Andrew McConnochie, 30 March 2008

To a packed (and hot) Rosalind Franklin room in At-Bristol, Chris Anderson (Editor of Wire, Author of Long Tail & now Free) gave a really good overview of the premise of the “Free” economy, Fremium, marginal costs and the impact of Moore’s Law on abundance & scarcity.  That was for around 25mins, he then did a Q&A session for 30 min before retiring to sign copies of his (not free) book.

I was lucky enough to ask a question which went loosely around, in this new economy of free, what is the value of geography (Hollywood, Silicon Valley, Beijing, Bristol)? Chris answered partly by describing two companies he’s just launched. For one the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) came from MIT, for the other the CTO was online and after 6 months Chris discovered that he was a High School drop out with a self-taught knowledge of Arduino in Tijuana. Chris also talked a bit about choosing to live in a place and then finding the best talent for solving a problem, which probably isn’t in your company, City or probably even country.

On stage and in the couple minutes he spent outlining his answer, this made a degree of sense but something wasn’t quite right, and it was only on the walk home that I worked through some thoughts; hence this post (it goes on a bit, sorry).

Whilst the human brain is an undoubted marvel of flexibility and adaptability, in evolutionary terms its design is around 5,800 years old. The last major version change was about 1.5 million years ago when it tripled in size, and the last genetic upgrades were around 37,000 years ago and 5,800 years ago. However, given that the internet isn’t 50 years old yet (and probably under 30), it’s a wonder that our heads don’t just explode trying to cope.

As an aside, I’ve worked for the last few years with a company in Toronto and for a while helping them build a partnership with an organisation in Vancouver; headshifting across 8 time zones is disproportionately harder than just working a 20-hour day. Even funnier is what happens when you try to physically do what the internet allows virtually and travel around the world in 23 hours, as Jeremy Clarkson found out (with a slight cheat on the international dateline – YouTube from 8:05 onwards in particular).

The point is that we’ve evolved to be local, social creatures (see the Dunbar number) and it’s only by a design fluke that we can even begin to cope with the internet. Which brings me back to geography by way of Seth Godin, we like to be in a tribe of similar people. Of course tribes can be online but fundamentally we like to meet people in real life. Its no coincidence that most digital start-ups are around the Silicon Valley area; that’s where all the other digital start-ups are. If you want to be in movies you go to Hollywood; if you want to be in finance you go to London, etc. Of course there are thriving start-up, film and finance industries outside those locations <plug>not least Bristol which has been recognised as one of the most innovative cities globally by McKinsey & the World Economic Forum, over a quarter of the global wildlife film making originate out of Bristol and the finance sector is the largest in the UK outside London</plug>.

And perhaps that’s the value of local. You can build trusted relationships with all the key partners to build a successful business and still compete globally on the ideas & products that are generated.

In my new part-time role as Manager of Science City Bristol, I was talking this morning with Martin Coulthard about the developments of the Bristol Enterprise Network over the next few months. He was making the valid point that Science City Bristol doesn’t have a ‘neat’ strapline or twitter pitch. But I’m not sure it needs one. To get back to Chris again, in the world of free and virtually frictionless transactions, we need to find the added value of being in the Bristol / Bath city region and being into science. That might be (probably is) different for each of the many tribes in and around the area.

For a bit of fun I tried “what is a science city” as a search term; WolframAlpha was completely stumped, Google found most of the UK Science Cities but didn’t really provide an answer, and Bing didn’t really do much better. I can’t promise to develop a complete answer myself, but I do think there is some great added value to be delivered.

Thanks to Andrew Kelly for running this as part of the ongoing Festival of Ideas.

[Clarification: I booked and paid for this Festival of Ideas's talk as Managing Partner of jbsh LLP, before discussions about being the Manager of Science City Bristol; I just happened to ask a question about geography in the new economy. These are my thoughts on Chris' response.]

Rowan tree - BioBlitz Bristol 2009

Take them out into a rich habitat and let them catalogue everything they find! Fortunately you don’t have to go to the rain forest, one of the oldest natural parkland spaces is just south of Bristol’s city centre at Ashton Court.

