Last year, I did an interview with Adam Bird, the Chief Technology Officer of the Nottingham-based technology company Esendex, and Toby Reid, the former civil engineer and one-time entrepreneur who is now director at BioCity Nottingham.
The interview centred around a discussion of Nottingham’s nascent tech community, exploring the kind of people and businesses who make it tick, and seeking to understand the kind of lifestyle and environment that encourages people like them to put down roots in a particular place.
At the time, the geeks and techies were feeling a bit unloved, as if Nottingham’s leaders were too busy wondering where the next office block might come from to notice that they had the potential gold dust that is knowledge and intellectual property growing under their very noses.
Since then, they’ve got noticed. Esendex was one of the first businesses to become part of the Invest in Nottingham’s Club’s creative class, a group of poster boys and girls for the emerging knowledge-based business community.
It’s the way of news that not all the work you put into a story makes it into print, and one of the shortcomings of the article was the omission of another interview I did to get an informed ‘outside’ perspective on what Nottingham needed to do to nurture and grow more creatives.
The interview was with Lucy Marcus, the American-born (but UK domiciled) technology investment consultant who is also a sought-after commentator on business and business ethics. She’s known to quite a few people in Nottingham through her links with BioCity’s investment fund.
I came across my notes again the other day, and what leapt out during the conversation with her was the answer she gave to the question of what the city’s authorities should be doing to support its creative class.
I’ll let the original unpublished article below do the talking. It’s something not just for creatives and technology companies to dwell on, but also Nottingham City Council, which is still working on its Economic Growth Strategy.
Put simply, it should think extremely carefully before it makes any commitment to create growth itself. And may be it should pick up the phone and give Lucy a call.
Here’s the article, see what you think – feedback would be welcome.
Lucy P. Marcus has long experience of the difficulties businesses face when they try to get recognition for creative original thinking.
The chief executive of Marcus Venture Consulting, she advises early stage technology companies on the best way to connect with venture capital. She also chairs the Mobius Life Sciences Fund at BioCity.
Marcus also has a unique perspective on the Nottingham economy. Born in the USA, she was a high flyer who worked for the US Government before coming to the UK.
Her verdict on the city’s emerging creative community is that it’s an important part of the Nottingham economy – but must find its own way ahead.
“I think one thing that would puzzle me a little is why it would be a big thing for them to get the city on board,” she told Business Post.
“A creative entrepreneurial spirit and the eco-support system for it is not something which can be engineered. It just happens.
“The lifestyle around it is important, the universities can feed into the development of it, but its development will tend to be organic rather than structured. Entrepreneurs are all about doing it themselves.”
Marcus says the sector must have some momentum and “density” if Nottingham is going to become recognised by potential financial backers as a centre for the growth of creative technological businesses. “It’s got to be obvious that there is a lot going on here,” she says.
Nationally, talk about the growth of creative business has been made fashionable by a cluster of web-based technology businesses in London’s Shoreditch that have become collectively known as Silicon Roundabout.
“People were priced out of London and they found a place with cheap rents and good facilities where creatives could gather,” says Marcus.
“Nottingham has got the DNA to make this happen. We have the universities, we have the graduates. If we make it attractive for them to stay, if there are companies for them to work for, then they will stay.
“But if it’s going to happen it will happen naturally – you can’t manufacture a sector through city policy.”
I’m going to revisit this issue from time to time, because it’s an important one. In the meantime I’d also recommend those who are interested in this kind of thing sample a couple of chunky pieces of brain-food.
One is Richard Florida’s Rise of the Creative Class, the book which was probably the first serious analysis of this new breed. It first came out years ago, but is well worth revisiting for first principles.
The second is a more recent tome, urban economist Edward Glaeser’s The Triumph of the City. This, I think, raises some really big questions about the way Nottingham views itself and the world it’s part of.
Friday 18 May 2012
Thursday 17 May 2012
The Great, the Good and the Ghastly at an inquiry losing the plot
I don’t normally like writing about my trade. I’m a reporter and I’m not meant to be the story.
The past year has made that difficult, though. Reporting of the Leveson Inquiry into press standards is everywhere.
