MIPIM: Nottingham's Silicon Roundabout is the real deal

The longer you're in business journalism the more sceptical you become about claims that a new development will bring hundreds or thousands of new jobs.

A decade ago, Nottingham was apparently looking at just that when glitzy CGis of a £900m regeneration plan for the city's Eastside area were revealed. What happened? Nothing. The demand just wasn't there and Eastside remains undeveloped to this day.

So what are we to make of claims revealed at MIPIM this week that a £40m Tech Hub in Nottingham could result in hundreds of jobs for people working in and around software development?

I'll declare a vested interest: it was my story and I spoke to the people behind it and others involved in Nottingham's  tech scene several times before publication.

And the difference between the people behind this proposal and the Eastside dream is that they've done this before.

Mark Onyett is the driving force behind it. Armed with a Masters in manufacturing engineering from Cambridge, he went into business consulting before joining Capital One and becoming its director of risk operations. With two former consulting colleagues, he came up with the idea for TDX Group, a business which used data analytics to devise software programs which better manage large-scale debt portfolios.

That was in 2004. In January 2014 he and his fellow shareholders (which by then included Bahrain's Investcorp, no less) sold the Fletcher Gate business to Equifax for a cool £200 million.

Now a partner in London-based tech investment vehicle Blenheim Chalcot (with colleagues Manoj Badale and Charles Mindenhall), he has launched three new tech business in Nottingham which are all operating in the financial services technology space.

The three firms - Oakbrook, Sequensis and Bizfitech - are currently based in York House on Wilford Street and need room to expand. Onyett's idea is that they should form the centre of gravity for a new Tech Hub which will attract other software developers and testers who can feed off each other to develop new ideas and new businesses.

There's nothing new in the economics of clustering - it's what lies behind Silicon Valley on the US West Coast and Silicon Roundabout in London. Onyett's point is that we already have a tech cluster in Nottingham because of the presence of data analytics-based businesses lke Experian, whose growth helped attract Capital One.

Together, those two hefty businesses have supported or given birth to the likes of TDX, Ikano Financial Services, HD Decisions, Insurance Initiatives and others. We have a serious talent pool as a result.

At which point you begin to realise that the announcement Nottingham made at MIPIM this week is not wishful thinking but the real deal.

The one caveat is that the city would do well to market this concept in London, Sheffield, Birmingham and Manchester, as the existing fitech businesses must be close to sucking up all the dev talent already in Nottingham.

Mark Onyett's not alone in thinking that Nottingham has got the rght kind of environment to support the tech mindset. Entrepreneur Adam Bird (one of the founders of Esendex, later sold for £11m) points  to a growing number of social gatherings (NottTuesday, Second Wednesday, for example) and the upcoming Hack Twenty Four event as evidence that there is a tech communty with its own eco system - generally seen as vital if techies are to avoid feeling like they've landed in Nowheresville.

There are other aspects of Nottingham which should appeal. Despite those fitech giants, techies often don't like big, branded and corporate, and environments like the Creative Quarter will go down well.

There were no glitzy CGis of the Nottingham Tech Hub to show at MIPIM (and that's probably a good thing). There is instead an experiened team which wants to tap into an existing talent pool grown by a heritage of data analytics activity.

In other words, it's believable.

Nottingham's Creative Quarter: It's better than b******s!

