Archive for August 2009

A few words by David Gill, Managing Director of St John's Innovation Centre Ltd:

• 

  Aug. 6, 2009 Cambridge Enterprise Conference

  23rd September 2009
  
  It’s only a month until the 10th Cambridge Enterprise Conference (CEC10) takes place at Churchill College. The theme this year is ‘navigating international waters’ and if you are an innovative SME with growth aspirations, I urge you to attend as building in an international dimension from the outset is one of the surest means of growing over the longer term.
  
  The CEC started as just an idea for airing issues about entrepreneurship, devised by Christopher Saunders (Choir of Angels) and Walter Herriot (St John’s Innovation Centre) in 1997. I became involved by serendipity as at the time I was working in the Marketing Department of HSBC and was in HSBC’s Cambridge office when Chris and Walter came in to pitch the idea.
  
  HSBC became a founder-sponsor and I gave a short talk at CEC 1 on the different ways that German and British banks deal with SMEs. The venue was the Fisher Room at St John’s College, which these days would be far too small for the number of attendees expected, though at the time the organisers were concerned that no-one would turn up.
  
  For the next three or four years, the date and the format varied somewhat. Sometimes the conference took place in April and sometimes in September (hence 10 conferences over 12 years). It ranged from one day to two and a half, with different ‘tracks’ in different lecture theatres, before settling down to its current format about four years ago. A number of names to conjure with in the innovation space have been speakers, from Amar Bhide of McKinsey and Columbia University to Mike Lynch of Autonomy and Guy Kawasaki of Garage Technology Ventures.
  
  This year the line-up is equally impressive. It would be invidious of me to single out any speaker in particular, so check out http://www.cambridgeenterpriseconference.co.uk/
  
  After an opening session on ‘the export imperative’, tracks will cover doing business in North America, in Europe and in Asia. The conference will conclude with a session on open innovation, and as is now customary, at lunch-time there will be elevator pitches from half-a-dozen promising young tech firms.
  
  The Cambridge Enterprise Conference is sponsored by Peters Elworthy & Moore as well as by the St John’s Innovation Centre. It is supported by Business Link, the Greater Cambridge Partnership and N W Brown Group Limited.
  
  Thanks to this support, we can allow entrepreneurs running early-stage, innovative firms access to the Conference on preferential rates.
  
  If you’re interested in attending, come and have a word with Peter Hornby or me in the office.
  
  Until next week
  
  David
  

• Aug. 3, 2009 Welcome to the new website

  Welcome to the newly-revamped website of the St John’s Innovation Centre! We hope you find it useful and informative.

  In addition to enhanced background information on the Centre itself, the Cambridge cluster and some recent or current tenants, over the next few weeks we’ll be rolling out services such as the ability to book rooms online, a calendar of events, a discussion section for live topics and other features to supplement the sense of onsite community with virtual tools to make communication easier.
  
  The SJIC community is fairly extensive, and as a result I suspect that most of us don’t talk to our neighbours (in the broad sense) as much as we’d like. Some 60 companies actually on site and 300 people working in the building are supplemented by 270 Star Tenants – companies who use SJIC as their address but don’t (yet) have a physical office here. With a wide range of organisations – from technology breakfast clubs to faith groups – using our conference rooms for regular events, the traffic through the building in any given month is quite extensive.
  
  I’m acutely aware that the recession has made most of us in the building keep our heads down this year, which is understandable. But many of the benefits of being in an incubator like SJIC come from discussions – formal and informal – with fellow tenants, and it’s those conversations we’re looking to facilitate during the autumn and beyond.
  
  In addition to new discussions facilities on the website, we’re re-launching the regular Friday events that many of you will remember from Enterprise Link days. Starting in mid-September, every other Friday the Innovation Centre will provide a sandwich lunch and an (usually) external speaker to talk for 20 minutes on a current, relevant topic of particular interest to innovative firms. Proposals being considered include legal issues in raising funds, recent changes in the grants regime, team building, open venturing and strategic marketing.
  
  We’re also looking to encourage tenants who’ve recently been successful in raising finance or undertaking a major corporate transaction to share their experience. If you have stories to volunteer, do let me know. The Friday lunchtime format is likely to evolve according to demand, and we welcome your feedback. If it proves popular, we’d look to have more frequent events.
  
  Now a short word about this blog. Having spent 2004-05 in California, just as social networking and personal blogs were taking off in a big way, I used to be a strong supporter of new media. But such has been the explosion of material in the past two or three years that it’s difficult not to feel that ‘less is more’. Personally I don’t even find time to listen to the weekly podcasts on entrepreneurship and finance I download from the BBC or the Cambridge or Stanford websites. And I’m a little suspicious of people who do: when are they actually getting work done?
  
  So this blog is likely to appear weekly, but if we on the SJIC home team don’t have anything to say, we won’t issue a blog just for the sake of it. Subject matter will be very similar to the proposed Friday midday events: current developments in areas of interest to innovation SMEs, from access to funding to changes in patent regulation or industry trends. In addition, developments at SJIC itself will also be covered.
  
  And as Polonius put it, brevity is the soul of wit, even though I still doubt that anything meaningful can be said in 140 characters or fewer, unless author and audience already share a dense common background. But I’m even prepared to give that a go.
  
  Until next time
  
  David