Becoming an Innovative Community

“It’s an ill wind that blows nobody any good,” as they say. Positive community reaction to the current set of disasters through flood and tempest in Cumbria and Fermanagh reminds us of the best of the human spirit. Neighbour begins to help neighbour. Church and community halls, normally locked up, are thrown open to take in the dispossessed. Families, pubs and hotels share their food to keep the elderly and the young from starving.

DETI Minister Arlene Foster, guided by Matrix (the NI Science-Industry advisory group), reminded us the other day that it’s the same for the economy. Communities working together are much stronger than a set of isolated individuals. Accordingly, she has already announced a set of measures already taken to create the environment for “Industry-led Innovation Communities” or IICs, in the jargon. Now I have to declare an interest, for I serve on Matrix and I’ve been asked to chair the sub-group of the advisory panel on IICs. As you may guess, it’s a task I relish.

If you need convincing of the power of the community over the individual, the next time you play a quiz-based game at home play the best individual against the rest as a team, or read “The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations” published in 2004, by James Surowiecki. Nine times out of 10 the group will win over the individual (unless of course they fall apart by bickering something extraneous to the goal). Therein lies the trick.

Those nations that have not had all the natural advantages that we possess (a temporate climate, decent land and no shortage of shelter) have developed finer honed skills in community management than we. It is often said that the powerful Japanese keiretsus evolved from the management style of villages – where a successful rice paddy depended on an irrigation system that no individual could possibly afford or manage.

As a result, the village evolved a system of community decision-making in which the agreement each day was to collaborate or to compete. The key was that none could do anything until unanimity was reached. Under this model, Japanese companies are notoriusly slow to decide – but fearsomely quick to implement. (Having said that, the Japanese style is not without its drawbacks and it is often said that it over-suppresses the maverick thinker and risk taker, who can produce the unexpected breakthrough.)

In the Northern Ireland ‘village’, we might enjoy the best of both worlds – Eastern collectivism and Anglo-Saxon risk-taking. We don’t necessarily have the large corporation with the single governance pyramid; rather we are a myriad of small and micro businesses. And consider the sum of our parts… key sections of planes, crucial elements of drugs and drug delivery systems, mining and quarrying technology, rapid transit vehicles, critical hardware and software for the world’s telecommunications systems and the software behind some of the most famous banks and payments systems; all are ‘Made in Ulster’!

With this basis on which to build effective Industry-led Innovation Communities (and providing we can ‘collaborate to compete’ and ‘compete to win’), we ought to have a great chance to achieve the goal of a prosperous peace.

SAP and Intel – life in the clouds

Intel is a lead innovator of the processor chips that power everything from computers to cars, from medical instruments to missiles and everything in between.

So far so good. But unfortunately for Intel, they left themselves a little exposed. A blindspot arose in the East where “simple” memory chips with a lot lower margin began to emerge. As this occurred, Intel continued to focus on “complicated” memory chips with higher margins. People nearly forgot you needed both and so, I guess, herein lies the general thrust behind the “Intel inside” campaign.

Intel’s involvement with its partners is so much more than just sticking a chip inside. I first came across their partnership way of working when my displays team from Malvern was asked to join a Ford/Jaguar team in producing a “Convergence Car”. (This was a concept car demonstrating the coming together of communications, computing and content).

The only partner Ford/Jaguar insisted on was Intel and they had a team of two working with the rest of the engineers “inside” the Convergence Car. The end result? Malvern (and Intel) was part of the winning team and they all got little gold model Jags to celebrate! Intel’s impressive inside technology left a strong impression on me and the Malvern team.

Now Intel’s inside again – this time they’re embedded with SAP’s research centre down at the Science Park. This truly is an exciting development for us and for Northern Ireland for lots of reasons. For example, consider how the software market has been opened up by the anti-trust actions of the past few years. The result is a new phase in software development. Take the release of Windows 7 – this represents the beginning of the battle which is being fought under banners like: ‘Cloud Computing’; ‘Utility Computing’; and ‘Network Computing’. I’m not expert enough to explain the detail (too ignorant, is probably nearer it) but essentially the days of the standalone device are over for all but the most unusual of applications.

