Silicon Valley is renowned the world over and has dominated the narrative around universities and economic development. This is the story of extraordinary universities growing up in conjunction with their place to create a powerful environment for knowledge, technology and entrepreneurship.
We are publishing today the first report from a London-Research England group that is examining the question of whether London was, is or could be something akin to a Silicon Valley in the UK. This is not a simple question, and we started our work with honest recognition of all the caveats to our enterprise. (We also recognised that London is not the only place, abroad or in UK, doing such an investigation.)
Expert commentators warn of the danger of assuming that Silicon Valley (or Kendall Square in Boston) is a transferable model that can be simply ‘lifted and shifted’ to another place. The institutions are:
- universities
- businesses
- investors
They co-evolve in a place over time and are mutually dependent. History matters. Places have unique stories of their origins and their means of development.
Stories of co-development
Universities and places also do not have just one story of co-development. Although Silicon Valley is our focus (which we think is relevant to London as a place), there are several other models.
Taking account of all these challenges, the focus of our group is the experience of universities in London, using their deep understanding of their place to define how their ecosystem works.
We have an aspiration to create a predictive model that can specify the types and levels of ingredients needed to come together to achieve new companies that thrive coming out of the university base.
The group was supported by:
- Research England
- national stakeholders:
- the National Centre for Universities and Business
- the British Business Bank
They considered whether the model developed for London could have wider applicability.
Stage one report
Our stage one report includes a literature review on the ecosystem concept, a generic model of an ecosystem for testing and technical information on further evidence work. Our stage one work has made us think:
- about the scale of London, and particularly whether it forms a connected system, or a set of subsystems. We became interested in whether we could map these subsystems and tech and expertise communities
- of the importance of the soft elements to ecosystems such as leadership, entrepreneurial culture and networks; and whether there are subtle or even profound differences of these in different tech and entrepreneurial communities
- about the risk of “boiling the ocean” trying to evidence a highly complex model versus the risk of producing a simple system that is easily measured but has no predictive possibilities
This work led us to adopt two ecosystem models.
Next steps
We are now embarking on more focussed studies to drill down on key aspects of the challenge of describing the scale and nuance of London. This includes a quantitative study to identify scale of opportunities, and qualitative studies to explore the likely cultural variations across different tech communities, starting with:
- fashion
- fintech
- pharmaceutical.
Are their ecosystems unique or involve generic and shared elements? How different are their leaders, cultures and networks? How different are their experiences in London?
Finally, we need to be careful of fashion in another sense: the danger of fashionable policy concepts that become common currency but lack the specificity to make them susceptible to evidence.
We are grateful to NCUB for providing an online space where we can report on all the stages of our journey to describe our ecosystem, and to seek feedback.
We are already grateful for contributions of academic commentators, pulling us up on the dangers of policy fashion, and we would welcome more such.
We would also welcome stories from ecosystem builders in other places, including critique of our approach – and we have started to work on a comparison with New York. We recognise that there is not one approach, and we want to learn.
Andrew is Chair of the London Entrepreneurial University Ecosystem Group and Vice-President Research and Enterprise at City, University of London.
Alice Frost is the Director of Knowledge Exchange Policy at Research England, one of UK Research and Innovation’s (UKRI) nine councils.
She is responsible for knowledge exchange policy and funding at Research England, and a lead expert at UKRI on commercialisation. Her background is in national policy for research, universities, innovation and economic development. Over many years, Alice has advised countries across Europe and Asia on the UK model of a third stream of funding for knowledge exchange.