The Cambridge Network Blog

Technology & Innovation Centres in Cambridge

This week has been hectic as the Local Enterprise Partnership and Technology & Innovation Centres initiatives get underway and we speak up for the Cambridge high tech cluster in the new political order.

On Tuesday night we had a meeting to discuss the future of Policy research locally, to try to create an equivalent to our wonderful Silicon Fen called Policy Fen. All day Wednesday we facilitated sessions with local counsellors and businesses from Peterborough, Kings Lynn, Huntingdon and Cambridge to establish priorities for investments we need to bring jobs and economic growth to the sub-region. And today we met with AstraZeneca (Medimmune), John Innes (Norwich), Genzyme, Goodman (Colworth, Harwell), GSK (Stevenage), Marshall of Cambridge, Microsoft Research, TWI, and Unilever to co-ordinate our bids for Technology & Innovation Centres to drive skills and export growth for the UK from our region.

Andrew Herbert (Microsoft Research), Ken Wood (Microsoft Research), Roger Leech (Unilever), Sue Dunkerton (TWI), Pete McDonnell (Genzyme), Henk Koopmans (EEDA), Rob Cooke (GSK), Sally Ann Forsyth (Goodman), Jane Osbourn (AstraZeneca (Medimmune)), Lucy Kemp (EEDA), Jon Green (AstraZeneca (Medimmune)), Cathy Prescott (Biolatris), Jeanette Walker (lets cell it), Matt Schofield (Cambridge Network), Alan Giles (John Innes), Sir Michael Marshall (Marshalls of Cambridge), Hermann Hauser (Amadeus), John Cummins (visiting researcher University of Cambridge Institute for Manufacturing)

Hermann started by pointing out that units like Bell Labs are in short supply in the UK. They invented the transistor and the mobile phone, yet AT&T closed their equivalent unit in Cambridge in 2002 (despite it having created the broadband mobile phone, RealVNC, Ubisense, and Virata and having made 100s of its former employees millionaires). Hermann quickly corrected himself to say that translation labs are dead in UK aside from Microsoft Research, whose Chairman EMEA was hosting. "Yes, I am the last of the racing dinosaurs!" responded Andy Herbert, modestly ;~)

I learned later from Andy that it takes about £20M p.a. to run a unit like his, and that may explain why we don't have many in the UK now. R&D is mostly done in the homeland, since most multinationals are led by nationals of their original country (Anglo-Dutch organizations like Shell, Unilever are notable exceptions to this general rule). We have very few native organizations left that lead R&D in their sectors globally - except for a few  pharmaceuticals (AstraZeneca, GSK, Pfizer...) energy (BP, Shell...) and defence players (BAE,...). Andy is probably the most influential chap in Microsoft who is not a US citizen, but there are few other US R&D giants who are convinced to value Britain that highly (respect to Bill Gates for bucking the trend, but as we all know he is a thoroughly charitable soul). As "national champions" like BT are cutting back on centres like AdAstral Park, we shouldn't be surprised that overseas investors like Alcatel Lucent do the same with their units here. We have to show how R&D done here in the UK changes global products if we want this kind of work.

So why now? Hauser thinks there is too much time wasted after discovery, and we are going to lose our key innovators to countries like Germany that give Spitzencluster subsidies to attract this kind of work. We have many subcritical units due to regional governments with overlapping ambitions and no real world-class research lead. The UK has 22 centres for nanotechnology, when we should have 2. Technology and Innovation Centres will only be one of many potential levers, the most effective of which is government's buying power. Hermann thinks procurement by DARPA created Silicon Valley. Actually, I've read academic papers which say that DARPA and DOD funding is a very good predictor globally of hi tech activity, and explains 85% of hi tech clusters. So much for something in the water in Cambridge ;-) We just happened to be the unsinkable aircraft carrier for the US Army bombers to take off from in the last war. So let's head down to the Eagle and toast the Yanks, Canucks and other boys who flew all those years ago. Hauser thinks UK plc should give £200m (0.1% of government procurement spend) to TSB to do best value for money procurement over 10 year timescale - rather than just buying the cheapest thing available each time.

