Event 004: Manchester – A Tech City?

Yes! And no. Since there’s no need to have an event called “Manchester: A Football City?” you’ve got to assume there’s considerable doubt in the air, and so it turned out to be at this Ian Aspin-chaired panel event on May 17.

While Manchester is certainly over-represented in talented and influential digital tech operations, and is home to a world-renowned university, it’s still more likely to be associated with football or music outside the M60. It’s not completely unreasonable to be quite happy with that. To attract innovative tech entrepreneurs to this rain-drizzled bowl there needs to be something for them to do, somewhere for them to eat and, as long as it is out of the public gaze, somewhere for them to dance.

But is this enough? A commonly held belief is that if there was more collaboration among the players in the sector of a location, there would be mutual leverage by association; through this mechanism the Manchester tech scene, in our case, would become a geographically identified thing. Tech start-ups need each other, as Elizabeth Varley, the panellist representing TechHub, has witnessed first-hand. TechHub is about not only collaboration for the common good, but also being a recognised centre of exciting goings-on, to which like-minded people gravitate. She pointed out that when innovatively disposed people get together, ideas flow and otherwise-guarded information is shared; but most importantly, people will help each other out of the holes they’re stuck in because people are, well, nice.

Martin Bryant (The Next Web) returned a glancing blow, saying tech centres have their place but are not a prerequisite for digital evolution. He suggested the “punk” ethos that has served the tech sector quite admirably in the past might be more appropriate to what is, by its nature, at a rolling frontier. Now nobody would condone gobbing at programmers or even SEOs, but the point does have traction; actively rejecting organisations that try to unify and classify technologically-minded individuals and start-ups can have a liberating effect. Big bangs can appear out of nothing, whereas enclosed spaces can merely circulate established thinking.

A tweetbreeze followed Martin’s revelation that when people approach him with ideas while wearing a suit, his initial instinct is mistrust, as it suggests they might be well versed in business etiquette (probably gleaned via Alan Sugar’s hapless Apprennabes) but have probably never forgotten to go to sleep because they are coding. The counter-argument that clothes matter not, spearheaded by 3 Sheep’s iPad-wielders, is of course completely true. Elizabeth did point out that Shoreditch, physical home of TechHub, is known for its indie mentality, proving that successfully creating a collaborative spirit both needs and inspires independent minds, not drones.

Perhaps the punk v establishment struggle is something of a red herring. There’s no reason why the two can’t cohabit in the city and forge their intertwined ways in the industry. To a great extent, the differences are all in the mind anyway. Good ideas are good ideas, and no culture has the monopoly on their genesis (indeed a bit of rivalry and loathing might even shove things along a bit). No matter how independent 70s punks thought they were, they still required industrialisation to print and distribute their records and (inter)national press, radio and TV to spread their message.

Funding and Collaborating

A pertinent point that was raised was the issue of profit sharing under the collaborative mindset. If you’ve got a game-changing idea, is it clever to share it, formally or otherwise, with potential competitors? A guest who highlighted a BBC scheme for nurturing tech talent was asked by Elizabeth about how the IP was apportioned, and although he assured the panel that it seemed fair and above board, a Mexican wave of raised eyebrows swept through the room. There had to be a financial sacrifice to the innovator and a benefit to the investor. It’s not without precedent for large organisations to, let’s say, not pay the going rate (e.g. a chocolate company paying in chocolate) to young, eager tech talent. But let’s not forget that investors who stick their necks out risk reversing the sacrifice/benefit balance when failure is a possibility.

So is funding a problem with the potential to hold businesses back? The room seemed to be leaning towards to the opinion that there were still plenty of potential investors in Manchester, and one guest made the point that there’s no shame in going to London for funding. If anything, investors could be accused of being too ready to flash the cash, meaning that start-up tech companies were suffering from an inability to get modest investment. In other words, an average start-up might need £25k but investors won’t get out of bed for less than £25m, probably figuring that any returns on less than a million-pound investment would hardly cover the time they spent signing the contract. How can a sector burgeon when the light-footed companies are forever stymied by cash flow bottlenecks? And as for borrowing from a bank … forget it for the moment.

AppLearn’s Andrew Barlow was neither dismissive nor enthusiastic about the state of the local infrastructure on which any investment must rely, describing it as so-so. What we have is a reasonably good platform, but it’s ultimately up to individual businesses to maximise their trade opportunities, as his company seems to be successful at doing.

Designing and Making Things? Are they Mad?

Andrew Mullett of Global Technology Team then made a timely appearance on the panel. He put forward the radical proposition that (a) you can actually make things, physical, tangible things, and still be part of tech culture, and (b) that you don’t necessarily need external financial investment if you plan and budget smartly. He asked, rhetorically, what the majority of invested capital was usually spent on, and suggested that often it was paying the high wages of the owners of the business.

Why not just have lower lifestyle expectations (pay yourself a little less; go without holidays) while your business is starting up and keep more of its equity? There are creative ways of paying for time and materials if you have customers waiting – sometimes you just need to use them.

A comment from the hall confirmed that once again the middle ground is equally valid – self-funding will suit some operations and heavy investment will be a necessity for others. While growth might be slower in the former model, that’s not always such a bad thing. It’s all down to personal choice and need.

Most people probably don’t have a daily realisation that the digital sector is but nothing without the hardware to shift the electrons around. But by marrying the guts and volts and creating electronic products, Andrew’s company is providing a vital service to the sector. “What you do is no different to what my granddad used to do,” said Chairman Ian; and it counts for something that at this digitally-charged event it was meant as a compliment. After all it’s not just the IBMs, Apples and Samsungs or even the medium-sized tech firms that are driving hardware innovation, and we ignore this fact at our peril.

Carry On Differently

Shaun Fensom (Manchester Digital) was next to take a panel chair, and he upped the beat of proceedings. Of course Manchester, like any city, has its faults and problems as far as getting the digital industries to become world players is concerned, but let’s not play ourselves down, he said. We’re incredibly lucky to be here at this time in a city that is no backwater on the digital map. Manchester is not only the UK’s biggest tech hub outside the capital, it is, Shaun reckons, third or fourth in the whole of Europe. He suggests that there’s no shortage of creativity up here, but we need to carry on “doing things differently”, to paraphrase AH Wilson, rather than trying to compete directly – starting with being a little more open-minded with our investment models.

The Sharp Project was itself designed to let people get the most out of the prevailing technological, cultural and infrastructural background environment, and the day after Event 004, it reached the end of the beginning of its mission when it threw open its doors to non-tenant members. By offering access to its facilities for as little as £80+VAT per year, membership will hopefully keep a constantly fresh stream of ideas coming and going. These members are particularly interesting and welcome as they facilitate a kind of covalent bonding between Sharp Project tenants and businesses, entrepreneurs and investors spread far and wide.

Wrapping up, Ian reminded the gathering that we should be mindful of just how far our city has come in the past 20 years, and as far as the digital sector is concerned we’ve done magnificently in comparison to plenty of other similarly sized industrial cities. If we lack something, it’s a willingness to trumpet our successes and to go out to the world and sell our ideas. And while some people judge success in terms of continually raising their wealth by orders of magnitude, plenty of others are happy to give themselves and their families a comfortable life and would be delighted enough to know that something they had done had made an impact.

So is Manchester a tech city?

It is, and has been for 250 years; but we have always been the ones giving a definition to the word “technology” through constantly innovating and selling our wares. One of the things we need to continue doing is determining what tech actually is.

Charlie Hankers

Photography by Lauren Hyde
#Event004 was a part of FutureEverything

For more information on membership of The Sharp Project, click here.