So how does this affect us? Most of us own computers to communicate, to shop or to entertain ourselves. And much of what we want and need comes, seemingly free, from out of the ether or the ‘cloud’… this is SAP’s bleeding edge and Intel are on board. This is great news for the consumer and even better news for local technologists. SAP is a great collaborator generally – so we can look forward them sharing frontline viewpoints on all the topics and markets of the day, like connected health, smart grid and digital media.

But, of course, Microsoft isn’t going to take all this lying down and, what do you know, they’re here at the Science Park as well. Now, when behemoths battle, passive bystanders can get caught as collateral damage but agile active parties can profit. As shown in the NISP CONNECT £25k Awards, agile companies are out there. Ideas from our research centres are as good as any in the world. And these three companies – SAP; Intel; and Microsoft – are routes to market for bright ideas.

There are clear opportunities here. To realise them, all we need is energy, determination and money. Can we do it? Yes, we can!

Tyndall represents a new way of working…

Last week I had the pleasure to attend the opening of the £150M extension to the Tyndall National Institute, TNI, of University College Cork. Without doubt, this is the island of Ireland’s premier laboratory for micro- (and nano-) electronics and places ROI at the leading edge of these fields in Europe. Clearly the investment by the Irish Government’s various agencies for science funding, technology transfer and industrial support represents a huge expression of their confidence in the future of this particular element of the knowledge economy.

The Institute is named after another of Ireland’s important 19th Century scientists, although like so many he had had to make his way in the world elsewhere, in his case, in London following on from the great Michael Faraday at the Royal Institution. Tyndall’s work included understanding why the Sun is yellow and the sky is blue. Just in case you’re thinking “that doesn’t sound very important”, bear in mind that it led him to invent and understand light pipes, a Victorian fore-runner of the optical fibre on which we all depend today for communication. Tyndall was also the first to realise the possible impact of mankind’s emission of carbon dioxide on the earth’s climate and he is celebrated in England with a Meteorological Institute.

The TNI was born out of a vision by two eminent academics at the University, Liam Kelly and Gerry Wrixson, who established an electronics laboratory, known as the NMRC and modest by international standards, in an old malting house, on the periphery of the university. Wrixson went on to become President of the University. Vision and determination paid off, as witnessed by today’s environmentally friendly construction in glass and steel with its laboratories crammed full of the latest equipment for nanotechnology in semiconductors.

If you can sense a certain amount of envy and nostalgia in my writing, you’d not be wrong, for this was my own field and I met many old colleagues at the event but there’s more to it than that. I do admire the Irish decision to invest in this type of facility, just when others, and the UK in particular, are divesting of such expensive laboratories. In this regard, I think they might just, as once Japan and Korea did, have got it right, by timing the investment close to the point of monetisation of the technology.

To take advantage, TNI isn’t just a new building; it’s a new way of Academe working with Industry. TNI researchers work on the bleeding edge, on solving immediate problems for the burgeoning computer industry in Ireland (e.g. Intel, HP, BT and Seagate). The same groups also work to create intellectual property, which is taken to market through some five spin-out companies. Simultaneously, TNI keeps ROI in the thick of EU research programmes. Most important of all to us, it’s available in Northern Ireland via our colleges and universities, through TNI’s excellent national access programme.

I wish TNI every success and urge every business here to check out www.tyndall.ie to see if there’s something they can do for you.

Happy 40th Birthday to the Internet!

Yes it’s (just) 40 years since a researcher at Stanford University in California typed the word “l-o-g-i-n” very slowly into a computer in one place and started up a computer in another place and the internet was born. Mind you it needed a few other bits and pieces and they came from all over the world.

Stanford had invented the telecommunications router. Alexander Graham Bell and Elisha Gray had invented the telephone but it needed direct electrical connection between the two machines; so between the two was an army of operators, gaily and chattily pushing jack plugs into the huge plug board in front of them. Stanford had shown that the message could be attached to an address and that address could be made sufficient to direct the message to the right place by itself.

The British then added to the story by inventing “packet switching” or dividing the message into standard pieces which could be sent individually with their addresses only to be reassembled when they got to their destination. Meanwhile, the boys and girls at the International Particle Physics research centre in Geneva had invented a neat way of collaborating which became the World Wide Web. We too played our part in the evolution of the technology with the high speed switches from Nortel and Fujitsu. Add to the mix the ever more powerful and affordable computer hardware, particularly from Asia and software from almost anywhere and you have today’s basis for global communications, market places, entertainments and personal expression.

