The Cambridge Network Blog

travel in Cambridge

Much have I travell'd in the realms of gold,
 And many goodly states and kingdoms seen

This week a number of people came and asked me whether our infrastructure in Cambridge is going to hamper the growth of the cluster.

For most of us, growth is not always and everywhere a good thing, at least not in our own back yard. Cranes hauling new buildings into place on the West Cambridge site block our wonderful open skies. Affordable local housing planned on brownfield sites to cut the long commutes of key workers into the city also put great strain on utilities and local schools, and bridge widening work causes queues. Hiring and training new staff requires everyone in the business to stop doing their day job and interview lots of aspiring candidates, and then supervise and develop the happy new joiners.

Paying for growth also raises difficult questions about equity. Limited regional government funding for asset development directed into our already highly successful cluster reduces that which is available for areas with real social issues elsewhere. Congestion charges required to raise the money for decent public transport inevitably reduce the rights of some people living in CB postcode villages and privilege others living in CB postcode suburbs. Restructuring the organization and promoting able staff to supervise new joiners changes the job descriptions of existing staff.

They asked me: "what's your plan?". I demured. Cambridge could well be described as a great example of anarchy without any particular plan. Unlike some other University towns, we did not have an industrial policy that invited heavy manufacturing to provide jobs for unskilled workers. Our flat, wet fenland requires us to keep green space very close to the heart of the old city which can never be built on, part of a region wide green belt, so only clean, high-margin businesses that can afford expensive space could ever set up shop here. Our oldest University does not seem to have planned to create the larger companies in our local high technology cluster either, despite the likely causality in that conjunction. These companies are often second or third generation offspring of companies independently set up by individual academics to exploit niches they could see. So the conservatism and long term thinking of the colleges that own great swathes of local land seem to have served us well as a community. Government intervention for industrial sector planning and support elsewhere has had patchier results. Organic growth with no particular plan seems to have worked here.

But sadly, anarchy will not address our social equity issues: "Anything goes means everything stays". When London wanted to reclaim Trafalgar Square for the people, an open plaza for public demonstrations far enough from Parliament and Palace to prevent bloodshed, they introduced a congestion charge which was broadly accepted, despite strong criticism. Trafalgar Square is nicer than it was when I first moved down to London 22 years ago, and cycling from Kings Cross to members in London is now quite pleasant. Of course, unlike Manchester, Londoners had a decent public transport system but just were not using it. But my point is that Londoners planned for an outcome and got it. I am just not comfortable knowing that I cycle happily past traffic jams full of people who have to drive an hour and a half each way because they can't afford local house prices, can't find work where they live and they have no public transport alternative to get into Cambridge.

It is so much easier not to think about infrastructure. Cambridge Network wants to serve more members better, so we can all grow both personally and economically. But where will those people live and how will they get to work? What's our plan? Do we agree with Cambridge Horizons, the Greater Cambridge Partnership or East of England Development Agency - will they get us the capacity to grow? Please write in your comments on the blog - so the next time someone asks me I have an idea what you think!

A friend from Valletta wrote:

"I was involved as an advisor in the planning, development, politics and implementation of the Valletta scheme. We looked at London, Durham and Edinburgh when we were still developing our ideas (2004-2005) then went on to convince Cabinet and published a consultation document (2005). A
tender was issued for the development, installation and management of the Controlled Vehicular Access (CVA) system (2006) and the system went live on 1st May 2007.

The system uses ANPR but is less intrusive then London. Basically the cameras are much smaller and the system is wireless. The technology is flexible and gives us very good performance. The developers are Superior Traffic Systems Ltd whose shareholders are all involved in CVA Technology Ltd who are currently running the system in Valletta.

My words of wisdom are shop around, have a clear objective of why you want to introduce RUCs, find the right timing and support, technology today can do miracles so don't be shy to ask, and finally
just go for it. If you have public support (which we got by engaging very early on the civil society and ensuring as much as possible equity along the lines of the objectives) then you should not wait.

