different sectors, and to see the confidence of our Members that they can do more next year.

startup City

In small proportions we just beauties see

Last night I had the pleasure of being on a panel with some great start-ups that came out of the Cambridge University Entrepreneurs. The pleasure was an unexpected one - my co-founder Tim Minshall should really have been on the panel, having stayed close and supported the competition through the last 10 years, but he asked me to stand in. Another co-founder Shirley Jamieson was there too. But it was nice to review the impact of the volunteer student-run business plan competition we started with a group of enthusiastic undergraduates 10 years ago.

The numbers were impressive. £0.5M in prizes has led to 40 companies forming that have raised over £30M in investment, the majority of which are still trading and employing 110 people full-time. But more impressive were the personal accounts of the CEOs who had founded as a result of engagement, from Aptivate, Cambridge Temperature Concepts and iSolve. Networking with the blend of technically savvy students and local business people who enter the competition and being mentored by local business angels had clearly helped each of these CEOs build a team and skills. They fielded the questions from a packed lecture theatre with the confidence of teams that are bringing money into the economy through export sales.

Looking out across the audience, I wondered how many more CEOs-in-the-making were sitting there, and how they will contribute to our Cambridge economy. I wondered how many of the employees of the companies started by CUE will form their own companies, just as the employees of Acorn did. The competition was once just a small thing, an idea with some people who believed in it. It is good to see that idea growing.

smart R&D

He bowed, and in a moment leaped among the lions wild:
The leap was quick, return was quick, he has regained his place

This week I spent some time with old and new colleagues at the Institute for Manufacturing in their impressive new building on West Cambridge site.

Elizabeth Garnsey presented some data from her group, who have been studying employment growth in the High Technology cluster of 1,500 companies, refining data collected by Cambridgeshire County Council over a 20 year period. The seminar had standing-room only, with a mixture of academics and local business leaders keen to understand more about what they have learned (if you are curious, many of their working papers are available on their website).

Elizabeth steadfastly denied that Cambridge presents a blueprint for the future growth of new jobs in new industries across the UK. I have to say that I agreed, having spent time earlier that afternoon with a visitor from Karlsruhe who was keen to see what good practice we had in encouraging entrepreneurs to start businesses and retaining them in the region. It is hard to extrapolate from a region formed around a large research-intensive university to a post-industrial grouping of many research institutes.

She did however present three local working models for funding R&D and creating employment. She identified these as "smart" ways to fund R&D because the companies concerned didn't need to start out with huge resources, but were still able to control their own destinies and create employment :

1. Technical consultancies such as Cambridge Consultants and TTP which have not generated huge margins, but are responsible for many local patents and spin-offs such as Domino Printing Sciences and Xaar;
2. IP licensing operations such as ARM, which has become a major local employer as well as dominant in designs for most microchips outside of the Personal Computer;
3. Software companies like Red Gate, where short lead times to market and quick customer adoption via internet download have enabled them to build out a product bundle and enter new markets.

She contrasted this with the poorer control gained by inventors and uncertain local employment outcomes of the "spin out, spin up, sell off" model, where investors put in money and look for a quick exit. Obviously, this is just my understanding of her points - you should go directly to her papers at the link above.

What do you think? Do you agree that early exits have less impact? In your own region, what working models are delivering high margin new products and new jobs? What other ways are there to do smart R&D?

leading clever people

For want of me the world’s course will not fail;
When all its work is done, the lie shall rot;
The truth is great, and shall prevail

Last week, we heard from Gareth Jones about how to lead clever people. He ran Human Resources in both the BBC and Polygram, where clever stars need the organization to achieve their goals but are quite capable of avoiding the authority of anyone who tries to manage them. He started out in research in University of East Anglia, and now works in London Business School.

His message was simple "Be yourself more, with skill". Clever workers need to believe their leader, so role playing and facades just weaken their contribution. Their leaders need skill to both show strength, but also reveal weaknesses where they need their team to help. His best analogy was that of the parent who both genuinely cares about their childs' development yet knows how to achieve distance when discipline is needed.

Gareth talked to two different groups that day. In the afternoon, he worked with a small group of 12 CEOs and Division Heads in a peer-group learning session of the Cambridge Leaders Academy. In the evening he addressed a much larger group of 240+ academics and business people from a very wide range of local organizations including Abcam, Addenbrookes, ARM, Aveva, CSR, Hays, Microsoft, Medical Research Council, Mills & Reeve, Nokia, Qualcomm, Philips, Red Gate, TTP, and Xaar. It was good to see that so many of our members care about improving the way they lead. I was very happy that the clever people I lead in our team had managed to get the word out to so many great organizations.

As Gareth told us, 7 out of 10 new jobs that will be created in the UK will be in the "clever" economy. We are lucky in Cambridge to have such clever skilled people - and lucky that our leaders want to raise their game together.