Personally, I’ve had enough of it – not the issues it raises, but the inquiry. Its grim relentlessness now has an almost medieval quality, with people and behaviour being pulled apart on a rack to no beneficial effect. Outside London medialand I think the rest of the country has probably had enough, too. I make no comment on the rights or wrongs. They are self-evident and were established months ago.
But the one thing you have to remember whenever you see the reporting of the Leveson inquiry is that not one of the national newspapers or broadcasting organisations continually putting it at the top of their news lists are disinterested parties.
Other national newspapers would love to see News International given a commercial caning because it opens the door for them. Some have behaved no better.
Some of the brickbats being hurled in the direction of NI and its employees past and present also have a political dimension. Murdoch & co clearly cosied up to the current government, so that relationship is also being used as a stick to beat a stumbling coalition.
It was at the insistence of a former Gordon Brown aide, Tom Watson MP, that stinging personal criticism of Rupert Murdoch was inserted into a Parliamentary report, transforming a rational judgement into cheap politicking.
The BBC, too, has given the inquiry a prominence which doesn’t always reflect levels of public interest. One of its main competitors is Sky, in which Murdoch-controlled News Corporation is the largest shareholder.
It isn’t bias. But it’s certainly navel-gazing, probably a bit self-satisfied. And it’s now tedious.
The Leveson Inquiry has properly dwelt on some shocking behaviour by newspapers. But nothing new is now emerging, and it rumbles on and on, day after day, with counsel cross-examining witnesses in a manner which has at times descended to the level of gruesome parody.
The giggles which greeted the ‘revelation’ that David Cameron signed off texts to an editor ‘LoL’ sit ill with the ghastly truth about the hacking of a murder victim’s phone. Has the inquiry lost the plot?
While ordinary people were genuinely shocked to hear about the hacking of Milly Dowler’s phone after she had gone missing, they are less concerned about politicians and celebrities (at least one of whom is now known to have made an error of fact while giving evidence to the inquiry).
Politicians have long felt they get a raw deal from national newspapers, who sit waiting for them to trip-up, demand instant results from policies just out of the oven, and make a three-course meal of minor problems.
The boot is now on the other foot and is being used to administer a good kicking. Which tells you that the two are, arguably, made for each other.
Similarly, celebrities who have benefited financially from fame driven at least partly by press publicity have decided they want the publicity strictly limited. Is that fair or is it hypocritical?
Celebrities are often very ordinary underneath. Ordinary people are fallible. Fallibility is part of everyday life. You can’t seal it off. But nor should you go looking for it with a zoom lens.
The press faces many problems. Frankly, its conduct is not the biggest challenge because outside the goldfish bowl of London most newspapers behave well and do a decent job.
Its biggest challenge is the disruptive change wrought by the internet, and the apparent belief that news costs nothing to produce.
That side of the industry is where do or die decisions will be made.
About that, the Great and the Good and the Ghastly who have paraded, performed and pronounced at the Leveson Inquiry have had nothing to say.
The past year has made that difficult, though. Reporting of the Leveson Inquiry into press standards is everywhere.
Personally, I’ve had enough of it – not the issues it raises, but the inquiry. Its grim relentlessness now has an almost medieval quality, with people and behaviour being pulled apart on a rack to no beneficial effect. Outside London medialand I think the rest of the country has probably had enough, too. I make no comment on the rights or wrongs. They are self-evident and were established months ago.
But the one thing you have to remember whenever you see the reporting of the Leveson inquiry is that not one of the national newspapers or broadcasting organisations continually putting it at the top of their news lists are disinterested parties.
Other national newspapers would love to see News International given a commercial caning because it opens the door for them. Some have behaved no better.
Some of the brickbats being hurled in the direction of NI and its employees past and present also have a political dimension. Murdoch & co clearly cosied up to the current government, so that relationship is also being used as a stick to beat a stumbling coalition.
It was at the insistence of a former Gordon Brown aide, Tom Watson MP, that stinging personal criticism of Rupert Murdoch was inserted into a Parliamentary report, transforming a rational judgement into cheap politicking.
The BBC, too, has given the inquiry a prominence which doesn’t always reflect levels of public interest. One of its main competitors is Sky, in which Murdoch-controlled News Corporation is the largest shareholder.
It isn’t bias. But it’s certainly navel-gazing, probably a bit self-satisfied. And it’s now tedious.