Valletta's implementation went on without major problems. People eventually understood the system and now it's already accepted.  Since the technology is flexible I am sure that whatever changes are made to the system in the future (in terms of methods of charging, area and so on), there will not be major problems ."

good people doing dumb things

BUSY old fool, unruly Sun,
        Why dost thou thus,
Through windows, and through curtains, call on us?

I am fascinated by how dumb other modes of transport seem to me. When I am in a car, that cyclist pulling out to swerve across 2 lanes of traffic to flash down a sidestreet looks quite naughty. As a cyclist, both the slow moving pedestrians stepping off the pavement infront of me and the eternally stationary cars and buses seem unbelievably slow. And when I am walking along with heavy bags, all those vehicles seem quite a threat. What amazes me is how I can get out of a car or off a bike and immediately change perspective. It seems dumbness is quite relative, despite some more jaundiced assessments in the press.

Mostly I ride around on a bike. That makes me feel quite good, actually. I get to wind up my country cousins by pointing out that my commute is completely bikeable, provided you don't mind cladding yourself from head to toe in wet-weather gear on mornings like today. Naturally, my self-esteem is quite undamaged by behaviour like swerving across 2 lanes of traffic and nipping into a sideroad to get away from all the heavy traffic. And it isn't even dented by my country cousins telling me that it is just sickening how people who manage to live reasonably centrally (whilst obviously only having a postage stamp garden) adopt an air of sanctity on carbon footprint issues. Pretty dumb, eh?

My happiness about having cycled there was the only specific experience I could bring to last night's amazing Special Interest Group session on Cleantech. We have a community led by Hugh Parnell that have been considering issues related to Cleantech for a few years now, but it was my first visit. Cambridge IP and Marks & Clerk did a great job of first describing the patent landscape with a nice engineering breakdown of the subcomponent technologies that will bottleneck scaling up of alternative energy sources such as wind and solar, and then giving a Cleantech-specific analysis of the strategies for protecting your intellectual property. It is thrilling to see how well-crafted German and Scandinavian government policies have created local champions and international markets for those services that have even been able to challenge the US leaders. I know from friends taking the Carbon Trust market incentive scheme to China and investing in UK technologies in the TTP Carbon Trust incubator here that we have great opportunities in carbon capture and in teaching other nations how to get these technologies adopted. I left the session more optimistic about our ability to really help save the planet from here.

So I shall be delighted to go along on the 10th June to Robinson College and learn more about why good people do dumb things. Andrew Campbell, who will be illustrating his talk with such interesting choices as Tony Blair's decision to take us into Iraq, has a wealth of experience to share. I shall feel right at home, being someone who regards themselves as good, but somehow manages to be consistently dumb. Its free to all, and I hope I shall see lots of you there! And I particularly look forward to hearing how you got there!!

And for those of you who insist on driving, I expect you will all want to come along to our lovely event on greening cars on 3rd June also at Robinson. Lotus Engineering and the Technology Strategy Board will come along to tell us all about how we will have transport without associated guilt. Senior people are coming in for the afternoon from outfits like BP, Cosworth and IBM in addition to native companies including 1 Limited, Antenova, Autoalert, EEDA, Ego Aeroplanes, Nokia, Qualcomm, Renewables East, RL Tech, TTP, and TWI amongst others.  Incidentally, apparently Robinson have a lower carbon footprint than other venues, so you don't even need to worry about coming to both events! Again, this event is free.

Gosh, here I am being dumb again! Promoting free events? Well, leading a network is a bit counter-intuitive. I know the biggest ask is actually your time, not your money - but that unless you come in, you won't experience this amazing community. So I'm highlighting some events where you don't need to put your hand in your pocket, even if you are not yet a member. Service first.

being there

No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.

Yesterday I had a difficult conversation with a stakeholder. His question was a fair one: "What is the cash return on the investment we have put into being a member of Cambridge Network?". The same question came up on Thursday lunchtime among a group of new companies that have just paid their first corporate membership fees. Everyone these days has to look at each cash outlay and ask this question. But how do we put a value on centrality?