It is therefore especially appropriate that to mark the birthday, the internet’s governing body has decided to remove the restriction on internet addresses of only Latin script. The way is now clear for businesses all across the world to create names for themselves in locally comfortable ways and styles. The biggest beneficiaries are likely to be the Asian countries; so the eastward track of the world’s economic centre of gravity continues relentlessly.

Is this good or bad? As ever threat and opportunity come as conjoined twins and our trick must be of course to find the one while eroding the other. The only way to do that is to embrace the change. Already we have links East as well as West. India and China are becoming well represented across our entire business spectrum and their populations are desirous of and increasingly well able to pay for our best ideas and products. Project Kelvin which has come ashore at Portrush and illuminates next year adds another welcome telecommunications link with low latency. Let’s not forget it doesn’t just take us to North America and to European hubs, it’ll link to South America, Africa and Asia, as well.

A lesson from history. When our ship building dreams went down with Titanic and after we had mourned for the loss and recovered from the First World War, we picked ourselves up and built ships for Valpariso and beyond into the Far East. We’re doing it again albeit in the packets of telecommunications as opposed to packet ships!

WWW just keeps on getting bigger

This month two internet firsts occurred. Internet advertising outstripped that on TV and, probably as a direct consequence, many had to watch their favourite football team’s big match over the internet as opposed to on their big screen TV. I bet Tim Berners Lee never conceived that his brain child would have such world changing consequences and so quickly, when he submitted the basic concept together in 1989 to allow easy collaboration throughout the many scientists of the many nations which contributed to the huge project that is CERN, in Geneva.

[A quick plug, two of our local born scientists involved in today’s big project are coming back to Belfast on the 9th of December, to talk directly and over the web to inspire our school kids and others to get interested in science. The event will be held by us and the Association of Science Education in Northern Ireland and is sponsored by the Institute of Physics. Even if you miss it, the power of the net to time shift will allow you to pick it up by computer at your leisure]

CERN alone might never have been able to commercialise the internet, had it not been for DARPA, the US agency in the Department of Defence, which has the mission to ensure the US is never flat footed again, the way it was over the Soviet launch of Sputnik. DARPA saw the potential for NATO science and technology communication and spread the net throughout the western world. From there it spread quickly to universities and as researchers got used to its power and effectiveness, it moved quickly into the commercial world. As recently as 2001, when we were designing the communications system for the Science Park, some reports were still suggesting that Internet Protocol was a flash in the pan and that it would suffer the fate of the dot com.

Since then, the world experienced strong growth for most of the decade and then suffered a near economic death experience. Now we bump along the bottom, waiting for the up-turn and hoping that governments, including our own, who seem to have successfully averted disaster by mortgaging our futures, know when and how to remove the various stimulus measures.

Into the middle of all this, has been published the Independent Review of Economic Policy in Northern Ireland. I confess, I’ve not devoured this tome but it is evidently a comprehensive piece of work and focussed on our perennial problem of increasing productivity. The vast majority of its conclusions are unavoidable, if uncomfortable, and its recommendations are worthy of detailed consideration. Put bluntly, in profit making private industry, the salaries and wages of the workers are too low. Most importantly, knowledge workers don’t get their premium. Yet prices for goods and services are depressed by global competition.

So, whatever else is in the IREP, it’s easy to agree that our strategy for the future must be to focus on innovation led, high value work which can be sold at a sufficient premium, through the world wide web and otherwise, to the markets of the world, and all need to be engaged in the task. The hard part is that most of the rest of the world, even Rwanda, has the same strategy and if we don’t get it right, the knowledge workers can leave and simply use the World Wide Web to talk to their friends and relations back home!

All you need to do is ask…

For all economies (more so those in recession!), one of the keys to long-term growth lies within innovation and technological change. Innovators are the guys who will uncover the new products to sell, find greater efficiencies in the system, increase a firm’s productivity and exploit new markets more quickly.

NISP CONNECT’s £25k Awards, generously supported by the Bank of Ireland and Invest NI, are an attempt to identify those innovators and prepare them for the marketplace. And I’m happy to report that this year’s awards proved to be another great success!

Tactility Factory from the University of Ulster won the top prize with their designed for a product that improves the aesthetics and acoustics of concrete by integrating textiles into the material. Essentially, what this team had done was take a traditional, long-established local industry – textiles – and transform into a new and modern application with big potential for the global marketplace. Now that’s innovation!