The Leveson Inquiry has properly dwelt on some shocking behaviour by newspapers. But nothing new is now emerging, and it rumbles on and on, day after day, with counsel cross-examining witnesses in a manner which has at times descended to the level of gruesome parody.
The giggles which greeted the ‘revelation’ that David Cameron signed off texts to an editor ‘LoL’ sit ill with the ghastly truth about the hacking of a murder victim’s phone. Has the inquiry lost the plot?
While ordinary people were genuinely shocked to hear about the hacking of Milly Dowler’s phone after she had gone missing, they are less concerned about politicians and celebrities (at least one of whom is now known to have made an error of fact while giving evidence to the inquiry).
Politicians have long felt they get a raw deal from national newspapers, who sit waiting for them to trip-up, demand instant results from policies just out of the oven, and make a three-course meal of minor problems.
The boot is now on the other foot and is being used to administer a good kicking. Which tells you that the two are, arguably, made for each other.
Similarly, celebrities who have benefited financially from fame driven at least partly by press publicity have decided they want the publicity strictly limited. Is that fair or is it hypocritical?
Celebrities are often very ordinary underneath. Ordinary people are fallible. Fallibility is part of everyday life. You can’t seal it off. But nor should you go looking for it with a zoom lens.
The press faces many problems. Frankly, its conduct is not the biggest challenge because outside the goldfish bowl of London most newspapers behave well and do a decent job.
Its biggest challenge is the disruptive change wrought by the internet, and the apparent belief that news costs nothing to produce.
That side of the industry is where do or die decisions will be made.
About that, the Great and the Good and the Ghastly who have paraded, performed and pronounced at the Leveson Inquiry have had nothing to say.
Monday 14 May 2012
Greek myth turns tragic for us all
If you’d asked me a few months back, I’d have said the problems in the Eurozone looked like they’d quietened down nicely.
Yes, some painful targets were being put in place to rein in spending deficits and pay back the absolute mountains of debt that Greece, Spain, Italy and Portugal racked up in the years of plenty, but provided they swallowed this deeply unpleasant hangover cure things wouldn’t get worse.
More importantly, a lull in the crisis would give the European economy time to get back on an even keel and start generating some growth.
Well, they’ve now spat the cure back out again. Or, to mix metaphors, they want to have their cake and eat it.
Last week, I watched a marvellous TV documentary about the eurozone crisis in Greece presented by former Tory minister Michael Portillo. Greece, you’ll remember, is the country where the government lied about its budget deficit to gain entry to the euro, where tax avoidance is a national sport, and where government borrowed squillions to host the 2004 Olympics, building a series of statement facilities which now lie unused (and unpaid for).
Portillo spoke to a handful of ordinary Greeks and asked them whether it might not be better to accept they had been living a lie, realise they could never pay back this towering debt and leave the euro. To a man, they said no. And anyway it was the government’s fault, not theirs. (To be fair, a similar attitude still surfaces here: we blame government for allowing the banking crash, and banks for irresponsible lending, we blame government now for cutbacks…even though it was us who borrowed all that money. But at least we’ve swallowed our medicine…so far).
Even in France – a big economy which lags Germany because of overblown public spending – voters decided they didn’t want austerity. With great respect to La France, they haven’t even sniffed it yet.
The European Union only has itself to blame here. It should never have allowed Greece into the euro when, deep down, everybody in Berlin and Brussels knew Athens’ accounting was just another Greek myth.
And the fundamental flaw in the whole euro project was that it assumed countries were willing to sacrifice a central part of their sovereignty – financial independence – for the greater good of Europe.
The politicians might have been, but the results of various elections in Greece, France and Italy have demonstrated that, when it comes to the crunch at least, voters are not.
The politicians made this assumption partly because they thought the Eurozone would always deliver reasonable growth and because the impact of a one-size-fits-all interest rate on a financial crisis in a range of economies had never been crash-tested.
It has now. And it looks to have failed.
May be it would have been different if voters across Europe weren’t feeling the pinch. But this isn’t the first time that European leaders have been caught running well ahead of the people they represent with hugely ambitious policies no one had voted on.
There is no clean and easy way out of this. Greek banks have been propped up by cash injections from the European Central Bank and from central banks in other countries. Banks across the continent are exposed to the Greek, Italian and Spanish economies.