We can point to some concrete examples where central players win out. Moscow is thought to have risen above its sister cities on the Volga because of its centrality in trading networks. Hanifan proposed in 1916 that some social capital accrues to those that support rural schools. More recently, Putnam (1995) ascribed the decline of American democracy to the loss of social capital represented by declining participation in civic organizations. Sadly for those reading this blog, he believes that the individualisation of leisure via narrowcasting technologies like the internet is to blame.

It is hard to find out who is central in a social network. Some tools exist to identify the hubs, pulsetakers, and gatekeepers in such networks, and where you have a nice clean hierarchy you can run such software over the e-mail and phone records and find the employees who are making the effort to link worlds. These are just activity input measures, but such behaviour would not persist if it was not somehow beneficial to both parties. Sadly for such analytical methods (but not for our liberties), knowledge workers defeat surveillance, despite the plans of iconic figures still present in some other Universities. Banking CIOs ruefully note that it is hard to cover the risks of insider trading with instant messaging and every other social network out there and available through mobile phones. Traditional triangulation through multiple interviews of different participants is smart if you are researching in this area. We can track e-mails logged, attendance at events, jobs and news items posted. But we still have to just go visit our members and hear their stories.

Another colleague pointed out that a major competitor was also interested in becoming a Founder. The stakeholder's reaction was an interesting one. "That's great" he said "I do run into John sometimes socially, and I think we raise one another's game". Don Corleone states "Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer". Cambridge Network is forum for friends in coopetition to meet, and being there at the centre is a useful source of serendipity.

My stakeholder answered his own question by the end of lunch. Perhaps it was a rhetorical question, because he actually restated his opening gambit. "You know, if Cambridge Network did not exist, we should have to invent it" he said (paraphrasing Voltaire). He seemed reasonably happy to be there.

xenophilia

Perhaps the self-same song that found a path
Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home,
She stood in tears amid the alien corn

Mark Grannovetter  observed in the 1970's that people got jobs through more distant connections. He called this "The Strength of Weak Ties". This was part of Mark's doctoral work at Harvard University's Department of Social Relations, which I find truly humbling. A friend who is a Director of Alumni Relations (but asked to remain anonymous) commented that college basket ball managers that belong to a "family" related to a famous lead coach with a distinctive style have better career resilience and win more prestigious positions. Informational interviewing, which gains access to distant connections, is the basis of the most popular job hunter's guide.

Grannovetter's observation is a good rule of thumb for most prospecting. Your immediate close connections at work or through your family are unlikely to give you a lead into a big new opportunity. You need to spread the net wide. Even where you personally know someone directly responsible, they will need you to build consensus for them inside their organization to get a good decision, to avoid the accusation of favouritism. In my own experience, old friends quickly hand me off to a neutral "broker" who can assess my proposal on its merits and reject it without fear for the friendship.

We are particularly blessed here in Cambridge. Universities including Anglia Ruskin and Cambridge and our local Hi Tech and Retail sectors continuously attract a diverse and well-connected population into our town, who teach or learn some stuff and then go home to apply it there.  A quick analysis of first names of the people registered on the Cambridge Network website to attend events or receive job offers shows a more equal balance of sexes and a wide range of ethnic origin consistent with the diversity of our home town. The East of England has already benefited from the huge growth of the Cambridge cluster over the past decades, and the diversity of our connections is shielding us from the downturn. The friendships we form here draw us into international markets - many Cambridge Network members make over 80% of their sales overseas. Taiwan moved up the PC production value chain through just such personal ties.

I hear local townspeople saying that our visiting scholars should "go back to their own country". I hope that if young people visiting here from other countries do return to their own home regions, they take some more positive experiences with them. Cambridge Network will welcome weak ties.

Open Innovation

`Men work together,' I told him from the heart,
`Whether they work together or apart.'

