Is this our stop? The creative & digital action plan

Last June, The Sharp Project hosted the Creative and Digital Summit. Invited were Manchester’s digital big-hitters leading organisations such as BBC North, MediaCity, Corridor Manchester and the city council. The issues raised have been analysed by NMP’s managing director Danny Meaney, who last month presented an action plan aimed at maintaining and boosting Manchester’s promising position as a digital hub. Many of the original Summit attendees returned to The Sharp Project to listen and discuss the findings.

In essence, the city and the region are currently in a position of great potential but we will need to be bold if we are to break through to being a world leader recognised as a city of creative and digital excellence.

Mentioning “Manchester” to people anywhere in the world will usually elicit one of two responses: music or football. But who remembers our international signings Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov on their celebratory open-topped bus tour in 2010? No, they weren’t City or United heroes; the two Manchester University physicists won the Nobel Prize in Physics that year for their work with graphene. And of course, the triumphal tour never happened, something that should force a little introspection about the way Manchester blows its own trumpet. The technology they worked on is already attracting hundreds of millions of pounds of investment into the area, but much of the groundbreaking work is now taking place internationally, and there is the risk that Manchester will lose any claim to ownership of the material in the global consciousness.

So we have a potentially life-changing material that is making ripples all over the world, but it is hardly registering outside its natural domains. Is the symptom of the silo culture that has developed (perhaps inevitably) among Manchester’s creative and media players? Can academia squeeze its influence past the Cornerhouse and the Palace Hotel? Our digital and technology sectors are proving successful enough to merit the attention afforded to our kicking and screaming brethren. We just need to shout about it more.

We have all come to accept the idea that in our connected world, location is not so important. For sure, an endless global data stream of digital business is taking place between continents, villages, living rooms and mobile devices. But businesses need expertise and finance, and they cluster in physical places. It is the very cross-fertilisation of ideas that pins ideas to locations, and thus attracts new talent into the fold. And this welcoming of new talent, new ideas, means that a system needs to have flexibility and adaptability built into it. How can this be made concrete? By making sure that technology decisions are not constrained by the standards of the day.

Imagine a city in 2012 announcing the completion of its 10-year mission to get a dedicated 56K internet connection in every home and business. Even if they had gambled on 2 meg broadband they would still be playing catch-up now that connectivity has many more uses than it did in 2002. There is only one way to be sure that such a mistake is never made – and that’s never to attempt to tackle technology head-on. But going half-hearted into an enterprise is just as bad. When major tech infrastructure projects are mooted at city level, there needs to be a boldness and a decisiveness, a willingness to hire the best people, and an educated instinct for the future that is already the norm in, say, road and rail planning.

As soon as a city council is involved, the public really needs to buy in if the endeavour is not to be seen as a vanity project, lambasted at every stumbling block. But therein lies the boldness – not a blind, stubborn boldness that invites opposition; an intelligence-based boldness that comes from research and experience. There is no reason why the city as a whole can’t be fully behind a bold endeavour that just might fail (as anything can) but would provide a superb platform for investment and growth if it succeeded.

Training and apprenticeships will need to play a major part, and these need to be developed with a sense of urgency. Academia and business need to work towards creating a new generation of pupils, school-leavers and students who understand and recognise the potential of the sector. Show them what success looks like and they will try to attain it. Everyone knows the coolest people are the geeks and the nerds. Don’t they?

By any measure Manchester is a successful city, with industry at its heart. But stagnation and decline will come from overcelebrating our past and our fleeting glories while assuming that some kind of momentum will guarantee future success. The greatness of the past was only ever achieved by millions of tiny steps – punctuated by the occasional giant leap. What we can take from the past is learning, and the fact that in its people and our city, Manchester’s heritage gives us the perfect platform to go on innovating.

Only with the right blend of training, infrastructure, self-belief, risk awareness, forward thinking, confidence and collaboration – as well as shouting about our successes and attaching our city’s name to them – can Manchester continue to make waves rather than simply ride them. Our city is full of monuments to its past greatness, but they are really bookmarks in our history, built to inspire us. The next generation’s monuments might be built not of steel and stone but of zeros and ones cascading through the ether. It’s our duty to make sure they are stamped with Manchester’s name.

A copy of the NMP report can be requested from info@thesharpproject.co.uk

Charlie Hankers