Posts Tagged ‘Entrepreneurship’

Ovum-DCE Smart Cities Europe 2012

The Lancaster, London 19-20 June 2012

You can find the Chirpstory for the event here.

In many ways the event revealed the broader problems with discussions around smart cities. There is the aspirational vision – cleaner, less-congested, less polluted and more prosperous cities – contrasted with the complex reality of current “smart” ICT projects, often mired in difficulties around business models, administrative jurisdiction, privacy and security issues and any number of other complex multi-stakeholder problems that crop-up when you try and integrate the physical and digital worlds; problems which go far beyond the scope of a simple technological fix.

The day started with an intoduction by Larry Hirst of the Digital City Exchange and Imperial College and Neelie Kroes of the European Commission, and a laying-out-of-issues by David Gann, the principle investigator of the Digital City Exchange.  The vision of the Digital City Exchange is to create the equivalent of a telephone exchange for a city’s data. This platform will then be accessed by citizens, businesses and city administrators to assist decision making, create products and services and inform city management. The key point about this exchange is that it seeks to be an exchange for all types of sectoral data: energy, transport, health, waste, environmental and any other areas you can think of to place a sensor. This goes far beyond the sectoral approach we see in many projects.

The imperative for such projects was underlined by Manel Sanromá, CIO of the City of Barcelona who pointed out that the human race is becoming steadily more urban, a process that has been going on for millennia. A result of this fact is that it is the quality of life that is available in the cities that is going to determine how we live in the future, because although you “can’t guarantee that France, the United Kingdom and the United States will be around in a thousand years, you can be virtually certain that Paris, London and New York will be”.

As such, cities themselves, through offices such mayors and other municipal offices that currently seem to be  undergoing a renaissance, are going to be the source of the impetus for moving to a smarter urban future.

Interesting themes that emerged from subequent sessions included:

The human element: the unpredictability of human nature and the risk of making any broad predictions about how the “human agent” will react when embedded in a smart city. A point raised in both the Transport session by panellists Sue Flack, Anders Roth and Jeremy Green, and by Nilay Shah in his “View from the Top” session as he tried to imagine what a smart city would look like using the tools of process engineering.

What is a smart city?: This is likely to differ from city to city, but what are the essential elements and what is the essential infrastructure needed before you can even think about calling yourself one?

Governance: we may use phrases such as “managing the smart city”, but more often the level of decision making is unclear, a hierarchy and decentralisation are often suggested but we still don’t know who to go to for a particular kind of decision.

Who will pay?: Something of an old warhorse in debates about almost any topic, but one that is particularly uncertain when business models are as contested as they are in the digital environment. A point made strongly by Allan Mayo of the UK’s Department for Business, Innovation and Skills who said the assumption that it was all going to be paid for by advertising was naïve.

The smart cities agenda suffers from a certain amount of tension between a bottom-up versus top-down approach. The former is responsive, but limited in scope by barriers between sectors and the latter is slow to develop and ill-defined, but necessary if the full potential of the agenda is to be realised. Hopefully the Digital City Exchange will go some way to filling this lacunae.

Wednesday 8th March, Imperial College Business School

By Richard Foulsham

Lem Lasher, as Group President of Global Business Solutions and Chief Innovation Officer of CSC is in a unique position to assess the influences upon and potential future direction of the digital economy, having both the analytical capabilities of a leading edge consultancy and a business that’s involved in the day to deployment of IT around the world within his remit.

During this lecture he shared with us some of the “points of view” that his organisation has developed around “next practice”, likely developments that clever players in the IT market can use to gain an advantage, and identified some of the areas that he thinks will grow and become important as the digital revolution gets underway.

This revolution in technology has been brought about by the growth of the internet. Mr Lasher predicts that we are barely into the foothills of this revolution with another 20 years of change ahead of us. This development will consist of  a relatively predictable advance in the technology, but Mr Lasher sees the real source of disruption being the development in business models that will take place in this new, connected environment.

The drivers of the current market as Mr Lasher sees it are globalisation and everything that overworked word entails – increased competition, the rise of China and India – but more interestingly he also identified a consistently difficult regulatory environment as being something that is affecting companies ability to differentiate their products. One interesting thing to ponder is whether the technological revolution and the  process of globalisation are really parallel or dynamically entwined. It is hard to imagine the economic growth of India without the business space that has been opened up by technology. Equally, the globalised markets that are the bain of many democratic politicians’ existence have grown up around the opportunities offered by a digital market place.