The 30 hour exercise was coordinated by the Bristol Natural History Consortium and with support from Science City Bristol and DEFRA, and working alongside the Bristol Regional Environmental Records Centre (BRERC). I was really keen to see how the event was going and pick up ideas for future Science City Bristol collaborations. Sam was up for the weekend, the sun was shining, a perfect way to spend Saturday!

Officially I start as Manager of Science City Bristol on Wed (1 July) but since this was being supported by Science City, and it seemed like a really cool day out, I wanted to go along. Soon we’ll hopefully have mini-reports like this on the Science City website. Stay tuned for more info.

After a quick introductory hello with Berry Goddard (BioBlitz Programme Manager) and Savita Custead (Director, Bristol Natural History Consortium), Sam and I were teamed up with our expert & guide Richard. After a few more volunteers and spotters joined the group we set off to record some trees, plants and birds.

Hounds Tongue at BioBlitz Bristol 2009

The first item of interest was a rowan tree. Apparently they aren’t usually found this far South but this one was making a start by the edge of the path. A bit further along the path we found a rare purple flower that turned out to be Hounds Tongue (we think) .

The last item of fauna foxed even our experts. Found near a dead beech tree the rather impressive fungus was found by one of the younger members of the group. We didn’t even try for a field identification. Back at Base Camp, Sam did have  look through a very thick book of fungi species, I used a simpler decision chart. Neither of us could figure out quite what was found.

Mystery fungus from BioBlitz 2009

So we left it in the capable hands of the BioBlitz experts to sort out.

Unfortunately they were off having an ice cream so it entered the “pending” tray. Mind you, they logged over 560 different species so everyone was kept pretty busy over the 30hrs!

I thoroughly recommend checking out their blog which has loads of updates, images, facts, and the full run down on the day.

A huge thanks to everyone that helped make BioBlitz happen, especially the small army of volunteers and helpers.

Resilient people face and manage positive and negative life events. They persist in the face of obstacles and when necessary, accept circumstances that cannot be changed. Resilience provides a buffer to protect us from psychological and physical health consequences during difficult times. Clearly, resilience is a desirable quality and yet all of us experience fluctuations in resiliency throughout our lifetime. Some people never develop resilience. Others are quite resilience but don’t recognise it; they may avoid challenges they could easily surmount. Sometimes resilience is worn down by multiple stressors and challenges.

As with a lot of psychology it seems very obvious when people say it, but it is not until it is clearly thought through and stylishly presented that it really does seem like something anyone could have said.  That is exactly what happened during this workshop. The approach covered integrated knowledge from resilience research and traditional CBT approaches.  If this is an area you practice in I would recommend Christine Padesky book (and if it’s run again the workshop), as it was clearly delivered, making it appear simple to apply the developed models. I will definitely be feeding and sharing the references and resources with my clinical psychology colleagues.  This may not be an approach we use, but as with all good ideas their are elements that I am sure I can and will use, especially in designing future research projects.

This is a re-post from the Open Coffee Bristol blog.

postbear, 16 January 2009

This morning’s Open Coffee Club meeting took place in the very pleasant surroundings of The Boston Tea Party’s garden. A lovely summer’s morning complemented the positive ideas being discussed in the light of HP Lab’s partial pull out of their Bristol facility.

Stephen Maudsley was first after me but headed up to the first floor before I could catch him, meanwhile Dave Simpson from Engine House Solutions (holding site) arrived and we began chatting while Stephen explored the upper reaches of TBTP. I first met Dave at the Bristol leg of the FOWA tour, where he was launching his web development and software company.

StephenM soon found us and we began talking about the start-up scene and different requirements of growing companies for executive support as well as cash. Around then Steve Cayzer arrived and we began to discuss his ideas for launching a new venture based on some of his research into environmental computing and ways to underpin the low carbon economy.

