you want to start something?

I spent this morning in the company of academia, industry and government as a ConnectED event. ConnectED is a fund used to create opportunities of collaboration between the colleges and universities. The aim was to try to foster some collaboration potential between the groups. I took some notes from our table (one of 5 tables I think) and was volunteered to present at the end of it. The felt-tip shows the main points.

There will be a further event to help foster this but the real wins for me were to get in touch with folk in QUB in the Knowledge Transfer Centre as well as some contacts within SARC.

There was a lot of consensus that there needs to be (at least one) hub for the creative industries (including software and digital media) in the North of Ireland. This is kinda what we’re trying to do with StartVI but without the large funds that ConnectED can provide.

It was startling how little interaction there is between industry and academia in truth – even the difficulties voiced by academia in getting productive student placements within industry. We need to work on that – not necessarily to change courses but to foster understanding. It is not the role of education to prepare an individual for work in a company but rather to educate them to be able to work in any company. And there is an onus on the students to make themselves indispensable to the businesses with whom they are placed. There is significant culture clash between academia and industry – whether it’s the timing of the academic year, the pressure of deadlines or the appreciation of impact on a business that a single student can make, positive or negative.

For our part, StartVI intends to take on a lot of placement students. And if they make themselves indispensable, then they’ll get work from the startups. If not, there’s always a McJob.

Tags: Commentary, Do Something Now by mj
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Andy Oram at O’Reilly RADAR writes:

One might expect Start-Up Nation: The Story of Israel’s Economic Miracle to come from the pen of business school or economics professors, but the biographies of authors Dan Senor and Saul Singer reveal policy backgrounds. Both were advisors in the U.S. Federal Government.
…
In this blog I’ll summarize the traits that that the authors find make Israel a successful incubator for innovation, distinguishing between traits that other countries can emulate and traits that seem uniquely embedded in Israel’s historical and geographic circumstances.
…
I’ll lay out three observations that came to my mind while following the authors’ argument: the importance of hard data, flipping axioms, and the creative role government can play.

The traits Andy mentions are summarised below. Go to the article for a more detailed discussion.

• A loyalty to the entire community that goes beyond personal success.
• A sense of dissatisfaction. To innovate, one must be convinced that things are not good enough the way they are now.
• A Do-It-Yourself approach to technology, which perhaps is one manifestation of the afore-mentioned innate dissatisfaction.
• A culture of challenging authority.
• A determination to succeed against all odds
• Interdisciplinary agility.
• A tolerance for failure.
• Providing young people with arenas to exert responsibility.
• A fruitful mentoring relationship between venture capitalists and new entrepreneurs. Injecting money into new ventures (as so many countries do) is not enough
• Government policies friendly to startups.
• A truly open-arms approach to immigrants, who bring not only fresh perspectives but a high tolerance for risk.

I commented:
Coming from another nation transitioning from a traditional skills-based economy to a knowledge economy. When you compare Ireland and Israel, there are several comparisons.

A divided country, history of conflict, large international diaspora.

But there is one major difference. Ireland may have received funding from it’s diaspora but it did not receive the sort of funding that Israel received from the US DoD budget spending. The impact of the military budget combined with the impact of the diaspora is nothing to be sniffed at. I’m not saying that Ireland wants or needs DoD money – quite the opposite – but the impact of this investment seems to go unmentioned above.

My interest is, however, in Ireland, North and South. We’d welcome interactions with the Irish diaspora internationally – get in touch with the Start Virtual Incubator in Belfast or the Greenhouse Startup Incubator in Limerick – two private enterprises dedicated to helping Ireland transition to the 21st Century.

Tags: Commentary, Do Something Now by mj
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I just read this brief blog post from BrainStore which is designed to help people visualise thinking about the future. They say to let them:

invent “Headlines of the Future” for the industry or topic you are working on? It puts them in the shoes of a different group (journalists) and generally produces great insights that people can relate to better because they are more familiar to them.

The example they give is:

This is a process that beings by eschewing assumptions. For example: lots of people have a concrete preconception of what makes a personal computer. They have severe difficulties in accepting notions which are outside of their paradigm. And it’s not just in computing. By challenging assumptions which are supposedly fundamental to the current stream of thought, we can find new ways to innovate.

Some of these (such as “No More Keyboards” are easy to envisage with the adoption of touch-screens and some of the brain-activity work going on in our local universities – keyboards could already be a thing of the past. But what about screens? We’ve seen a concept computer from DELL which doesn’t have a screen, it has a projector by default. Or how about a wearable computer which feeds data directly to a video headset. What about non-visible user interfaces like on the iPod shuffle? Or one which uses aural or haptic clues?

It isn’t quite as easy as just taking each statement and looking at the inverse – but rather to examine it for fragile assumptions.

Tags: Commentary, Do Something Now, design by mj
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The State of Funding in 2009 was a blog post I put together a few days ago.

It’s not meant to be definitive and there are other ways to get funding.

I think we should recognise the efforts of one local entrepreneur who managed to energise a local MLA into seeking funding for his startup from two local property developers. This sort of ad-hoc business angel network should be taken as an examplar. Never before have I known a local politician to take the plight of startup entrepreneurs so seriously. Would it be that other politicians would follow suit and assist us in the building of an incubator and seed fund for startups.

So. I mentioned yesterday that a small group of interested do-gooders are opening an incubator and starting a fund.

We reckon that businesses will stay in the Incubator for 6 months – 1 year and then will be able to graduate to other premises (for example CoreBelfast or many of the Serviced Offices around the province).

The fund is going to be made up by interested do-gooders. It’s small amounts individually but it only takes small amounts to get a startup off the ground. We’re going to talk to some ‘professionals’ about the legals of this obviously (recommendations welcome)

Tags: Do Something Now, Startup by mj
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The Economist: Nokia tries to reinvent itself:

ASK Finns about their national character and chances are the word sisu will come up. It is an amalgam of steadfastness and diligence, but also courage, recklessness and fierce tenacity. “It takes sisu to stand at the door when the bear is on the other side,” a folk saying goes.

We have this feeling. We have it. We likely don’t have a word for it. And that’s a damn shame.

We need something to change. Northern Ireland will always have difficulties because we lack the environment we need to excel. Part of this is historical, part of it is just the way our culture is built. We have the talent, we have the brains, we just lack part of the execution. We will never have the same number of angels and funds as Silicon Valley. So we have to make better use of what we have. We will never get the massive DoD contracts that Israel secured so we’re going to need to find other ways to make our mark. We need to have the foresight to prepare for the future, the charisma to make friendships that will last and the heart to build it. Not for our own gain but for the gain of tomorrow. Well, starting from today, the first week of January 2010, we’re going to change that.

We’re going to start an incubator.
We’re going to start building a fund.
And we’re going to do it in Belfast.

So I’m looking for a word in Irish to express something. To express the passion about how I choose to spend my free time. There’s some candidates here – and the front-runner so far in bold.

Tags: Commentary, Do Something Now, Social, Startup by mj
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