Coming from a scientific background, my idea of research is to have a question, then collect evidence to inform it. The opinion formed or conclusions is the real crux of any research project and the ability to analyse and organise information to further the understanding of a subject - by whatever small amount - is what really matters.
Is a bunch of statistics and facts however well laid out a sufficient body of work to be classed as research? A recent piece of market research for one of our companies consisted of over 100 pages of information primarily extracted from Mintel reports. Similarly, I recently read a commissioned report that purported to be a piece of research, but again was just a collection of pertinent facts relating to a particular market and geography.
While no doubt this information is highly relevant and informative to certain readers, I question whether this should be called research. Or am I just being too protective of the phrase?
Monday, 2 March 2009
Monday, 19 January 2009
Two Banks of a Technology Pond
The British persona tends to be self-deprecating and reserved when it comes to trumpeting our successes and rather backwards at coming forwards when it comes to converting innovation and research into commercial reality, particularly when compared to our US counterparts.
There is a tendency in the UK to wait until something is proven before investing in it, whereas the USA has more of an appetite for risk. Americans will try something new, if it works they embrace it and believe more, if it doesn't they purse another opportunity. This non-deterministic approach contracts sharply with our tendency in the UK to want to make managed stepwise progress that avoids the risk of failure. The fact of life is that no matter how carefully you plan, you can't avoid some false starts and the need to backtrack and admit making mistakes are all part of the journey.
Having lived and worked on both sides of the pond, my experience is that its the balance between three essential elements of tech success: IP, management and money. And the stigma attached to failure. In the USA there are more tech entrepreneurs prepared to back early stage ideas that VCs or bankers (right so!) wouldn't take even a first look at. This business angel involvement at proof of concept enables new ideas to get one foot out of the lab and onto the radar screen of serious funders with some management DNA already spliced in. Similarly American VCs employ (or are started up) by more tech-savvy people, rather than being top heavy with lawyers and accountants (not that these skills aren't important!). American VC tend then to step in an put serious money into fewer companies that are in better shape to progress than those in the UK enabling a more of a seamless transition from idea to commercialisation
So maybe we need a little more joined-up thinking that combines money, enterprise, innovation and management...
There is a tendency in the UK to wait until something is proven before investing in it, whereas the USA has more of an appetite for risk. Americans will try something new, if it works they embrace it and believe more, if it doesn't they purse another opportunity. This non-deterministic approach contracts sharply with our tendency in the UK to want to make managed stepwise progress that avoids the risk of failure. The fact of life is that no matter how carefully you plan, you can't avoid some false starts and the need to backtrack and admit making mistakes are all part of the journey.
Having lived and worked on both sides of the pond, my experience is that its the balance between three essential elements of tech success: IP, management and money. And the stigma attached to failure. In the USA there are more tech entrepreneurs prepared to back early stage ideas that VCs or bankers (right so!) wouldn't take even a first look at. This business angel involvement at proof of concept enables new ideas to get one foot out of the lab and onto the radar screen of serious funders with some management DNA already spliced in. Similarly American VCs employ (or are started up) by more tech-savvy people, rather than being top heavy with lawyers and accountants (not that these skills aren't important!). American VC tend then to step in an put serious money into fewer companies that are in better shape to progress than those in the UK enabling a more of a seamless transition from idea to commercialisation
So maybe we need a little more joined-up thinking that combines money, enterprise, innovation and management...
Saturday, 3 January 2009
New Year Predictions
OK here goes:
Connect Yorkshire helps even more companies get investment ready and pitch for investment through its flagship investment forums, investment challenges and business plan competitions.
The rest of the UK increasingly embrace the Connect model and new initiatives are rolled out in London and the North East.
A UK wide online platform that brings together entrepreneurs with the resources to they need to succeed is launched that complements and extends our regionally focused 'on the ground' activities.
Yorkshire Forward announces a region-wide investment fund as a follow on for Partnership Investment Finance and the South Yorkshire Investment Fund that incorporates a much needed seedcorn element.
The Business Support Simplification agenda leads to more joined-up thinking with regard to investment readiness support and access to finance across the piste.
Connect promotes its flagship 'Springboard' initiative to help early-stage propositions get their business plans into shape - even if they are not necessarily wishing to raise external finance.
Cloud computing and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) gains increasing traction in the market and we all start buying PCs with smaller hard disk drives.
One can but dream...Happy New Year!
Connect Yorkshire helps even more companies get investment ready and pitch for investment through its flagship investment forums, investment challenges and business plan competitions.
The rest of the UK increasingly embrace the Connect model and new initiatives are rolled out in London and the North East.
A UK wide online platform that brings together entrepreneurs with the resources to they need to succeed is launched that complements and extends our regionally focused 'on the ground' activities.