Our Maxwell centres will be different from the Fraunhofers in Germany, where industry is dominated by automotive. German heavy industry contrasts strongly with our service-oriented economy. They have maintained it very well, while we have exited industry after industry as Asian competitors became stronger. They recovered miraculously from the last war: despite our conflict in the air, assisted by the Yanks, Canucks and even the plundering Russkies, most of the German plant (80%) and particularly the machine tools industry (93.5%) remained intact. Their success in rebuilding so quickly drove Europe's quick recovery under the more comforting rain of Marshall Plan goods from 1947-1951 (30% increase in European GDP) which provided 14% of the income of Hermann's Austrian homeland at that time. (Read "Postwar" by Judt if you want to understand our current state). But clearly Anglo-Saxon commercial values differ from German industrial philosophy, and so our Maxwells should match our style.

The key thing is to have 2 or 3 industrial backers for each Maxwell centre. If income is roughly 40% government, 30% academic and 30% industrial we need £6M p.a. in industry income for each Maxwell/Technology Innovation Centre we want to create. Even if Cambridge has brilliantly distinctive ideas, unless we can show a way to turn those into industry income quickly they should stay as research projects. That is our next job. If anybody has a lead to major industrial customers who will want to buy the Cambridge ideas that should be changing the world in 10 years - we'd love to hear!! ;-)

PS We did also have a really good Healthcare event in the Addenbrookes Board Room on Health records, privacy and social networks too. Lots of nice members turned out and stayed around to chat (healthUnlocked, Judge, Linguamatics, Mills & Reeve, Napp, NHS, PA, Patients Know Best, PHG, Philips, Sagentia, University of Cambridge, Wellcome Trust Sanger etc) and we had fun. Its been hectic, as I said above ;-)

PPS We do know a few organizations through having run the Corporate Gateway over the years. Below some folk we will be chasing up - but obviously warm leads in these places are also very welcome:

ABB
Air Products
Alice Ventures
Apple
BASF
BHP Billiton
Boeing
Boots 
BP
British Oxygen
BT
De La Rue
Deutsche Telekom
Dimplex
DoCoMo
DuPont
Eastman
Egg
Ericsson
Fujifilm Sericol
Gerber Technology
Giesecke & Devrient
Google
GSK
Hilti Corporation
IBM
ICI Image Data
Index Ventures
Infosys
Itochu
JETRO
Kaneka
Kodak
Merck-Serono
Microsoft
Morphy Richards
Nokia
NXP Semiconductors
O2
Osaka Gas
Pepsico
Philips
Procter & Gamble
Qualcomm
Reckitt Benckiser
Rio Tinto
Rohde & Schwarz
Rusnano
Samsung
Sanyo
Schneider
Siemens
SLS Venture
Smith & Nephew
Sondex
Sony
Takeda
Tata
Thales
Dow Chemical
Unilever
WL Gore
World Energy Solutions
Yorkshire Water

big people giving it up for the little people

Last Friday saw the high tech community of Cambridge full tilt, big people giving it up for the little people. The BBC Children in Need charity is a worthy cause, and 200+ teams came to the Science Park in its glorious 40th year to show that we care by running for Fun.

The great advantage of running in full costume is that nobody can recognize who you are. We took exploited our anonymity and sang songs like "Who's afraid of the big bad wolf", "How much is that piggy in the window?" and "I don't know but I've been told, piggy wings are made of gold; I don't know but its been said, wolfy wings are made of lead". Now the truth can be told. It was us ;-)

Giddens wrote about ontological security. Ontology is "the branch of metaphysics concerned with the nature of being", and what he observed is that human beings want to be secure, and to know how they fit into society. In some cases, this leads to some pretty wierd behaviour. For example, the US "war on terror" makes people in the United States feel more secure (thanks to Noa Epstein for this brilliant analysis). Soldiers are soldiers by virtue of defending their state from enemies. in 9-11 Al Quaeda really shocked the US because they showed that tens of fanatics armed with box-cutters could burn out an iconic downtown city of a nation whose military budget (2005) is larger than the next 20 biggest spenders combined and six times bigger than China's. Al Quaeda assert a Califate which threatens all nation states, and the United States is all about statehood and having everyone live inside their own state free and secure. And they exploited precisely the liberties that the modern US provides their citizens - easy access to travel over huge distances, private communications through the internet etc - to deliver a message that whatever was happening in the homelands of those fanatics could also happen in downtown Manhattan. That prospects terrifies me too. But the US turned to familiar routines to reestablish a feeling of security. WW1 was "the war to end wars". When that didn't work, they tried a "war on poverty". And then a "war on drugs". And now we have a similarly interminable "war on terror".