As a result of concepts such as this, the award’s reputation is extending beyond these borders and this year over 20 venture capitalists 15 different funds came from across the British Isles and further afield to check out the talent.

We also managed to snare ex-SVP for Yahoo Europe, Toby Coppell, as guest speaker. Toby is relatively young man and originally from Northern Ireland – and we were very grateful for his time.

Toby spoke about the risks and opportunities of entrepreneurialism and of the sacrifices required to pursue one’s ambitions. It was an inspirational speech but it revealed something of the leap that innovators must make.

Toby knew he wanted to work and invest in internet companies (he was one of Google’s first customers when the global phenomenon was still just a small $15m-a-year company in Silicon Valley). For his first deal in the mid-90s, he borrowed $150k to invest in a company – that successful investment set him on a journey that would propel him to one of the top jobs in Yahoo.

It was clear from his life-story that Toby positively embraced risk as necessary to unlocking great opportunities. Failure was never the end of the story for him or the people he worked with. Yes, those lessons are well known, but Toby also offered a softer message – it was simply that when you’re up against it and you need support, just ask for it. When given the opportunity people will amaze with their generous and willingness to help others. This is also an old-fashioned lesson (which incidentally is just as applicable for the dining room as the boardroom) that amounts to: if you don’t ask, you don’t get.

One of the biggest successes of NISP CONNECT and the £25k Awards is in creating an esprit de corps and a community of people who want businesses to succeed. So I’ll make the same offer to News Letter readers that Toby Coppell made to the audience at the £25k Awards: if your start up isn’t progressing or if you need help taking your concept to market, all you need to do is ask… (you’ll find us at www.nisp.co.uk)

Connecting the segments…

Two separate and unrelated events are taking place which illustrate the growing importance and understanding of the sciences to society and culture as well as global economies.

First off, the government’s Science Minister went head-to-head with scientist and bad science writer Ben Goldacre at the Royal Institution in London. While the confrontation attracted considerable media interest, this was less a ‘rumble in the jungle’ and more of a ‘slight to-do in Bakerloo’.

In the government corner was Lord Drayson, who believes the media are doing a reasonably good job reporting science affairs. And in the other corner, Dr Goldacre who believes the media’s treatment of science stories is a cause for alarm. Essentially, they were discussing rubbish science reporting .

Irrespective of whether the debate was won or lost by Lord Drayson or Ben Goldacre, the outcome of this mock battle was settled before it had begun. That is, Drayson versus Goldacre had captured the media’s imagination and science issues had been raised to the top of the public agenda.

When the benefits and principles of science are accessible to a mass audience and popularly described in everyday language, the real winner is the science community in general.

And while this is the key to transforming how people think and approach the sciences, it’s not sufficient for scientists to communicate with each other. Nor is it sufficient for scientists to communicate with a mass audience. All the segments of the business economy must be in dialogue and interacting with one another. In this way, all the players will come to know each other and move on to trust one another. (Trust is particularly relevant in the current climate.)

Exactly one week after the Drayson / Goldacre event are the finalist presentations for NISP CONNECT’s £25k Awards ‘the search for the next big thing’. This competition is all about tooling up Northern Ireland’s young innovators for the marketplace and creating a much-needed pipeline of new start ups.

The critical thing about NISP CONNECT is that it brings all the segments together – bankers, entrepreneurs, politicians, venture capitalists, lawyers, accountants, marketers, technologists – and puts them in the same room. Connecting people, technology and capital drives innovation and creates wealth, and it how we drive forward this communication which shapes the commercial potential of innovation.

Lord Drayson and Ben Goldacre have made an important contribution and their debate serves to highlight how to raise public awareness. But events such as this week’s NISP CONNECT £25K Awards show how to exploit the science – and how to transform a science story into a business story (something everyone agrees media do very well). I trust the finalists of this year’s £25k Awards will soon be able to produce a good business story of their own. When people, technology and capital connect together something exciting follows.