This week I met with a friend, Roland Harwood of NESTA, who works on Open Innovation. Don't panic! He asked to be un-anonymised and is curious to see your comments on our joint work - see his response below. He was only stopping for the day, in a tour that embraced Belgium, Scotland, the North of England, the West and would eventually take him back to London. We talked about LinkedIn and Facebook, and whether they really allow a change in the way that people can work together.

My experience with e-mail is bad. It brings out my worst side. Swift anger in a moment of tiredness that leaves a mark on relationships that only time and more positive experiences can wipe away. Paranoid concerns about someone's motivation - which will naturally be forwarded to them to resolve! The problem with e-mail is that we think we are having a private conversation, and we are not. Even when we copy, or worse, blind-copy others, in our mind we have the podium. As the villain in "The Incredibles" wryly comments "You got me monologuing, you sly dog!". By contrast, this blog is kinder to me. The text you are reading now is very different from the first version. It started with the end in mind, an invitation to discussion where I open the text to others to comment.

Our Network has some amazing global businesses that use technologies like this to collaborate with partners. In my own doctoral studies I witnessed how ARM works with partners like Texas Instruments and Nokia. This way of working was enabled by a couple of important changes. The first was a legal change that occured a long time ago, when the US Navy required all suppliers of aircraft and radio sets in the First World War to pool their patents to enable fast innovation, and then paid them according to the usage of those patents in the products that were finally used. The consequence of that legal change is that companies that licence technologies to electronics manufacturers can simply verify the volumes of the product that are being produced and sold from an industry log, and get payment on a percentage basis. The second change was Electronic Design Automation. This, combined with a set of sophisticated spreadsheets, allows ARM engineers to model the performance of a microchip quite accurately without having to build it, and share those models with collaborators on the other side of the world. In contrast to a spell-checker for e-mail that gives "feed-back" these models allow "feed-through". This allows much better communication to the other electronics engineer, for whom the ARM architecture is only one component of the entire design they are trying to realise.

A chance meeting on a train gave me access to Jamie Urquhart, a founder of ARM (again, Jamie e-mailed kindly with comments, see below). I was very keen to go and learn how they ran their global network of collaborators. I blithely asserted that ubiquitous mobile telephony with access to e-mail had finally caused the death of distance. This thesis proved to be an exaggeration (to steal a phrase from Mark Twain). Jamie, who was to become a great mentor, kindly introduced me to a number of other founders and key folks, but thought that ARM was still "an airmiles business". ARM was born global because its senior management team flew out to Japan and persuaded key semiconductor manufacturers to back an unknown team with only one successful application, the Apple Newton. Their new collaborators had recently been let down by an Intel decision to take production back inhouse and were ready to become part of a new, open architecture, which worked out just fine for all concerned. My interviews with senior ARM personnel taught me a great deal, much of it already discovered by researchers elsewhere. I re-discovered patterns of innovation depending on architectural uncertainty observed in the 1950s in television manufacturers which had somehow been forgotten in the interim. Thank goodness that charitable examiners found something novel in my thesis (perhaps my spellings or my split infinitives?). But it was pretty clear that real innovation mostly requires face to face meetings.

I offered my experience to Roland. I warned him: "If I look at when I am effective, it is not through these shared models. People need to sit down together to have any serious conversation. And I spend most of my time simply trying to sit down with people - my worst work is done on e-mail." We gazed out of the window of the University Centre Grads Cafe. It had been a very long conversation, and one that had taken us through a whole series of related experiences and common collaborators.

Suddenly he turned to me. "You know", he said, "I must get 100 e-mails a week from Networks. Mostly they want money. And I am okay with that". But I could tell he was not okay with that (as you will see below, he didn't even remember saying those words, so maybe I misheard him). Actually, nobody is okay with people just wanting money from them and not caring whether their needs have been served. Perhaps the reason why he had come to me was precisely because I had NOT contacted him asking him for money. And so we had a quick conversation about the rationale for putting money into networks, and what kinds of legitimate outcomes could be expected. Fortunately, I could refer him to an excellent summary that had been written by people he trusted from past work. And I could give him a lead to a forthcoming report by a leading local consultancy that will give him an edge. And so we moved past that dangerous moment, the moment when they are expecting you to ask for money.