Organisations have responded to these challenges by becoming more complex and adopting a greater variety of forms than has been the case previously. Mr Lasher identifies a process that could be described as a “democratisation of technology” which has affected the way technology advances:  technologies are available at low enough cost and can be operated by non-experts – the iPad and the child are given as an example and anyone whose watched toddlers playing Angry Birds will find it hard to disagree – meaning that public bodies and private corporations cannot dictate to the market, but rather they have to respond to the market in a way that keeps revenue intact and minimises risks from regulation.

These effects are not consistent across sectors, and Mr Lasher then went on to describe a matrix for predicting the degree of business model disruption likely to result from these changes in a particular industry. He identifies two major predicting factors: whether the organisation deals in physical product or data, and the degree of regulation in the industry. This model has a remarkable predictive power which two examples will suffice to illustrate. The music industry – no physical product and little regulation (or at least little ability to enforce what regulation exists) – has gone through an exceptionally torrid time recently, whilst banking, dealing largely in data, but doing so  in a highly regulated environment, has itself suffered little in the way of disruption whilst, ironically, wreaking havoc on the rest of the economy.

Mr Lasher ended his presentation by describing a number of specific areas that he sees as likely to become increasingly important in the future. Some are predictable, others more of a surprise.  There was also a list of things that may prove to be the downside of the bright, shiny digital future that glistens enticingly at us from the cover of a thousand company brochures.  Whatever happens, it’s not going to be boring.

You can access a recording of Mr Lashers presentation here.

Driving New Business Development: From Insights to Innovation

18:30-19:30, 22^nd November 2011, Imperial College Business School

Blog by Richard Foulsham

The world has changed. A company like Ericsson cannot rely on developing its current technology to generate income in the future. That was the message that Magnus Karlsson, Director, New Business Development & Innovation at Ericsson left us with when he came to deliver a distinguished guest lecture at Imperial College Business School. We are moving towards a networked society. It is becoming cheaper and cheaper to connect ‘things’ to the internet and along with this diversity of things come a far wider number of participants and a consequent breakdown of traditional industry boundaries. To work in this world requires openness, partnerships, knowing your organisations place in the value chain and, seemingly most important, a more market and user centred approach to innovation.

Innovating in the networked world

So how does a company like Ericsson, with its distinguished track record in networks and systems, adapt to this new environment? Traditional R&D departments are no longer the sole answer as they cannot hope to cover all the areas where opportunities may lie.  The answer that Magnus described was to introduce a diffuse culture of innovation throughout the organisation. This was designed to be a combination of both top down – a new CEO took the opportunity to introduce a new mission statement – and bottom up initiatives that aimed to get people within the organisation thinking about what might be “the next big thing”, and importantly also to capture those ideas for Ericsson when they occurred.

The top down process involved the development of a number of scenarios based around what a customer might need in 2020. These provided a strategic focus for the entire enterprise. Interestingly these scenarios were not only analysed through good old-fashioned SWOT analyses, but they were also illustrated using narratives and games to provide insight into the user requirements and broaden the scenarios impact.

The bottom up process captured ideas for innovation at all levels of the organisation through an “ideas funnel”. This was a multi-party entity tasked with receiving, analysing and, potentially, developing ideas from all sources. An important way that the sources of ideas were diversified was through the introduction of ‘ideas boxes’. These boxes provided categories for innovative ideas. Each box has a manager whose job is to capture and champion innovative thinking. Once captured, the idea is examined by the members of the ideas funnel and, if judged to be worth investigating, the originator of the idea is given the time and “a small amount of money” to develop the idea. Not all ideas become operational and a transparent feedback mechanism providing reasons why ideas are not selected, or indeed if they had already been attempted and failed, is an important part of the innovation process.

Catching ideas

People always have ideas, but Magnus identified the creation of a culture of innovation within the organisation as one of the most difficult aspects to instigate. The new CEO helped as already mentioned, but there were other mechanisms. A source of tools and information – the Ericsson Academy – was developed. Identification and education of a leadership community who appreciated the value of innovation to the organisation, and who know what to do when they see it, was an important part of Ericsson’s approach. These activities had the additional advantage of creating a common language of innovation which allowed ideas to move around the company and reach people who were able to assess them and assist in their development.