If Greece goes back to the drachma it will trade at fractions of the value of the euro, the price Italian, Spanish and Portugese governments pay to borrow will rocket, and banks will hoard cash again.
So if Greece limps out of the euro with a default the losses will be felt by us all.
Holidays in in the Aegean will suddenly be very cheap. And by crikey we’ll need one…
Yes, some painful targets were being put in place to rein in spending deficits and pay back the absolute mountains of debt that Greece, Spain, Italy and Portugal racked up in the years of plenty, but provided they swallowed this deeply unpleasant hangover cure things wouldn’t get worse.
More importantly, a lull in the crisis would give the European economy time to get back on an even keel and start generating some growth.
Well, they’ve now spat the cure back out again. Or, to mix metaphors, they want to have their cake and eat it.
Last week, I watched a marvellous TV documentary about the eurozone crisis in Greece presented by former Tory minister Michael Portillo. Greece, you’ll remember, is the country where the government lied about its budget deficit to gain entry to the euro, where tax avoidance is a national sport, and where government borrowed squillions to host the 2004 Olympics, building a series of statement facilities which now lie unused (and unpaid for).
Portillo spoke to a handful of ordinary Greeks and asked them whether it might not be better to accept they had been living a lie, realise they could never pay back this towering debt and leave the euro. To a man, they said no. And anyway it was the government’s fault, not theirs. (To be fair, a similar attitude still surfaces here: we blame government for allowing the banking crash, and banks for irresponsible lending, we blame government now for cutbacks…even though it was us who borrowed all that money. But at least we’ve swallowed our medicine…so far).
Even in France – a big economy which lags Germany because of overblown public spending – voters decided they didn’t want austerity. With great respect to La France, they haven’t even sniffed it yet.
The European Union only has itself to blame here. It should never have allowed Greece into the euro when, deep down, everybody in Berlin and Brussels knew Athens’ accounting was just another Greek myth.
And the fundamental flaw in the whole euro project was that it assumed countries were willing to sacrifice a central part of their sovereignty – financial independence – for the greater good of Europe.
The politicians might have been, but the results of various elections in Greece, France and Italy have demonstrated that, when it comes to the crunch at least, voters are not.
The politicians made this assumption partly because they thought the Eurozone would always deliver reasonable growth and because the impact of a one-size-fits-all interest rate on a financial crisis in a range of economies had never been crash-tested.
It has now. And it looks to have failed.
May be it would have been different if voters across Europe weren’t feeling the pinch. But this isn’t the first time that European leaders have been caught running well ahead of the people they represent with hugely ambitious policies no one had voted on.
There is no clean and easy way out of this. Greek banks have been propped up by cash injections from the European Central Bank and from central banks in other countries. Banks across the continent are exposed to the Greek, Italian and Spanish economies.
If Greece goes back to the drachma it will trade at fractions of the value of the euro, the price Italian, Spanish and Portugese governments pay to borrow will rocket, and banks will hoard cash again.
So if Greece limps out of the euro with a default the losses will be felt by us all.
Holidays in in the Aegean will suddenly be very cheap. And by crikey we’ll need one…
Thursday 10 May 2012
The questions a vote left behind
So no directly-elected mayor for Nottingham. Not for the forseeable future, anyway.
Last week’s vote against having one can be read any number of ways, but the turnout in the Arboretum ward – a paltry 8.45% - offers a clue: one way or another, many voters just aren’t bothered about it.
May be they thought there wasn’t a lot to bother about. This wasn’t a well-sold or well-explained campaign, and (despite some daft rumours) wasn’t well-financed, either.
The mood music seems to be that there are bigger fish to fry. Which is pretty much what the Nottingham East MP, Chris Leslie, suggested before the vote.
A wise city council leadership won’t claim this as an emphatic endorsement of the current leader-and-cabinet system, though - 57% for No and 43% for Yes doesn’t tell us that.
Labour worked harder than the Yes campaign to mobilise a No vote, and won a postal vote with a turnout north of 65%. That’s an astonishing number against attitudes otherwise dominated by indifference.
But many of its voters look to have stayed at home on the day, which doesn’t suggest passionate endorsement of everything that comes out of Loxley House.