Source: Wikipedia. Freedom from Want, Norman Rockwell

Fortunately, human society has also organized some other useful routines for dealing with people you disagree with. Spring cleaning is mirrored by a set of rituals of reconciliation in the major world religions at this time of year. Few of our ancestors can have been confident of making it through the winter. Reconciling yourself with estranged social contacts who you might never see again before winter really set in must have been useful for society. So we have Yom Kippur, Eid ul-Fitr, All Souls, Thanksgiving, Anti-Bullying Week, and the glorious Cambridge Fun Run.

When a wolf wanders into your reception demanding money, what do you do?

Well, if you are Brian Moon you put your hand in your own pocket and donate £500 to honour the 50th anniversary of Cambridge Consultants and the 40th Anniversary of the Cambridge Science Park. What ontological security did Brian gain from doing this? Only he knows the routine he was honouring when, taken completely surprised, in a moment of truth, he put his hand to his company chequebook and made a huge contribution to the welfare of children who could never possibly affect his own bottom line.

Respect, Brian! Now, when a wolf walks into YOUR reception, what are YOU going to do?

And if no wolf walks into your reception, why don't you go to the Cambridge Fun Run website and donate? Because no matter how big you've got, it is time to give it up for the little people. So Cambridge ideas can continue to change the world once you've got done leading technology and innovation and want to hand on the torch to fresh legs and eager hands.

Content is king, but wisdom is queen

In Cambridge, content is king. Scruffy academics in macs vie with gawky geeks in dayglo cycle shorts for the prize of the most unlikely person to change the world - until they open their mouth and start explaining their idea.

Wisdom has built her house,
she has hewn her seven pillars.
She has slaughtered her animals, she has mixed her wine,
she has also set her table.
She has sent out her servant-girls, she calls
from the highest places in the town,
"You that are simple, turn in here!"
To those without sense she says,
"Come, eat of my bread
and drink of the wine I have mixed.
Lay aside immaturity, and live,
and walk in the way of insight."

Fortunately, we have a brilliantly well-presented team of ladies organizing events here in Cambridge Network, who wisely do all those things that make meetings rather more effective. Stuff like putting up events a good time in advance on a website that receives 7,000 visitors and hands out 50,000 page views a day. Stuff like chasing speakers for presentations and getting them up in PDF form on the web page of the event in case anyone wants to tweet about it and link to some real content. Stuff like making sure that there are refreshments and a good list of attendees with their interests in the particular topic being discussed nicely laid out. Stuff that most other organizations just don't do.

 
Head of the team is Louise Rushworth. Louise holds the forward schedule for the next year or so - our Special Interest Groups are mostly planned through 2011 now. She did a brilliant job last Friday of taking new and prospective members through the upcoming schedule, a group of around 45 people from Audio Analytic, Badenoch and Clark, CADStudios, Creactive Design, Encocam, Enterprise Consulting, Evolve Organisation Development, Fenners Chambers, Ideas by Eden, Judge Business School, Medical Research Council, Metail, NHS East of England, NW Brown Group, Obsidian Consulting LLP, Orion Automation, PraxisUnico, Safer Business Associates, SHAZAM Analytics, SJPR, The Inspired Group, University of East Anglia. Louise looks after theSpecial Interest Groups in Defence & Security, Developing World, Entrepreneurship and Open Meetings. Louise organizes lots of other stuff too, like the Corporate Gateway which gives technology scouts and R&D directors 1-to-1 meetings on the topics of their choice over two days with the best and brightest (and nicely presented!) minds in Cambridge.

Andrea Mitchell actually organized the event - she sorts out all the Making the Most of Membership sessions, along with our brilliant Consumer Products, Finance Director and Cafe Networking SIGs.