A quick flurry introduced Brian Dorricott with his newly launched Meteorical, Andrew Wray from Bristol University’s enterprise support team, Andy Seaborne (also thinking about launching an enterprise semantic knowledge application) and Nadya Anscombe (freelance science & technology journalist). Introductions, connections, business opportunities and much coffee ensued.

Thanks to all for a great morning of stimulating discussions and opportunities to be explored.

The next Open Coffee is the Demo Session, Tues 30 June at eOffice, please sign up on Eventbrite (http://opencoffeedemo30june.eventbrite.com) so we’ve some idea on numbers.

If you have a company / product / service that you’ve developed (or are thinking about) and would like constructive comments & ideas, please sign up as a presenter and we’d love to help contribute to your success.

Next to us was the general cake stand with Jenny & Bridget overseeing a wide range of home made confectionary (including some Rocky Road Crunch Bars that had been modified from the original recipe by Sam).

All the usual stalls were there, Bric-a-Brac, books, plants, games for the kids (including a fantastic giant Connect-4). All the stalls were donating to the Centipede Trust (Reg No. 1126335) the charity behind CDC (www.gacac.org.uk). Although the centre has been running a number of years, this was their first Summer Fete so it was all a bit of an experiment.

Even the Fire Brigade turned up (and made a significant contribution to the Cream Tea sales). The Trust is the official charity for HMS Scott and some of the sailors turned up to open the Fete and provide the all important treasure hunt (and Pirate King, with bounty for those that found all the hidden swords).

We’re not yet sure how much was raised as the final tally hasn’t been taken. However it was a fun day, with plenty of supporters and despite a summer rain shower trade was steady throughout.

Just back from a cracking talk by Mike Turner, Senior Designer on the Bloodhound SSC project. [Full disclosure, I'm a member of the Bloodhound SSC 1K Club; everything I say is highly biased, I think this is a fantastic project to be based in Bristol. ]

The talk was introduced by Bob Mytton, Chair of the West of England Design Forum.

Mike began with a bit of background on his career so far, from trains to cars to JCB diggers. This last culminated with JCB’s DieselMax project, to design a diesel that would go over 350mph. Speed was definitely in Mike’s future!

Although Bloodhound is an “Engineering Adventure”, their tagline, it’s ambition is to:
1. To create a national surge in the popularity of Science Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) subjects
2. To create an iconic project requiring extreme research and technology whilst simultaneously providing the means to enable the student population to join in the adventure
3. To achieve the first 1000 mph record on land

Mike quickly moved on to his core specialty of designing the outer surface, the bit that interacts with the air flow. Beginning with the outline design concept, Mike developed a refined shape for the car. This went to the team at Swansea University that were handling the CFD work. The results from the CFD, together with the engineering structural & package development (steering, suspension, controls, Andy Green, etc) were then fed into the next design cycle with Mike.

In the Q&A afterwards Mike was quizzed on the time the CFD added to the design cycle time. When they first started each CFD run was taking a couple of weeks (to run the numbers, check them and be confident of the answers). After going public with the project they were picking up additional computing support, each run was around a day.

The main challenges are to make the whole car as strong as possible (without increasing the weight too much); as slippery as possible for a Eurofighter jet engine with a solid fuel rocket strapped to it; as stable as possible in a straight line (without being so stable that Andy can’t direct it at all); and keep it on the ground (without turning into a 1,000mph plough).

So no conflicting pressures for Andy to juggle in his design decisions!

For all the CFD modeling, I was particularly struck by the comment that Mike put up from Ron Ayers, Chief Aerodynamicist on appreciating the designer’s eye for form & proportion “if it looks right, it probably is right”.

yewenyi, 16 April 2007

As an aside, it was Ron’s earlier work developing the Bristol Bloodhound Surface to Air Missile that gave rise to the project code name.

The Q&A was lively with Mike fielding questions for at least half an hour and staying around for another half hour as people continued to discuss the car, the design activity, and a bunch of technical questions that demonstrated real interest and enthusiasm.

A fantastic evening, thanks to the Bristol Design Festival and West of England Design Forum for organising.