And I guess that is my answer to his question, "Have electronic networks now realized in LinkedIn and Facebook changed the nature of open innovation?" Now we can follow one another on Twitter, we can create communities on LinkedIn, we can organize parties on Facebook. All share the merit of this blog - we can edit and fix stuff so we appear as we wish to appear. But none of them replace the moment of truth in the meeting. We can talk on the telephone, warm things up, but until we actually make time to meet we will not accomodate one another. The profound conversations that actually change our direction, change our minds, take us out of our isolation and calm our rage, only happen face to face. Just showing up really helps.

Roland read my blog and responded::

"I'm glad we helped to inspire a post. Just had a read. I agree with much of what you say about the pros and cons of different media verses face to face.

On the networks point I feel I must clarify my view. I am not ok with numerous requests to prop up/fund networks and I don't think I implied I was. I do believe firmly in the mantra 'conversations, then relationships, then transactions' in that order and yes it does annoy me when people try to sell/pitch straight away without understanding what I might be buying.

What frustrates me most though is that, on the one hand I believe strongly that cross cutting networks are vital to an innovation economy, but on the other hand public subsidies are at often unhelpful or worse, counter productive.

Part of what we are seeking to understand through this piece of research is how we can shift focus from investments into people or individual companies into activities (that almost certainly need some investment) that encourages networks to grow, strengthen and flourish.

And yes, I did single you out as a 'good guy' with relevant experience with whom we could discuss these matters.

Thanks again for your time. It gave us much food for thought also and we'll share that with you once we've conducted a few more conversations with other network 'hubs'."

Jamie also e-mailed with some thoughts about what lessons ARM's licensing model should teach others:

"A thought about your piece on the factors that lead to successful licensing businesses. There has to be a maturity in the market such that the item being licensed whether it be a CPU or a USB interface is not the differentiating factor for competitiveness.  So had ARM been around earlier it would have not been as successful because most companies interested in CPUs would have designed their own and retained that knowledge as in-house IP.  The other factor that is important to creating a high-value IP business is that the business must own the roadmap for the IP.  In that way a premium can be maintained for the IP. For instance many companies build standard IP blocks such as USB i/f but are not able to achieve premium pricing since there is not monopoly on building to the USB i/f standard. Whereas ARM, providing the lawyers and engineers work together can maintain its lawful monopoly over the IP.

This latter point affects many start-ups who seek funding but do not appreciate the dynamics of licensing. Furthermore a licensing business will find it difficult to achieve an exit other than an IPO. Since its technology will have been widely licensed and so little competitive advantage accrues to an acquirer. To go public requires a significant market position. Look at the struggles that companies such as ARC and Cyan have - I wonder if their investors mis-interpreted the value proposition by misunderstanding the market dynamics of IP licensing.   Classically markets tend to support 3 players at most in the long-term. The CPU licensing business has ARM, MIPS, Tensilica, ARC, Cyan etc - time for a shake-out?"

'

back to back

That's the wise thrush; he sings each song twice over,
Lest you should think he never could recapture
The first fine careless rapture!

Networking events are not something to be lightly undertaken. But this week we had 3 open lecture sessions, 3 executive dinners and 3 inbound missions which promised Cambridge insights into the world, each drawing amazing people together who travelled long distances to be there. Thank goodness we started with a long weekend!

