The woods are lovely, dark, and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
This week I was reminded again how lucky we are in Cambridge. Good people are so close.
Two visits illustrate the point. On Wednesday I went over to TTP to meet some people from their many business units. My head was spinning by the time I finally got onto the train back. The diverse communities in our region (inkjet printing, electronics, cleantech etc) have contributed great individuals to TTP teams engineering new products - very often for Asia or the Americas. Roughly every hour I met someone from a completely different business unit. Somebody making piezoelectric devices to deliver inhalable drugs, somebody running a cleantech incubator, someone financing cleantech and IT, somebody writing embedded software to monitor traffic for a mobile telecommunications operator, somebody building robots to reliably deliver tiny quantities of liquid, somebody customising drinks cans with real time prints, somebody creating and characterising nanostructures and depositing thin films... Nobody had a job title. The only way to understand them was to look at the things they made and ask them how they did it. Spending time with the founders of the outfit was even more challenging. Management in such a diverse community is more a matter of finding new talent and then making sure that everyone benefits together from group profits and limiting the size of the bets that are placed than traditional command-and-control.
On Thursday I flew out to a European capital to meet a national telecommunications company keen to engage in our region. Here the job titles were clear. People in charge of innovation and telecommunications standards inside businesses that employ tens of thousands of employees and deliver service in different continents do need structures to communicate. They had called us because they perceive Cambridge as a gap in their radar of innovation, a focal point in the United Kingdom where they can listen and learn with us. Our member's meetings to discuss cleantech, healthcare, information and communication technologies and other areas might give them early access to emerging technologies. The discussion was intense, as we shared insights into the Greater South East of England, a region that commands half of the spending on R&D of the United Kingdom. The issues were fascinating: the rollout of cable, whether WiFi really has a role to play in Europe given our 3G service coverage, the relative importance of fixed line and mobile investments, how consumer adoption of cloud computing is changing the business model in telecommunications... All too often I had to confess my ignorance and invite them to come to meet specific experts here.
On Wednesday I met ten people doing very different things in three different companies, leaving my house at 8.30 am and returning to it at 5.30 pm. On Thursday I met three people doing more or less the same thing for a single company, leaving my house at 6 am and returning to it at 2 am the following morning. Our drop density of small, innovative companies makes it quick and easy for us to sit down face-to-face and really learn something new. In other regions, planning the logistics of seeing a series of good companies is complicated.
Making that international trip really helped me appreciate the effort our visitors make to come the other way. We are even luckier that good people who are not close remember our name and invite us to help them serve their customers better.
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