King of Pentacles
“It is good people who make good places.”
― Anna Sewell, Black Beauty
Last week I attended Climb 23 in Leeds. It was a great two-day event put on by Gordon Bateman and the team at Investor Ladder. There were several fantastic sessions I attended across many topics, but the ones which were of most relevance to my work and my interests were the panel on tokenization and the roundtable on ecosystems.
In the roundtable on ecosystems, there were several thought-provoking contributions by a range of people with strong experience in placemaking and innovation policy. I took some notes, liberally garnished with my own thoughts - and on occasions, rebukes - on the viewpoints of the group’s members. I go through them here in no particular order…
Certainty about funding is key. As I have mentioned in previous posts, the plumbing of our economic development system is broken. There are many needless layers of complexity, and we have seen a carousel of organisations (from RDAs, to LEPs, to Growth Hubs, to MCAs etc…) come and go seemingly on the whim of BEIS and DLUHC ministers. The effect of this is many wasted months and years, where organisations are inert and the key staff involved with actioning investment projects distracted by analysing what new hoops need to be jumped through and how. There is a palpable pessimism regarding the Shared Prosperity Fund across cities and regions. Although many people will breathe a sigh of relief to see the back of onerous ERDF and ESF procurement and compliance practices, the incoming drought of funding is going to make many regional bodies feel the pinch.
The reduction in funding means more effective partnerships need to be put together so that places can do more with less. This poses a problem, as most City Regions will have [despite their best efforts to deny it] key institutions locally that are somewhat aloof in how they do things. The process of getting these institutions to play ball will be critical to economic development success over the next administration(s).
This ultimately points towards needing the right people. The stroke of good fortune which took place in Liverpool City Region was having a game private sector, public sector personnel not averse to risky projects and small, agile groups of people who could make things move at relatively fast pace to turn proposals into assurance paperwork, and then into operational projects. We can see further examples of this approach being effective in Lisbon, where Carlos Moedas (a former EU Commissioner for Science and Innovation) is now Mayor - and is leading the most tech sector-focussed regeneration campaign in recent European history.
Those people need to be backed by adequate money - and examining the more ‘macro’ picture in the UK, there is still a woefully small amount of money put aside for nurturing ecosystems and helping businesses to compete globally. Tom Blomfield has just voted with his feet, as have a string of medium-sized and emerging corporate tech firms. Our stock exchange is unattractive to firms wanting to list, our skills picture is a mess (at national and local level), our road and rail infrastructure is sub-par and we are terribly averse to spending any money on trying to fix these things. Ultimately, the conversation about building more high growth tech companies cannot be divorced from a wider conversation at governmental level about what we spend our money on and how much debt we are willing to take on to achieve our ambitions. We have poured billions into unproductive housing stocks for a decade thanks to ‘buy-to-let’ - imagine if just a fraction of that had gone into fixing careers pathways, our skilled visa system, or creating a sense of civic pride. This map of the Elizabeth Line being overlaid onto the North West should get your blood boiling…
Good founders will always find a way to succeed. What the public sector should be trying to do in its efforts to support scaleups is tip the odds so that more are able to succeed, and do so without abandoning the country. You can’t do that with pacer trains and piecemeal investments to support the odd grant fund or business growth programme. It requires its own multi-decade strategy - and therein lies the root cause of the reaction I just cannot hide; something that irks me so much and brings about such a visceral reaction inside me that it has led me to recoil in front of the politicians who say it:
“We want to be the next Silicon Valley…”
Okay. So show me your 40 year strategy and the hundreds of billions of public and private investment you’re going to need to achieve that lofty ambition. Oh, you don’t have those? Maybe don’t say those words then.
This isn’t me scolding ambition or politicians having an interest in the growth of the sector - far from it. Rather, we could just do without the hyperbole and the ‘industry tourists’ that gold rushes spurred on by such rhetoric bring about. Placemaking in innovation is not just building lab space, moving anchor tenants into science parks, or adapting the language of the type of consultants your business growth programmes pay for. To be done effectively, it requires throwing out the existing canvas and putting an entirely new material on the easel and a switch from crayons to watercolour. For places to succeed in the age of exponential technology, leaders must recognise that the parameters within which labour, capital and leverage exist have been re-drawn from twenty years ago when their public sector careers began. Trying to copy Silicon Valley won’t work. Places need their own authentic product offering, backed by infrastructure and policies that actually promote growth.
“The something of somewhere is mostly just the nothing of nowhere.”
— Peter Thiel