I said in previous blogs that there was an extremely important message underneath the backing for the Yes campaign, and it still stands. Though it wheeled out a couple of ‘trusties’, the No campaign was not able to demonstrate widespread business backing for the status quo. Such backing does not really extend beyond the pragmatism of a working relationship.
Influential sections of the city aren’t happy with the way things are run, whether it’s the service they get from the city council or the alleged failure to bat for Nottingham nationally and internationally. Their view, as Tim Garratt has pointed out elsewhere, is that the city doesn’t properly punch its weight and can sometimes be a three-course meal to work with.
That strikes me as harsh. There have been some massive successes – making the tram extension project happen against a background of significant public sector cutbacks was immense. No one can take that away from Labour.
But how did an ability to make such giant strides also translate into 10 whole years of stumbling around Broadmarsh? And of a once-in-a-lifetime development boom sailing straight past Eastside and Waterside? Even now, there is a major project in the city which has gone bafflingly quiet.
The relationship between the city leadership and Whitehall has been hit-or-miss. Notable achievements have been mixed with childlike spats (on both sides) and a stubborn refusal on the city’s part to come clean about some of its spending.
The result of these bouts of churlishness is the poke in the eye Nottingham got when it applied for a comparatively small amount of money to invest in ultra high-speed broadband. What should have been a straightforward economic decision became a political one.
Local MPs have hesitated to raise Nottingham’s case in the House of Commons because they know the city’s attitude is going to be thrown back at them. Some were also livid at the conduct of the No campaign, particularly after ‘leafletgate’. There have been long-running frictions between the Labour party nationally and the party in Nottingham.
Away from politics, these grudging undercurrents are what bother some very senior business people – that, and an apparent belief that community comes first. If it comes first, why not invest more heavyweight political capital in attracting the investment and the programmes that could deliver the growth community needs, they wonder? If the council really wants the jobs and growth it so regularly campaigns for, why doesn’t it back the people who can deliver it to the hilt?
Life before May 2010 is gone. There will be no return to big government spending, no Building Schools for the Future budget to wield, even if a blundering coalition throws in the towel tomorrow. And there is no regional development agency to give a paternalistic steer or oil the wheels of an investment inquiry.
One of the most telling – if coded - contributions to the mayoral debate came from Alan Simpson, the former Labour MP for Nottingham South. He dismissed the idea of a mayor out of hand, but offered sharp criticism of the city council, which he claimed lacked visionary leadership and risked dumping Nottingham into the second division.
Simpson is not an entirely disinterested party – he didn’t get on with the city leadership. But his criticism plays to another issue for Nottingham: it may have a vision in parts, but it doesn’t have a clear story to tell.
Let’s be clear – there is a lot happening in Nottingham and a lot is going to happen. The infrastructure development pipeline is significant, investment will take place in upgrading the city’s retail offer, we do keep appearing on the inquiry list for significant inward investments.
But these big opportunities beg a far more assertive approach to economic development which tells a compelling and original story about a powerful conurbation which leads a region – one where a walk through the door immediately tells you that you are in the company of ambitious people who know how to make things happen.
As someone said to me at MIPIM, the people, the opportunities and the conurbation are all there. But where is that single, powerful, unified vision?
If Nottingham really is serious about its place in the universe then there are some big decisions to make.
So how Nottingham organises itself as an economic entity will come back on to the agenda at some stage. If it is to compete for the government’s City Deal money it has to demonstrate there is a mechanism for joint action between neighbouring local authorities.
Businesses want a figurehead, and a compelling story about a big conurbation which is easy to work with. MPs wish some of the city’s politicking was driven by big picture vision rather than small-town spats. Some civil servants simply expect more of what should be a regional capital
We have some massive opportunities in this city. There are people who can deliver. There is a track record of achievement. Is the way forwards really that difficult?
Last week’s vote against having one can be read any number of ways, but the turnout in the Arboretum ward – a paltry 8.45% - offers a clue: one way or another, many voters just aren’t bothered about it.
May be they thought there wasn’t a lot to bother about. This wasn’t a well-sold or well-explained campaign, and (despite some daft rumours) wasn’t well-financed, either.
The mood music seems to be that there are bigger fish to fry. Which is pretty much what the Nottingham East MP, Chris Leslie, suggested before the vote.