Tuesday brought us the global world of the Judge Business School. Arnoud De Meyer gave a powerful presentation of their new Executive MBA, a programme recently developed by Simon Learmont. Arnoud laid out an interdisciplinary approach to address the international, healthcare, energy, and process concerns of the senior industry executives present. Suddenly the Judge building, an old friend from my own doctoral studies, became populated in my mind with researchers teaching the next generation of executives. It is so hard to see down the road you never travelled by, but I remembered my own friends with MBAs, educated by other institutions, including one that Arnoud himself led before coming here. The clear international excellence of the teaching at the Judge and the amazing 50 nationalities in their student body left me in no doubt that many of our local executives will travel that road, and travel it soon. That day we also had a chance to meet and talk about the Network and the cluster with some interesting senior army officers from many countries, hosted kindly by a member with international operations, Cambridge Consultants.

On Wednesday, Jonathan Milner of Abcam and Paul Webster of Ubisense took us on another global journey, from University of Cambridge departments to the international markets that they now serve. Both founded in the black recession of the dotcom crash, one launched on his way by a Christmas dinner conversation with our former Chairman, David Cleevely, one forced out of a University embedded research lab closed by a withdrawing telecommunications company. These were businesses born global, serving early adopters with very specialised niche needs scattered around the world. Their poverty drove them to radically challenge the conventional models being developed by rivals with venture capital funding. The price performance delivered by their Cambridge-based teams speaks wonders for the ability of our oldest local University to address real world problems in a new way and the serial entrepreneurship of our local angels. And the financial turmoil of those black days gave them time and space to develop unbeatable leads before competitors could be funded to address the markets they exploited. Walking out into the court of Clare College in a green summer evening with a founder, I was delighted when he turned to me and said "this is a bit more like the early days of the Network". Our founders' vision of Cambridge ideas that change the world suddenly seemed close and tangible. That day we also had a visit from a Danish regional university and its local government and and companies, kindly hosted by St Johns Innovation Centre.

On Thursday we went to Cambridge station to pick up an international visitor from the Rocky Mountain Institute, Amory Lovins. Amory is very familiar with another University, and it was fun to take him around our much smaller town as we travelled to the main site of Engineering on Trumpington Road. As he began to speak to over 250 academics and industrialists from all disciplines and all over the Greater South East of England, the gentle humour of his slides provoked gales of laughter. This audience had gathered in less than one week to hear his message of integrative design reducing the demand on the consuming end of our wasteful energy chain. The staff of entire companies had cancelled their plans and travelled from other cities, booking time for offsite workshops in local venues including the Moller Centre. Within a few minutes the silence was intense, as they drank in the scale of the savings in carbon, capital and cash that Amory was offering them. As Hermann Hauser and senior staff of the Engineering Department led us over to the University Centre for lunch, we heard more about personal motivations. For Amory, his service as a Friend of the Earth and now as a messenger of the Oil end game seem to be strongly linked to a vision of a benign and open US foreign policy. He is a good ambassador for his country.

By Friday we were all grateful for the cool evening sunlight on the lawns St John's College. The lecture from David Eyeton of BP on their 100th anniversary quickly established a new scale in which Cambridge ideas have changed the world through BP. David speaks for Cambridge within the company, and confesses that he is delighted to find so many causes to be proud. BP deliver a vital service around the world, the energy that keeps people alive, and he finds that the University helps them do it at lower risk and cost to our pockets and our environment. At the dinner afterwards, I was surprised to be sat beside him. But it soon became clear why - he already personally knew the amazing array of department heads and senior academics sat with his colleagues at the other tables. He was curious to know what the Network could do for him and so he wanted me to chat. I was very glad that another shareholder, Ian Leslie, sat at his other side. No argument from small non-profit industrial network could persuade such an influential stakeholder in the UK economy. But clearly David trusts the University of Cambridge and will try working with us in the Network. We will learn a lot from the experience. That day we also met the forerunners of an international executive group visiting in June with London Business School.

Thank goodness for weekends. Particularly lazy weekends in a warmth of an English May when the cycling is easy. 800 years ago, exiles came here to teach and learn how to be in the world, but not of it, founding a tradition of challenge and curiosity. We are privileged that such great people come to us still, to open our eyes to the world.