And the result? Magnus said that the scenarios generated resulted in a number of new partnerships, and more generally, around 1 in 40 new ideas were eventually implemented. The diversified ideas base had not resulted in a great change in the origin of innovative ideas.  The sources of ideas were still dominated by already existing networks and contacts, with further innovations coming from other companies. The ultimate test will be whether Ericsson continues to be a force to reckoned with in the new, networked world.

Our Future Digital Economy: If You Build It, Will They Come?

18:30-19:30, 24^th October 2011, Imperial College Business School

Blog by Sherry Morris and Andrew Fletcher

The second of four Tech City Talks, hosted by Imperial College Business School and the Guardian’s Tech Weekly team focused on whether Government intervention in Tech City / Silicon Roundabout have been beneficial, and how it fits with other clusters and interventions.

Asked if Tech City was simply a brand to attract investment or whether the Government wants to invest in companies on the ground, Eric Pickles, secretary of state for communities and local government, made it clear direct government investment in companies would be the ‘kiss of death.’ He wants to see Tech City as a means for cities to join up globally.

He summarised one approach being used to support the development of clusters: enterprise zones. By using key interventions such as tax incentives, access to superfast broadband and local development orders, start up companies can get the push they need to develop and grow. The development orders being key to prevent the zones simply being used by companies to transfer existing jobs around the country. When asked to define what Tech City is, he pointed to three of four thriving sites around London where ‘techies’ and start-up companies can gather and feed off each other to develop new products, ideas and services.

Alex Deschamps-Sonsino, founder and CEO of Designswarm and co-founder of Tinker London and part of the Really Interesting Group, picked out other factors that led to the rise of Tech City, with the single biggest factor aiding growth being the expansion of the East London line. She also stressed the importance of small companies co-existing with large companies and providing support to help them develop. But the support needed in a company of 1-10 employees is radically different from that needed for 100 employees, even though both are classed as SMEs. She wants specific, targeted support for these ‘micro-companies’, so they, too, can get off the ground and grow, rather than be left to struggle along on their own.

Eric Van Der Kleij, CEO of Tech City Investment Organisation, argued that Silicon Roundabout is thriving since the spotlight was thrown on it by government a year ago, citing growth from 200 to 500 start-ups. Activities such as Silicon Milk Roundabout also clearly demonstrate the paid opportunities that these start-ups are generating for graduates. However, Alex pointed to the difficulties in measurement because of the difficulty in distinguishing what is a tech business, what is a creative business or what is something else.

Regardless of the numbers in the clusters, Tara Solesbury, a digital media and creative industries consultant, drawing on experiences from Wired Sussex, pointed out the importance of the clusters occurring naturally and within the local community. In her experience, only clusters that formed organically thrived, the rest died out.  She welcomed the development of more ‘tech cities’ around the country.

It was suggested that perhaps with all these numerous start-ups clusters we are in the midst of a new bubble. But Elizabeth Varley, CEO of Tech Hub, argued ‘no.’ The resurgence of tech and entrepreneurship in London is not a bubble, causing ill-considered investment in businesses, but a genuine increase in the considered investment in companies. Austere times are causing this resurgence of entrepreneurial activity, and a change of mentality to ‘if you don’t have a job, make yourself one.’

Asked if there was a need to focus on cities, rather than ‘Tech Rural’ Alex argued that being located remotely is possible, but inevitably travel will be required as the business grows and engages with larger communities. For a small percentage of businesses, clients remain local, but the majority need to set off and expand.

A recurring theme from Eric Pickles was the need for government to avoid meddling wherever possible and helping to create the right environments, through mechanisms such as enterprise zones, rather than using regulation. His hope is that these thriving clusters link up and work together not just within the UK, but worldwide, emphasising the part that cloud computing can play in helping individual clusters to collectively grow into something much bigger, outweighing the importance of the ‘vibe’ in any one particular area. In Tech City we are embodying the ‘build it and they will come attitude’

The series of talks continue next Monday at Imperial College Business School. For more information and to register:  http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2011/oct/03/tech-weekly-tech-city-talks-digital-economy-event

You can listen to the podcast of this week’s event here.