You might say it was when they talked about the money, or the skills, or the mentoring. And all of those things matter.
But for me the defining moment of the Creative Quarter workshop held in Nottingham was the moment when someone near the front delivered the judgement: “This isn’t bollocks.”
Too right.
I’m not being flippant (not much, anyway). This was unvarnished evidence that an audience of people who’ve seen economic initiatives come and go like trains in the night thought that Nottingham’s plans to develop a whole new quarter of the city actually made sense.
And so they should. For there are two key differences between the Creative Quarter plan and the now-wearily familiar CGIs of dreamboat developments that were wheeled out to wow us during the credit boom: this one’s tapping into an existing heritage – and it’s got money behind it.
Friday’s workshop at the Antenna creative hub saw people talk about Nottingham’s industrial past, the potential for social and environmental returns, inclusiveness, even the difference extending Nottingham’s political boundaries might make (yes, that one again).
But the single most important byte of information was contained on a Powerpoint slide flashed up by John Yarham, the City Council’s director of economic innovation. What did it show? £37 million for a venture capital fund, £20 million for a technology grant fund, £8 million of investment in infrastructure, money for start-ups, and business rate incentives.
As I’ve blogged before, when we talk about the creative quarter and the money lined up behind it, we’re really talking about a broad sweep of activities which range from programing, data analytics and life sciences through to creative design, digital content and media. All have knowledge at their heart, all have been present to varying degrees in the Nottingham economy for decades.
The audience at Friday’s event came largely from the creative design and media end of that spectrum. Some tuned in very quickly to the huge implications of the Creative Quarter initiative (Susi Henson, with some tough business experiences under her belt, spotted rent rises immediately), others were wondering how to connect with it, a few wanted to weld it to their own cultural cause.
It’s bigger than that, and the political and economic imperatives underneath it mean it will inevitably do some things a few people in the room won’t like. That’s business.
Yet there were some fascinating contributions to the debate about what Nottingham’s Commercial Quarter is going to be driven by. Adam Bird, the Esendex CTO whose idea of downtime is a quick 100 miles on a bicycle, banged on about business stepping up to the bar and collaborating in the name of economic progress.
This wasn’t woolly idealism, but the product of Bird’s own experience of what it takes to nurture an environment attractive to the techies which firms like his can collectively feed off.
This is about more than well-paid jobs: it’s about events they like to gather at, surroundings they feel at home in and facilities they value. It is understanding that these people look for a fulfilling way of life rather than a Perspex tech palace with ultraband bragging rights.
So it’s wrong to dismiss Bird’s approach as wishful thinking which ignores hard-headed commercial reality. It’s anything but: businesses who want to make the most of the commercial quarter – whether it’s being a part of it or selling services into it – need to understand that. Some of the businesses that grow or set up there will be familiar, traditional animals. Others may have a different cultural feel.
Councillor Nick McDonald, who leads the city council portfolio on jobs, skills and business, also made a number of interesting observations. The Creative Quarter has to deliver politically, and this is why it actually covers a broad range of business and a hefty chunk of the city – including Eastside, a stalled regeneration zone which should have been full of gleaming flats and offices by now if you believed the noughties CGIs.
It’s also the reason why a central component of the Creative Quarter/City Deal hooks into the massive issue of skills and youth employment. This is a nasty problem which has been darkening our corridors for far too long and all initiatives of this kind must have a component which answers the question: what does the future hold for our kids?
This tracks back to Adam Bird’s point: businesses cannot criticise an economy if all they’re going to do is take something out of it. If they think GCSEs are meaningless and don’t rate the skills of job applicants…well, do something about it.
While some involved in the workshop were nervous about attaching too much expectation to an initiative which, as Confetti's Craig Chettle put it, is still in the foothills, McDonald was happy to admit that Austin (home of ‘Keep it Weird’) was part of the inspiration, and pointedly said that Nottingham had been too inward-looking in the past and shouldn’t be ashamed to brag a bit.
There is, potentially, a massive amount to brag about at the moment. Besides the Creative Quarter and the wider City Deal, we have the tram expansion (£600m), the A453 widening (£140m), the transport interchange (£60m), the enterprise zone.
Very few cities can offer such a portfolio of opportunity for the next generation.
Nick McDonald said one of the reasons why the city had been shy about shouting about itself abroad was that overseas ‘jollies’ tended to up on the front page of the Nottingham Post.
The surprise would be if the opportunity presented by the Creative Quarter doesn’t make headlines at MIPIM and beyond. It’s a big story.