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 hidden creative heritage

A few weeks back I blogged about the potential for a serious creative quarter in Nottingham, dwelling on remarks made by venture consultant and commentator Lucy Marcus, who suggested this wasn’t something that state intervention could manufacture.
In short, her point was that a creative quarter would happen only if the creative industries in Nottingham had enough momentum to make it happen - money can help, but it can't invent it.
In view of the fact that Nottingham City Council wants to use part of its £60 million City Deal to develop a creative quarter, this is an important question.
Nottingham's creatives are certainly trying to deliver an emphatic answer. And it may be that there’s more of a heritage of creative and technical achievement in the city that conventional analysis suggests.
Outside the realms of industrial classification, most people will tend to see the creative industries as either something artistic, perhaps wandering into fields of design, or 'tech’ – which is stuff like computer programing, isn’t it?
That’s not wrong. But it doesn’t come close to doing justice to the breadth and depth of creative, technical, research and scientific activity which takes place in the city right now.
Or, more importantly, of acknowledging how long it’s been happening for and understanding where its strength really lies.
In design terms, our creative heritage is epitomised by Sir Paul Smith. And this was, once, an international centre for the textile trade. Through Nottingham Trent, it still produces graduate talent in this field. It's a tough game to make money in, though.
Nottingham’s right to a place at the top table in life sciences and pharmaceutical discovery is well-established, based on the discovery work that used to be done by the likes of Boots (Ibuprofen was discovered here) and the research carried out by the University of Nottingham in particular.
But something else has happened since then that might not be as well recognised. Thanks to the emergence and growth of businesses like Experian and the arrival of the bank Capital One, we now have the best part of a 20-year track record in a field known as data analytics.
This is the story of Experian, founded here and now a global leader in the fields of forecasting and analysis around consumer and business financial behavior. Its multi-faceted demographic tool, Mosaic, is almost a map of the way we live now.
It's the story, too, of Capital One, the US bank which set up its European headquarters in Nottingham. It is very much a can-do corporate, all the way from being a regular in the great places to work charts through to giving its own analysts time to indulge new ideas.
The end result of their presence can be seen and felt in three areas: in other financial services businesses, like Ikano, tapping into a talent pool; in start-ups like HD Decisions, launched by people who found their feet in the two biggies; and in knowledge graduates - people whose degrees deliver skills suitable for programing, analysis and software tools and apps - deciding to stay in Nottingham.
Along with the existing science research, these firms have become another reason for specialist legal and accounting expertise to maintain a presence here.
I was chatting last week to Mark Onyett, the engineer and ex-Capital One exec who co-founded the credit and risk software and services firm TDX (on course to be the city's next £100 million business).
Onyett's journey and his entrepreneurial outlook put him in a strong place to understand the kind of message the city needs to be giving out to the students, start-ups, businesses and backers who might drive the creative and tech sector here.
Again, this is a knotty issue. Identifying a distinctive message won't be easy in a world where local authorities everywhere are fixating on their own mini-me of Shoreditch and Silicon Roundabout. But Onyett thinks we're more plausible than most.
"I'm not sure I'd go for Maid Marian Roundabout!" he says. "It's got to be about the future. How about something like 'For the next generation, come to Nottingham'?"
Next generations don't just appear and you can't invent them, even with a wodge of money. They evolve from what's already been happening.
And that's the point about Nottingham: creative and tech has been happening here for longer than we think. Only now are we beginning to realise what we've got.