Along with a couple hundred others, I thoroughly enjoyed the Bristol Design Festival’s launch party last night, however, I was taking a specific interest in the Grafikea entries. As in previous years, the standard was excellent with some ingenious and occasionally subversive uses for a simple LACK Side Table from your friendly blue and yellow purveyor of Scandinavian style.

For those that haven’t seen Grafikea before, the rules are quite simple. You purchase a table (as on the right) and then, according to the official rules:

Let your creativity run wild and modify the table.

And that’s pretty much it.

The results are quite astounding.

Before the prizes were announced I took a walk around the entries and a few leapt out at me. Apologies for the photos, I was using my camera phone, I’m sure better quality press-pics are available; even better, get down to the Old Fire Station and see for yourself!

One of the first that caught my eye was a very Bristolian scene of the SS Great Britain sailing under the Clifton Suspension Bridge, all on a coffee table! There were even a few fishes in the Severn that younger visitors seemed particularly entranced by.

I later discovered that this table (together with another 5) was designed and made by the ASD classes at Kingsweston School. This particular one was from Oak Class.

There were a number that had been decorated with graphics and very well executed designs (as you’d expect) along with the quirky and fun. I quite liked the ‘Coffee Table, Coffee Table’ and ‘Table to Die For’. On the quirky and subversive was this inverted table-come planter. Another table that caught my eye was ‘Exhibit yourself’ which had completely deconstructed the table and turned it into a pole-dancing platform!

There were only a couple that didn’t really do anything for me. One had some licorice allsorts spilled across and lacquered, another with digestive biscuits, I also wasn’t entirely convinced by the loud speakers & Mp3. Just my personal opinion.

The WFT award this year definitely went to ‘Shadows of a Table’ – you have to go along and see this in person! No photo can do it justice,part Alien, part Necromicon it positively broods in the corner looking down on the other tables and viewers alike.

And the winners are: (these are the official competition winners in two categories, Junior and Grafikea)

Junior

	First Prize went to this entry from St Bede’s Catholic College. Transforming their table into a weird and ferocious monster. This is right by the entrance so keep an eye out at ankle level!
	Second Prize went to Delectable from Lime Class at Kingsweston School. I had a long chat with one of the Specialist Teachers about the ASD Unit and how all the kids had contributed to designing their tables. In total there are 6 tables from Kingsweston showing creativity and ingenuity. In addition to Delectable & the Bristol Bridge, there are 4 other tables from the other classes in the ASD unit. I’ll let you find them in the exhibits, suffice to say that you have to look at the identification cards to know they’re from Kingsweston, the quality is that high.
	Also from St Bede’s this beach scene obviously captured the imagination along with Third place. Perhaps the title of ‘You Scream, We Scream’ helped.

Grafikea

	First Prize went to a stunning entry from Helen Ward; Entomology. Each of the butterflies is cut from coloured paper and laid out as you might expect in any Victorian collectors house or museum. My apologies to Helen for the poor quality photo, please visit the exhibition to see the exquisite detail that has gone into this table and also take a look at her website for more images and additional background on the artisan paper and history behind the butterflies.
	Second Prize went Cork from Jack Patient, a fun table surrounded by colourful corks.
	This entry, entitled ‘Production Line Error’ from Dave Stannard won Third Place. A quirky mix-up between a table and chair.

Congratulations to everyone that took part, all the tables are available to buy from the artists so head down to the Old Fire Station for the opportunity to take home some local art!

The clothes peg is a commonly used (at least in the summer) household object. Most of us have them, though we rarely regard them. They are so basic yet so useful, they have the ability of serving many functions in addition to it’s original one. It can be used to hang stuff, to hold, to fasten, endless number of uses.  The peg is a simple object.

However if you talk to many people within the medical profession a PEG is something very different.

The Percutaneous Endoscopic Gastrostomy (PEG) feedback tube is a safe and effective way to provide food, liquids and medications (when appropriate) directly into the stomach. The procedure is carried out for patients who are having difficulty swallowing. Irrespective of the age of the patient or their medical condition, the purpose of PEGs is to provide fluids and nutrition directly into the stomach.