Yorkshire Forward announces a region-wide investment fund as a follow on for Partnership Investment Finance and the South Yorkshire Investment Fund that incorporates a much needed seedcorn element.
The Business Support Simplification agenda leads to more joined-up thinking with regard to investment readiness support and access to finance across the piste.
Connect promotes its flagship 'Springboard' initiative to help early-stage propositions get their business plans into shape - even if they are not necessarily wishing to raise external finance.
Cloud computing and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) gains increasing traction in the market and we all start buying PCs with smaller hard disk drives.
One can but dream...Happy New Year!
Monday, 15 December 2008
It's Good To Be A Little Bad or Mad
Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great."
- Mark Twain
A lot of entrepreneurs worry about people stealing their bright ideas. In my experience, ideas are easy - its execution that's hard. And even if your idea is brilliant, the best ones aren't necessarily so. Any really good new idea will seem either bad or mad to most people; otherwise someone in China will already be doing it. Your idea needs to be almost good and it helps if the world around you helps turn your fad into a fashion. Look at all the money going into green energy - its even got its own name 'CleanTech'. Most funders are driven by consensus, not just within their firms, but within their community. Surely that's exactly how the credit bubble happened - everyone was doing it, so it must be a good idea. Not.
And being too clever ain't necessarily a good idea either. My claim to fame is that my Ph.D was part of a research project that won E.J. Corey his Nobel Prize. That research itself never generated anything that was directly commercial. However, the spin-offs that were successful were infinitely less ambitious in their goals, but solved real-world problems in an explainable way. It’s a great case study of how a small change of perspective and focus on an addressable market opened up a commercial opportunity – and why trying to be too smart is not always a good idea in the real world!
So when the next small-minded person tells you what you are trying to do is bad or mad, breath a sigh of relief that maybe you on the path to greatness! Someone right now is probably telling the next Google why what they are doing isn't such a bright idea. And he probably works for a bank!
- Mark Twain
A lot of entrepreneurs worry about people stealing their bright ideas. In my experience, ideas are easy - its execution that's hard. And even if your idea is brilliant, the best ones aren't necessarily so. Any really good new idea will seem either bad or mad to most people; otherwise someone in China will already be doing it. Your idea needs to be almost good and it helps if the world around you helps turn your fad into a fashion. Look at all the money going into green energy - its even got its own name 'CleanTech'. Most funders are driven by consensus, not just within their firms, but within their community. Surely that's exactly how the credit bubble happened - everyone was doing it, so it must be a good idea. Not.
And being too clever ain't necessarily a good idea either. My claim to fame is that my Ph.D was part of a research project that won E.J. Corey his Nobel Prize. That research itself never generated anything that was directly commercial. However, the spin-offs that were successful were infinitely less ambitious in their goals, but solved real-world problems in an explainable way. It’s a great case study of how a small change of perspective and focus on an addressable market opened up a commercial opportunity – and why trying to be too smart is not always a good idea in the real world!
So when the next small-minded person tells you what you are trying to do is bad or mad, breath a sigh of relief that maybe you on the path to greatness! Someone right now is probably telling the next Google why what they are doing isn't such a bright idea. And he probably works for a bank!
Monday, 8 December 2008
Bonfires, Dry Stone Walls, Clouds, Inches & Death Computing
Colin Beveridge spoke at the 20/20 Vision event organised by Sandford Technology/Virtronix on Fighting the Trillion Dollar Bonfire (effective information systems for the 21st Century). His conclusion seemed to be that system integration is the way forwards. I have to agree. Most IS systems seems like good old Yorkshire stone walls - they require immense intricacy to put them together and great skill to build, then they fall down after a while because there's nothing but air and friction holding them together. What we need is some 'cement' to hold the functional bricks together and facilitate process, workflow, data sharing and increased productivity. Yorkshire Forward seem to have woken up to the fact that each 'brick in the wall' they fund is replicating data and not sharing it effectively with each other. They are introducing a CRM that all agencies can tap into, leverage and generally use. Great idea! I have been saying this for three year's and every other agency seemed to wave the data protection act at me as to why we can't share information more!!!
The death of the corporate datacentre seemed to also be on the vendor agenda with all our data being entrusted to third parties (like this blog and my emails). Ian Weatherhog and Mike Briercliffe waxed lyrically about how the PC was the root of all evil when it came to data security (he also spoke at our recent TechTalk event). I can remember far enough back when I accessed the old cloud i.e. our corporate IT server from a remote PC and the data could be viewed, but not manipulated. We used to say all this valuable data was "an inch from the desktop" and spent ten years going that final inch and start turning data into information, albeit with security and integrity compromised. Now we seem to be poised to unify the competing factions with the eventual promise of network computing and Larry Ellison's vision of thin clients that all they do is the final rendering.