Emma Southern turned out a great crowd last Wednesday to talk about Business Intelligence. IT and operations experts from Advantage Europe, Andrew Webster, Anglia Business Solutions, AVEVA Solutions, Beacon Computer Technology, Bridge Partners, Cambridge Financial Partners LLP, Contact Edge CRM, Convergys, Craft Way Consulting, Crucible Technology, Elegant Microweb UK, Farmor Quince, GE Energy, Graveley Associates, Itica, Judge Business School, Management Process Systems Limited (MPS), Microsoft Research, Paribus, Risk-Capital Research & Technology, Safer Business Associates, Signify, Softwerx, Synalytic, TTP, Voyage Manager and Zapp. Personally I wound up chatting to the Microsoft Research presenter about the French and Anglo-Saxon innovation systems. He teaches at a Grande Ecole, and talked about how concerned he was about the gap between academia and commerce in France. I cited an ex-Grande Ecole mate who went straight from being Sarcozy's chief of staff to performing the same function for the head of Orange France Telecom, but then we agreed that was probably better described as moving between different government functions. Emma looks after Healthcare, Cleantech, and Sales and Marketing SIGs too.

Lastly, our brilliant young Russian intern, Kate Parashina, did a brilliant job last week of pulling together an audience of around 80 Chinese national students who were interested in hearing about Unilever's plans to expand their Shanghai R&D centre. It was a big help to Kate to listen to Jim Crilly (who heads up Unilever Colworth) because she is working closely with Louise to identify academics and companies who are interested in emerging markets, and many of the issues that Unilever's Chinese researchers need to consider relate to precisely those issues of developing waste handling and redesigning products to be less resource-hungry as emerging consumers rapidly move to being 80% of all consumers by 2020. Again, I found the session fascinating myself - and when the kids were knocking back the Liptons Iced Tea on the weekend I could brag that I had met the man in charge!

Content really IS king in Cambridge. None of these sessions were generalised speed networking sessions for business people to sell low level services to one another. Each of them took months of effort to line up the right speakers, and to get three such sessions out in a single week is a testimony to the effectiveness of our events group. They fulfill our mission of bridging from the Universities to the region, from the region to the world.

 

small town

Bob Driver (UKTI, Dir Hi Tech), Lynn Gladden (ProVC Research, Cambridge), Hermann Hauser

In Cambridge commerce is mostly just the continuation of academia by other means, to paraphrase von Clausewitz. It was great to eat pizza with Amadeus, Base4, Johnson Matthey, GSK (BioScience Park), Philips Research, TWI, Unilever (Goodman) and the Universities of Anglia Ruskin, Cambridge and East Anglia to discuss what we should be doing about the new Fraunhofer-like Technology and Innovation Centres that the government recently announced.

We were keen get together with friends to think about how to respond to the announcement of this funding in the Comprehensive Spending Review on 20th October. Bob Driver (Director High Technology, UKTI) is familiar to many in the region as the original creator of Technology World. Bob had spoken with colleagues in BIS and established that the Technology Strategy Board would be working with industry, stakeholders, and wider government to identify the priority areas, and the scale of investment required for the network of centres by April 2011. He recommended that we discussed any outline plans we had with the TSB and BIS. A vital aspect was the extent that the Technology and Innovation Centres would enable the UK to exploit large global markets worth (or potentially worth) over £10bn pa; and where the UK has technical leadership. Bids will only have to be submitted in the New Year - so while we are quite right to get our act together, we aren't yet late to market. But, as our friends at Intel say, only the paranoid survive.

Lynn Gladden (ProVC Research, Cambridge), Hermann Hauser, Sian Reid (Leader Cambridge City)

It was good to hear from the University and Hermann, the author of the report recommending the development of UK Fraunhofers, and to understand the huge progress that they had made behind the scenes in negotiation with other Universities and with the funding councils.