I’ve been investigating the impact of medical treatment on patients that have had treatment for Oral and Maxillofacial Cancers. Part of this treatment may be the placement of a PEG feeding tube. So how does having a PEG feeding tube effect the Quality of Life (QoL) of this patient group.  I undertook a study to find out, which was presented at conference (2008 British Assocaition of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgeon Annual Conference, 22nd Annual Conference of the European Health Psychology Society and 6th International Head & Neck Quality of Life Workshop).  An overview of this study is given below.

A Qualitative Investigation into the Impact of PEGs

Research by the Maxillofacial Department at Derriford Hospital in Plymouth has shown an initial reduction in QoL due to the effects and demands of treatment as measured by the questionnaires. But patients want to add detail about specific areas of concern to themselves. One of these issues is the use of PEGs. The aim of this work was to explore the views of patients regarding the impact of having a PEG in-situ.

Ten patients were recruited prior to treatment for Head and Neck Cancer. They participated in a semi-structured interview and then completed the University of Washington and EORTC-C30 and HN35 QoL questionnaires to ensure comparability with previous studies. Follow-up data was collected at 1, 3, and 6 months post treatment.

Data revealed that those participants with a PEG in-situ had issues with clothing, activities, and sex, which were not apparent in those non-PEG participants. All rationalised the placement of the PEG, but expressed a desire for the PEG to be removed in order to more freely socialise, not be restricted in activity and start ‘feeling normal’. Communication with clinicians about the expected duration of use was described as poor. Patients needing new dentures prior to removal of the PEG reported feeling ‘abandoned’ by the hospital and ‘not confident in their dentists’.

This research shows the benefit of interview in adding flesh to the bones of questionnaires. It reveals adverse psychological effects of PEGs and need for better communication between patients and professionals. Investigation into oral rehabilitation is required.

So what next?

As noted, there needs to be better communication between patients and professionals. But the professionals need to be aware of the issues their patients may have.  Therefore this work is currently being written up for publication in peer review journals, and other work is ongoing to investigate the knowledge base of professionals such as General Dental Practitioners that work outside of hospital settings, but that can still have a significant impact of the length of time this patient group require PEG feeding tubes.

Single by The Clash from the album Combat Rock

I had a really good discussion with Jack & Nigel in the Watershed a couple nights back. Jack’s launching a new venture and wanted some advice. Nigel and I pitched in our thoughts, as did Micheal when he turned up a bit later.

Jack’s key question was around the business model. How much of his know-how did he give away on the website and how what did he charge for?

Essentially, Jack is building a personal brand as so many of us are.

In many ways Jack and I (and most consultancy businesses) are in similar positions, we’re trading on our expertise and ability to do stuff that’s really important to a business at specific moments in time. We also really enjoy what we do, which makes it easy to have a discussion with someone about how they could develop new ideas for their product / service, or how they could structure their business for growth, or find funding.

The challenge is when to do this over a pint in the Watershed (other pubs & coffee shops are available but good food, beer and free wifi is a tough act to beat) and when to sit down in a closed room and start billing. For me, the test is if we’re discussing specific costed solutions for your business, or if we’re having an advisory chat about business models, sources of funding, networks of finance, etc.

Jack also had a question over scalability, this was a question for Chris Garrett at OpenCoffee Demo where he presented a thriving agency with lots of work and skills, but no core IP. That’s changing for good reason, and they’re developing a system for location based alerts and friend finding but with an interesting difference (more when it’s launched). For the rest of us, once you’re billing 24/7 at the maximum rate the market will stand, you’re maxed out. The solution usually is to hire more mini-me’s.

But people are paying for your insight, not the intern’s.

So what can you do?