Economic soundbites and a speech that matters

There have been two big economic stories over the past 48 hours. One of them has big implications for business in the long-term, the other for politics now. You can guess which one hogged the headlines.
The release yesterday of the first impression of the UK’s economic performance in the last three months of 2010 got hijacked by a yawn-worthy shouting match between Government and opposition. The most informed analyses came from Stephanie Flanders, the BBC’s economics editor, and Gavyn Davies of the Financial Times.
Neither characterised the figures as an unmitigated disaster, while Davies said that because they varied so much from the aggregate of surveys tracking the performance specific industries he didn’t really believe them.
Anyway, the point is that those figures are not where the action’s really at. A much more telling contribution to the debate about where UK business goes from here was provided by Sir Richard Lambert.
It’s the last speech Sir Richard has given in his role as director general of the CBI. Once again, one particular theme in his speech got well and truly ‘politicked’ after the CBI emailed out advance copies to media organisations.
I’ll digress for a moment and explain why this happens. The reason is that this one theme – that the Government hasn’t said nearly enough about policies for business growth – plays to a political agenda currently being driven by the big unions.
The GMB, for example, is in the midst of a PR campaign which involves emailing journalists across the country with round-ups about public sector job losses which it says are ruining the recovery. Whether you agree or not, it’s an effective campaign and in the absence of another narrative from government it’s made the running.
Len McCluskey, the incoming boss of one of the big unions, Unite, went so far as to suggest that Sir Richard’s speech showed that the CBI and the unions are now singing off the same hymn sheet. He clearly didn’t read all 14 pages of it.
Thanks to the good offices of Paul Southby, the Nottingham lawyer who did a sterling stint as the CBI’s regional director, I had a couple of long chats with Sir Richard during the depths of recession. He is a hugely intelligent and very measured man, and anyone who characterises his speech as a political pot-shot is wide of the mark.
And the really important point is not what he says about what the government hasn’t done, but what he says about what it should do. That section his speech – which is much longer than the bits which suited the current news agenda – wasn’t covered at all.
I’ll come on to that in a moment. Sir Richard’s speech contained a useful recap of why the economy is where it is now and why, in his view, public spending would have been slashed even if Labour had been re-elected.
Granted, the coalition has gone about the cutbacks in an uncompromising fashion, but two statistics tell you why public sector retrenchment of one flavour or another was inevitable. Government spending last year was around 3 per cent above the original forecast made by then Chancellor Alistair Darling two years ago. But Government tax revenues meant to fund it were a whopping 13 per cent lower than expected.
Plummeting tax revenues are a measure of how much business activity has fallen out of the economy. Much of it will never come back, leaving a permanent hole in Government budgets. Tellingly, Lambert says that regardless of the economic cycle, “the tax and spending policies of the last government created a substantial structural deficit…that’s what made substantial spending cuts inevitable” (I’d be amazed if Len MCluskey is on the same hymn sheet as that).
So Sir Richard’s speech wasn’t a one-sided attack on the coalition. He poured scorn on the idea that higher business taxes would help plug the deficit, pointing out that this would be an even bigger long-term drag on jobs and growth than the public sector cutbacks are now.
His take is that the ingredients for a private-sector led recovery are definitely there: many businesses have cash in the bank because they cutback in recession, significant opportunities for growth lie in areas like the UK’s power generating infrastructure (which has to be upgraded to meet future demand) and manufacturing-led exports, where the weak pound is beginning to pay off.
So what’s lacking? This is where the serious criticism kicks in: business needs confidence to get spending and investing, but it’s lacking because the government has been far too slow in outlining its policies for supporting business growth.
And those policies that have impacted on business so far – the immigration cap, the localism agenda, the introduction of Local Enterprise Partnerships – have been woefully ignorant of the law of unintended consequences.
Finally, here’s the bit that matters. Beyond those soundbites (which most media focused on) Sir Richard went into some detail about what the Government now needs to do to unlock the growth potential the private sector can deliver.

Long term

• Put a relentless focus on the development of human capital (education, skills, training) and physical infrastructure (power, transport, digital). And do it across the regions to tackle our lop-sided economic geography. So the message for government is that it must invest again once the deficit is tackled

Short-term

• target policies which help small to medium enterprises, NOT large businesses. SMEs, says Sir Richard, are the main source of new jobs in the UK and successful ones are spread all over the country (so fewer ministerial photocalls with big companies!)
• Don’t fall into the hoary old political trap of trying to back ‘winning’ industry sectors. Sir Richard cites fascinating research by our own Experian here, which points out that innovative, ‘growth champions’ are NOTdefined by industry sector – they are defined by the “entrepreneurial zip” of management and an innovative approach. Experian’s research shows it can happen in any industry, anywhere.

Sir Richard says: “What politicians find it difficult to get their mind round is that it is just as possible – and important – to be an innovator in the brick making industry as it is in biosciences. And innovation is not confined to the South East corner of England.”
It follows that if government launches initiatives which back sexy industry sectors it will almost certainly exclude massive numbers of businesses with great potential for growth. So government has to concentrate on policies which support firms which display certain characteristics, not certain SIC codes.
Sir Richard criticises politicians for placing huge emphasis on trade with India and China when UKTI, the Government’s export advice service, would be better supporting these smaller firms trading with Europe.
He says the government’s lukewarm attitude towards Knowledge Transfer Partnerships – which put postgraduates into innovative work in companies – makes no sense when evidence suggests the scheme costs peanuts but delivers significant economic benefits.
Then there’s finance. Again, he says the emphasis should be on making sure cash gets through to those growth champions, not setting one-size-fits-all lending targets for banks based only on a number.
Sir Richard says he isn’t looking for the Government to come up with a five-year, Soviet-style blueprint for the economy. If you read between the lines, he would probably attach a health warning to any slogan-led grand plan.
And there is no succour in this for the public sector or for unions, despite the soundbites. Sir Richard’s analysis is grounded in hard, economic facts presented in a non-partisan manner.
You get the impression he feels politicians have failed the economy once and that we can’t afford it again.
Here’s hoping Vince Cable read all 14 pages, not the news channel soundbites.