A wise city council leadership won’t claim this as an emphatic endorsement of the current leader-and-cabinet system, though - 57% for No and 43% for Yes doesn’t tell us that.
Labour worked harder than the Yes campaign to mobilise a No vote, and won a postal vote with a turnout north of 65%. That’s an astonishing number against attitudes otherwise dominated by indifference.
But many of its voters look to have stayed at home on the day, which doesn’t suggest passionate endorsement of everything that comes out of Loxley House.
I said in previous blogs that there was an extremely important message underneath the backing for the Yes campaign, and it still stands. Though it wheeled out a couple of ‘trusties’, the No campaign was not able to demonstrate widespread business backing for the status quo. Such backing does not really extend beyond the pragmatism of a working relationship.
Influential sections of the city aren’t happy with the way things are run, whether it’s the service they get from the city council or the alleged failure to bat for Nottingham nationally and internationally. Their view, as Tim Garratt has pointed out elsewhere, is that the city doesn’t properly punch its weight and can sometimes be a three-course meal to work with.
That strikes me as harsh. There have been some massive successes – making the tram extension project happen against a background of significant public sector cutbacks was immense. No one can take that away from Labour.
But how did an ability to make such giant strides also translate into 10 whole years of stumbling around Broadmarsh? And of a once-in-a-lifetime development boom sailing straight past Eastside and Waterside? Even now, there is a major project in the city which has gone bafflingly quiet.
The relationship between the city leadership and Whitehall has been hit-or-miss. Notable achievements have been mixed with childlike spats (on both sides) and a stubborn refusal on the city’s part to come clean about some of its spending.
The result of these bouts of churlishness is the poke in the eye Nottingham got when it applied for a comparatively small amount of money to invest in ultra high-speed broadband. What should have been a straightforward economic decision became a political one.
Local MPs have hesitated to raise Nottingham’s case in the House of Commons because they know the city’s attitude is going to be thrown back at them. Some were also livid at the conduct of the No campaign, particularly after ‘leafletgate’. There have been long-running frictions between the Labour party nationally and the party in Nottingham.
Away from politics, these grudging undercurrents are what bother some very senior business people – that, and an apparent belief that community comes first. If it comes first, why not invest more heavyweight political capital in attracting the investment and the programmes that could deliver the growth community needs, they wonder? If the council really wants the jobs and growth it so regularly campaigns for, why doesn’t it back the people who can deliver it to the hilt?
Life before May 2010 is gone. There will be no return to big government spending, no Building Schools for the Future budget to wield, even if a blundering coalition throws in the towel tomorrow. And there is no regional development agency to give a paternalistic steer or oil the wheels of an investment inquiry.
One of the most telling – if coded - contributions to the mayoral debate came from Alan Simpson, the former Labour MP for Nottingham South. He dismissed the idea of a mayor out of hand, but offered sharp criticism of the city council, which he claimed lacked visionary leadership and risked dumping Nottingham into the second division.
Simpson is not an entirely disinterested party – he didn’t get on with the city leadership. But his criticism plays to another issue for Nottingham: it may have a vision in parts, but it doesn’t have a clear story to tell.
Let’s be clear – there is a lot happening in Nottingham and a lot is going to happen. The infrastructure development pipeline is significant, investment will take place in upgrading the city’s retail offer, we do keep appearing on the inquiry list for significant inward investments.
But these big opportunities beg a far more assertive approach to economic development which tells a compelling and original story about a powerful conurbation which leads a region – one where a walk through the door immediately tells you that you are in the company of ambitious people who know how to make things happen.
As someone said to me at MIPIM, the people, the opportunities and the conurbation are all there. But where is that single, powerful, unified vision?
If Nottingham really is serious about its place in the universe then there are some big decisions to make.
So how Nottingham organises itself as an economic entity will come back on to the agenda at some stage. If it is to compete for the government’s City Deal money it has to demonstrate there is a mechanism for joint action between neighbouring local authorities.
Businesses want a figurehead, and a compelling story about a big conurbation which is easy to work with. MPs wish some of the city’s politicking was driven by big picture vision rather than small-town spats. Some civil servants simply expect more of what should be a regional capital
We have some massive opportunities in this city. There are people who can deliver. There is a track record of achievement. Is the way forwards really that difficult?
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