• Keep building your tribes, they are your evangelist marketeers, global ideas pool, potential clients, and probably friends
• Keep building your know-how, your secret sauce (this is what people are paying for); read widely, participate in conversations, innovate up the food chain
• Look out for scalability: collect your stories / experiences /ideas, if you’re a coder write some code that you regularly re-use and license it as a development tool, if you’re a designer/creative put some designs on T-shirts / mugs / etc (traditionally it’s called merchandising, bands have done this for ages),
• Rinse & repeat

Don’t get stuck in a rut of securing clients, delivering, billing, securing clients, delivering, billing without any scalability or building any know-how; someone will come along that is faster / smarter / cheaper / cooler than you and you need a defensible position.

How are you building know-how and scalability?

Mariano Kamp, July 2008

In my earlier post, I revealed some analysis that I’d asked Nigel to undertake and my interpretation of that analysis. Here I offer some thoughts on what actions businesses might take away from this.

The first thing to note is that unless you’re a Bank or car company, Government support for you probably won’t change that dramatically.

For the genuine start up, life is still going to be pretty tough until you can show some revenue. The good news is that there is lots you can do yourself that doesn’t involve lots of cost. Start blogging about your service/industry, join the Twitter conversation, keep an eye on the enterprise networks around you, get out there and meet people. The tools to support good old fashioned networking and business development have never been better or cheaper (and you can’t get cheaper than free).

If there isn’t a suitable enterprise network around you, start one. BEN is a great network around Bristol but tends towards established companies, so I set up an OpenCoffee Club, OpenCoffee is a ready made template that’s free and globally recognised. So long as you’re building an entrepreneur support & growth network and not just pimping your product/service you’ll find folks are generally happy to support you.

For the company that has some revenue, or the promise of imminent revenue there are a couple of interesting options.

The first is the range of grants available for R&D from SWRDA (South West Regional Development Agency). These are to part-fund small and close to market R&D (typically £5k to £50k) with a specific focus on small companies. You identify a project value and SWRDA provides a portion of that, usually between 40% and 60%.

1. Proof of Market Projects test the commercial potential of an innovative idea for a new technology, lasting no more than 9 months. The output should be a thorough and professional analysis of the scale of the market opportunity. Grants of £5,000 – £20,000 are available to small and medium sized businesses.
2. Micro Projects are small scale development projects lasting no longer than 12 months. The output should be a simple prototype of a novel or innovative product or process. Aid of £5,000 – £20,000 for all micro businesses covering 45% of eligible costs is available.
3. Research Projects involve planned research or critical investigation into the feasibility of new products or processes, lasting between 6 and 18 months. The result of the project could be new scientific or technical knowledge that may be commercially exploited. Grants of £20,000 – £100,000 for micro and small businesses covering 60% of eligible costs are available.

There are also Development grants and two Exceptional grant levels >£100k. The development grants are only 35% and the exceptional grants aren’t really aimed at the small business or start-up entrepreneur.

Next up are more general business expansion funding. A couple of days ago SWRDA announced their South West Loans Fund. This is £10m of funding for small businesses that have been refused credit elsewhere. A good slug of that cash comes from Europe (£6.25m) so the focus is on the more deprived parts of the South West (Cornwall & the Isles of Scilly get £5m), but businesses from across the South West are eligible.

All grant applications have to address two very different needs. Yours and the funders. Having written plenty of successful business grants for funding, research or collaboration myself, knowing how to frame your business innovation so that it appeals to public sector funding is more art than science.

Although most of the cash is coming from SWRDA, BSSP means you access it through Business Link who will provide you with Information, Diagnose your needs, and Broker connections to the right bits of SWRDA’s Innovation team.

As I’ve said elsewhere, there is evidence that banks are beginning to open up to good companies under the Enterprise Finance Guarantee. For business growth finance this is probably your best bet, and you’ll have to have tried (and failed) here before you approach SWRDA for a South West Loans Fund application.

Then there are the equity funding options from SWAIN, Catalyst Venture Partners, Eden Ventures, and those are just the main ones in the South West. There are other independent Angel investors and networks in London that are investing.

So as ever, there are quite a few options. I’ve only cover some here, those I feel are most relevant to the small business or start up entrepreneur. The full list of support products is available in a pdf from SWRDA.