Dr Hermann Hauser said:
•    he is delighted that his original report to Peter Mandelson has been taken up by Vince Cable, who obviously was under no obligation to follow the same policy as his predecessor in BIS;
•    The Government recently announced £200m of funding for about 12 centres across the UK. The actual figure that will be available is thought to be nearer £250m;
•    There is a a danger that the Government money won’t be allocated to Cambridge as ‘Maxwell’ centres but to other areas in the UK. People made unemployed as universities and public sector employment are cut back in the North East and North West are unlikely to find other local jobs, while our rampant growth (the high tech cluster is growing 10-15% this year) provides many opportunities for similar people here. For humane as well as political reasons, there is a strong desire to send whatever available public funding as far North as possible;
•    The Fraunhofer model is that funding for each centre needs to be 33% Government, 33% academia, 34% industry, and the Germans have been opening roughly one centre a year on that basis including recently units in the United States. To quote Wikipedi:

"The so-called Fraunhofer Model has been in existence since 1973 and has led to the Society's continuing growth. Under the model, the Fraunhofer Society earns ca. 60% of its income through contracts with industry or specific government projects. The other 40% of the budget is sourced in the proportion 9:1 from federal and state (Land) government grants and is used to support preparatory research.

Thus the size of the society's budget depends largely on its success in maximizing revenue from commissions. This funding model applies not just to the central society itself but also to the individual institutes. This serves both to drive the realisation of the Fraunhofer Society's strategic direction of becoming a leader in applied research as well as encouraging a flexible, autonomous and entrepreneurial approach to the society's research priorities."

•    Rumour has it that certain areas have already been highlighted for Fraunhofer-type units here but it is not finalized yet;
•    We feel that Cambridge had a better case than most for the establishment of at least one centre here – we have strong research and effective export-oriented high tech industry delivering many new jobs;
•    There is still the opportunity to influence government.

Hermann Hauser, Lynn Gladden (ProVC Research, Cambridge), Steve Battersby (Senior Director Innovation, Philips Research)

Professor Lynn Gladden said
•    She is working with Herman to determine the impact/implications of new Fraunhofer-type centres in the region;
•    University of Cambridge sees value in the centres;
•    Funding might not be an issue even if BIS allocated it's limited funds Northwards - we might possibly use EPSRC funding to support such units;
•    We have some key areas of interest:
a.    Plastic Electronics would be stronger here than in alternative area of the North East, particularly as the University of Cambridge (with it's spinouts Plastic Logic and Cambridge Display Technology) have a good connection with Imperial College;
b.    Stem cells / regenerative medicine;
c.    Bioinformatics where we have the European Bioinformatics Institute, Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute,  and successful spinouts such as Illumina (Solexa) and more recently Base4;
•    There is definitely time to influence Government. The indications are that the topics (and hence locations) are not a done deal yet but that our case would be stronger if we presented at least two parts of the funding in order ie industry and academia;
•    We are reliant on industry collaboration to make these new centres work. It is jolly useful to have pizza for some interested parties organized by Cambridge Network, originally founded by the University for just such a purpose of bridging from the University to the region and from the region to the world. More pizza will be required ;-)

Peter Oakley (TWI, Associate Director), John Gourd(Johnson Matthey, Planning and Services Director)

We laid plans with Goodman (who look after science parks at Unilever Colworth and Harwell) for ways to make the Fraunhofers we are all proposing complementary. That really isn't very hard to do.  Colworth is located midway between Cambridge and Oxford, and Unilever are already well aware of our ecosystem and what it can contribute.

Hermann Hauser, Sally Ann Forsyth (Goodman, Director), Henk Koopmans (EEDA, Head of Strategic Investments)

But there are lots of open questions:
a)    Raise industry matched funding. £100m is available from some institutional investors, but we would need to work out a business model that would allow the University to covenant;
b)    How much is needed? Hermann says each centre should cost ‘£50-£100m over 10 years’;
c)    Do we plan for two centres, one in Physical Sciences and one In Life Sciences, to match our West Cambridge and Biomedical Campus spaces?

Cambridge ideas will continute to change the world if they are easy to pick up and assimilate. Charles Kingsley wrote that fen people are more arrogant than mountain-men because they see nothing around them taller than the buildings their fathers raised. Our new Fraunhofers will engage a new wave of multinationals in our amazing ecosystem, and we imagine they will keep us humble. Would you like to come too?