A New Model Of Enterprise Support

August 26, 2011 //
0

Yesterday we had the first meeting of The Gathering – seven people meeting in, appropriately, an old cotton mill: we are seeking to seed new enterprise in the great NW industrial heartlands.

We decided over a strictly observed single hour that our shared priorities lay around access to capital, skills training and employability, expert labour access and exchange, network expansion, strategic vision and export focus.

The other first members can remain anonymous or comment in public as they feel fit: you see, we’re not window dressing and don’t have to justify ourselves with manifestos and position papers and an endless rat-a-tat-tat of co-ordinated press publicity.

We’re not paid by the public purse. We are businesspeople. What counts for us is outputs.

The Gathering is for hi tech enterprise in the NW. We have set it up because each of us thinks it is a good idea. Each individual may well have some individual reasons – these are mine:

  • There is no longer a Regional Development capability. Many think that what was there was dysfunctional and bloated. But that doesn’t obviate the need for something.
  • The Local Enterprise Partnerships (LEPs) are not working in this region. Many people think that they cannot work, including quite a few people who are actually on them.
  • There are networking groups but they offer different things: they are not connected to the finer grained demands of sector-specific enterprise growth.
  • The state and public sectors operate under the fallacy that there is a “business community”, somehow coherent across multiple sectors and geographies, and somehow easily and wholly accessible.
  • There cannot be more appropriately positioned people to guide their own enterprise support than cohorts of passionate people who are growing enterprises.
  • Membership organisations have generally become too removed from the concerns of growing enterprises and do not contain the specific knowledge and expertise to be significantly effective in such support (although they may well perform other useful roles).
  • We do not live in an “enterprise society” and we desperately need mechanisms for expert knowledge sharing and expert knowledge leverage.

- So, that’s The Gathering. I’ll never share names or details – those kinds of things  are, literally, our business. But I am sharing the idea of this model and will issue occasional updates because I think there is great mileage in this model and some of you may consider establishing similar initiatives in your own image.

This isn’t a press release. The Gathering doesn’t have an authority structure which issues such things. This is a personal statement of intent, in the full realisation that my own efforts are much greater when situated and leveraged amongst peer groups, all of them then made much greater than the sum of their parts.

Tags ,
Categories Enterprise Support, North West Development Agency

Fantastic Prices for Stepping Stone Technologies

May 15, 2011 //
1

David Beal, the Tories main business connections guy, has just been asking on LinkedIn about the quality of Microsoft’s purchase of Skype. I think it raises a broader issue of overpaying for stepping stone technologies. In answer to his question of whether it is a good deal:

I am deeply unsure.

All the Twitterati and the Fackbookists and LinkedInners talk as if Social Media is a fully developed end point and that these first generation tools of which they make fantastical claims are finished, final and permanent parts.

There is huge flux but also a couple of certain trends: the expansion of web-based communications and services ever deeper into all aspects of our social and commercial lives; convergence across information, entertainment and communication.

Now, Skype does speak (literally!) to both of those core trends, so it is indeed potentially a major linking route.

However, there is not a lot about Skype that is deeply proprietary and the price paid seems astronomical. On a more general note, it is highly uncertain that any of these stepping stone technologies towards a much grander and over-arching linkage will establish any long-term value generation of itself.

At the fast moving forefront of any great technological revolution, it is very difficult to evaluate what is forming a relatively stable bigger picture and what are just transitory brush strokes in a much richer-texture build-up.

The purchase smacks of Microsoft, which still enjoys amazingly profitable revenue streams from its core operating system and software businesses, continuing to struggle to enter, never mind define, the emergent picture of the new web world.

If it were possible, perhaps Microsoft would be better exercised in the leverage of its vast cash reserves by seeking to take us directly to how things are likely to look in, say, ten years from now. That, however, will take the rediscovery of the speculative and messianic fervour which first made Microsoft great, which is quite a long time ago now.

