Siemens’ UK HQ happens to be in Manchester, where I was glad to find contrary evidence last week that all is far from lost on the innovation front, at the Northern Tech Awards, presented in rock’n’roll style by the investment bank GP Bullhound. Here were 100 high-growth companies, ranging from the self-explanatory (-Parcel2Go, Pharmacy2U) to the baffling: I glazed over at ‘the intersection of Big Data and the Cloud’. Among winners with plainer purposes were Sheffield-based Twinkl, which sells online teaching materials for schools around the world, and Leeds-based Crisp Thinking, which provides rapid responses to adverse social media activity for companies and brands, again worldwide.
But most interesting were the conversations about people rather than equipment and algorithms. Almost all of these ventures are in a phase which demands rapid recruitment of talent. ‘Who here finds that easy?’ asked a speaker: a single hand was raised in the crowd. One software wizard enthused about hiring Syrian refugees with firsts in electronic engineering for his outpost in low-cost Kuala Lumpur. Another lamented the difficulty of getting a day’s work out of Britain’s smartphone-addicted ‘Generation Z’ (born after 1995) with their short attention spans and constant need for praise and validation. The simpler answer, until now, has been to recruit highly educated and motivated kids from the EU’s Baltic fringes, but Brexit has choked that pipeline.
We’ve always been a nation of ideas and we could emerge from Brexit as a nation of born-again, outward-bound entrepreneurs. But if we don’t nurture the skills and invest in the tech, it’s hard to see how we’re going to build a new wave of world-beating businesses on our own shores.
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