I suppose it's only a matter of time before we all have enough certainty that "till death us do part" our data is safe and backed up in the cloud and not deleted when our credit card expires. Now that's what I call security.
The death of the corporate datacentre seemed to also be on the vendor agenda with all our data being entrusted to third parties (like this blog and my emails). Ian Weatherhog and Mike Briercliffe waxed lyrically about how the PC was the root of all evil when it came to data security (he also spoke at our recent TechTalk event). I can remember far enough back when I accessed the old cloud i.e. our corporate IT server from a remote PC and the data could be viewed, but not manipulated. We used to say all this valuable data was "an inch from the desktop" and spent ten years going that final inch and start turning data into information, albeit with security and integrity compromised. Now we seem to be poised to unify the competing factions with the eventual promise of network computing and Larry Ellison's vision of thin clients that all they do is the final rendering.
I suppose it's only a matter of time before we all have enough certainty that "till death us do part" our data is safe and backed up in the cloud and not deleted when our credit card expires. Now that's what I call security.
Monday, 1 December 2008
Snow Report
‘Solutions for Business – funded by government’ is a package of business support to help companies start, grow and succeed. The launch event was fittingly held last Friday in a casino! Simon Hill from Yorkshire Forward explained how they have streamlined thousands of public-funded support products into a package of thirty. My take on it was that they have identified a set of product categories under which individual solutions would fit, which is not exactly the same thing! Like the fact that multiple inheritance in object-oriented systems is technically feasible, but not a good idea in practise, going forwards hybrid products that fit under two categories would disappear, which is perfectly sensible.
But let's remember this is just a conceptualisation of reality that dices and slices things to offer a palatable solution that hides complexity, maximised cohesion and minimises coupling (see my Keep it Simple Stupid post). For example, lets take business mentoring - it is valuable before and after investment but has been and probably will continue to be separated into investor readiness support and 'money with management'. And there's nothing wrong with that, but in another conceptualisation it could be brought together, but that would require closer coordination between organisations like Connect and the investment funds.
We all want things to appear as simple as possible, but as with systems biology, life introduces complexity as the thing evolves. That's not to say we shouldn't group together things - that's what an organ is. Eskimo's have twenty words for 'snow', because it's an important concept to them. Try telling them they don't need the other nineteen.
But let's remember this is just a conceptualisation of reality that dices and slices things to offer a palatable solution that hides complexity, maximised cohesion and minimises coupling (see my Keep it Simple Stupid post). For example, lets take business mentoring - it is valuable before and after investment but has been and probably will continue to be separated into investor readiness support and 'money with management'. And there's nothing wrong with that, but in another conceptualisation it could be brought together, but that would require closer coordination between organisations like Connect and the investment funds.
We all want things to appear as simple as possible, but as with systems biology, life introduces complexity as the thing evolves. That's not to say we shouldn't group together things - that's what an organ is. Eskimo's have twenty words for 'snow', because it's an important concept to them. Try telling them they don't need the other nineteen.
Friday, 28 November 2008
Something For Nothing
Grave concerns about personal liberties and freedoms are thrown up by the proposed national identity card scheme, but judging by the discussion at TechTalk 2008, advertisers are already tracking our every move. Andrew Burke, CEO of Amino Technologies and former CEO of BT Entertainment said that media companies would need to look at supermarkets who run loyalty card schemes so they know exactly what customers are buying and when. Already Google analyse email traffic to target advertising based on content and Phorn are seeking to strike deals with ISPs to monitor all Internet traffic to profile user interests.
One of the investment forum presenters, Prescient, have developed a electronic nose and a recent applicant to the Yorkshire Concept fund has developed a vision system to profile people by age, ethnic origin, etc. Maybe not perfect, but better than nothing. What then stands in the way of not only profiling people by their data traffic but also their personal traits as we stand in front of an advertising display or shopfront? Maybe I am getting paranoid, but the thought of being offered a voucher for body products or a discount on a zimmer frame based on my appearance or body odour sounds just a step too far in personal profiling.
One of the investment forum presenters, Prescient, have developed a electronic nose and a recent applicant to the Yorkshire Concept fund has developed a vision system to profile people by age, ethnic origin, etc. Maybe not perfect, but better than nothing. What then stands in the way of not only profiling people by their data traffic but also their personal traits as we stand in front of an advertising display or shopfront? Maybe I am getting paranoid, but the thought of being offered a voucher for body products or a discount on a zimmer frame based on my appearance or body odour sounds just a step too far in personal profiling.
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