The problem with stepping stones is that they frequently get washed away, by-passed with new bridges or crossings, or simply left in useless side channels as rivers change direction.

(my main blog about investment, economics and Manchester corporate finance raises many more aspects around valuations and value-creation)

Categories Corporate Finance

It’s Time We Became Capitalists

May 15, 2011 //
0

This week the British Bankers Association hosted a major seminar event through Liverpool Chamber of Commerce. I believe that we must conduct a major investigation and debate into how we better direct flows of capital into enterprise – and the answer is not more bank bashing. You will find much more on this and related topics on my main Manchester corporate finance site.

The Liverpool Chamber-hosted seminar of the British Bankers Association was both very real and also slightly surreal.

It was very real in that a succession of very senior banking figures spoke frankly and reflectively about where things had gone wrong in the past and about their determination that they would not do so again.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags
Categories Corporate Finance, Enterprise Support, Manchester Corporate Finance, Uncategorized

The Pitfalls & Perils of Seeking Investment

April 24, 2011 //
0

It can be incredibly difficult for young and ambitious businesses to raise capital, even when they pass the necessarily high threshold of having mustered sufficient talent around a very promising idea. 

The balance of power between investment capital and earlier stage companies frequently lies vastly in favour of the former.

Membership organisations, networks and individual business builders are often loathe to pass any criticism in case their members or they themselves want to try again with a certain funder, or through fear that they might somehow end up on an informal awkward-squad list.

Read the rest of this entry »

Categories Corporate Finance, Funding, Manchester Corporate Finance

The Dull Drone of The Enterprise Zone

April 6, 2011 //
0

“New offices, financial incentives, special initiatives, how to kickstart the economy……” and so the rhetoric of Enterprise Zones drones on.

Evidence from previous UK Enterprise Zones strongly suggests that they are incredibly poor at creating sustained returns on investment.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags
Categories Enterprise Support, Political Thought & Social Theory

Mix-d: Manifesto for Mixed Race Living

March 28, 2011 //
1

I am privileged to work regularly with Mix-d:, the UK’s leading research and advocacy organisation in support of mixed race living. We have just finished our policy manifesto to go and present to and discuss with the European Commission.

Mix-d: is increasingly working with policy makers to inform the development of practice. These are the seven key points we believe need stronger attention:


 1. They are not messed-up people but other people can get confused.

  • Perhaps there is an Educational need.

 Firstly there is a call for a language, which combines accuracy with a lack of prejudice and awkwardness. Beyond mulatto and half-caste, there is Mix-d:.

Secondly there is curriculum representation and the need for simple, normalised representation of mixed race – a modern, lived identity and not an anomaly, a hybrid, nor a mistake.

2. There is no shame in any part of their heritage but why do other people ask them to choose one part above another?

  • Perhaps there is a Research need.

 Firstly we must de-focus the debate from black and white and concentrate more on the presence of mixed race.

Secondly the lived experiences must be placed before assumptions and we must listen to what is being said: the good, the bad and the ugly. 

Read the rest of this entry »

Categories Big Society, mixed race, Social Enterprise

Looking Beyond The Trademan’s Reach

March 5, 2011 //
1

There’s a gardener every three quarters of a mile in every UK urban area, a plumber every mile, a hairdresser every mile and a half and a tattoo parlour every three miles.

The specifics could be wrong but, if you get my drift, it’s broadly true: there is a supply and demand ratio which establishes a working and workable density of providers. There are the odd exceptions which prove the rule. Pimlico Plumbers have famously tapped the flood of demand in London for timely and reliable service.

Manchester’s Louis Molloy has skilfully evolved from being a tattooist of celebrities to becoming a celebrity tattooist. I’m having my other shoulder done by him before long. But don’t tell my mother – she doesn’t even know about the first one yet.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags ,
Categories Corporate Finance, Manchester Corporate Finance
« Older Entries
Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.