Science in society…

September is the month of the British Science Festival. Formerly this was known as the Annual Meeting of the British Association of Young Scientists, I was lucky enough to be given the opportunity to attend (some considerable time ago) by the then New University of Ulster. I remember much of the excitement even now. This year the Festival is hosted by the University of Surrey in Guilford and you can see for yourself what goes on at http://www.britishscienceassociation.org/web/index.htm

The target audience today for the British Science Festival is the family group as the role of parents in shaping the interests of their children is well recognised. So the emphasis is very much on fun and frivolity with the science kept accurate, though somewhat below the surface. Topics include funny stories and songs about science and why women wear red lipstick. You can also find out why journalists love stupid equations, why our financial systems collapsed and about the science of cooking.

Sometimes I wonder if we aren’t straying too far this way. It’s too easy for reporters to focus more on the characters than the content. Do Adam Hart Davis and his court-jester coloured clothes and bikes make better TV than the sombre suited ex-Spitfire pilot, Raymond Baxter, of my youth? I leave the answer to students of the New Media courses.

Actually there never was any shortage of characters in science. Some of the greatest characters in 20th century physics, Einstein and Feynman, had huge personalities and colourful lives to match any media mogul or film star. Even in a more modest way, I remember my year’s intake of physics research students at Cambridge included: professional quality musicians of all genres; a tight-rope walker; a full member of the Magic Circle; an African Prince; and an Israeli Tank Commander. Surely one day soon, we can dispel the myth altogether of scientists being some breed apart but that rather that they include the full range of human character types, good and bad, interesting and boring, that can be found in any profession.

The fact of the overwhelming importance of science is something else. If you still need proof, just look at the stories emerging behind the successful prosecutions this month of the so-called ‘Lucozade Bombers’. They used science to invent a new form of home-made bomb that could have made Lockerbie look insignificant. On the other hand, just imagine the science and technology that went, not only into the detection and surveillance that led to the group’s capture and conviction, but also into the invention and rapid deployment of a world-wide system of airport passenger screening that would detect the new explosives. Irritating or not, you can’t deny the effectiveness.

So I would urge you to enjoy the funny stories and colourful characters that present science to society today but also to look deeper and consider the importance of what lies beneath. Ultimately the aim must be for Society as a whole to gain an understanding and appreciation of the world’s science and of the scientists who do it.

IEEE SOC Conference comes to Belfast

If you’re in the neighbourhood of Queen’s and the Wellington Park Hotel this week, you’re liable to rub shoulders with someone who’s planning the future of your work and home life, or at least of the technology you’re likely to be using in both. Chip designers from all over the world are here to debate the methods and applications that will be in tomorrow’s TVs, mobile phones, washing machines, maybe even in people themselves!

Northern California has become synonymous with the “silicon chip” but that’s not where it was invented. The first integrated circuit was actually made in Worcestershire, in England, in my old establishment. Geoffrey Dummer published his work in 1957, a year before the Intel and Fairchild patents, and showed the future very clearly; metal tracks, resistors, capacitors and inductors were all there as he demonstrated integrated multi-transistor circuits that could be made by the thousands. Unfortunately, his work was not supported further.

Meanwhile, the inventor of the transistor (William Shockley) hadn’t fared much better at Bell Labs in New Jersey. There had been little pick up of the idea and little royalty return. I don’t know if they even noticed one licence application from Japan from an unheard-of company, that had been trying to make a technology living inside the restrictions of post war Japan with such products as a motorised wash board device and paper based magnetic tape that kept breaking. We know that company today as Sony! Anyway, Shockley upped sticks and moved to California, where his ideas took root and the rest, as they say, is history.

Originally, silicon chips were serried ranks of uniformity and flawless manufacturing was the differentiator but since the 1980s, that began to change and in addition to the “standard” chip, the market began to swing to the specialist Application Specific device (ASIC). Between 1985 and 1995, I think, the ASIC market grew by a factor of 100 and changed from 99% aerospace and defence, to 99% consumer driven! ASIC business differentiators include design and most importantly of all, verification of the design; you don’t want one of your chips to have conditions you don’t understand under all circumstances. Capital costs of manufacture are amortised over many designers and so brains alone can get you to the table.

For more than twenty years, this conference, organised under the auspices of the Institution of Electronic and Electrical Engineers, has been providing the premier forum for this community for sharing the latest advances in technologies and applications in that area. That, for only the second time being held outside the USA, the conference has come to Belfast is marvellous testament to the quality of work done in QUB’s Institute for Electronics, Communications and IT, which we are delighted chose to be on the Science Park some five years ago. In their ranks, you can rest assured that there are ASIC designers (and other skills) the equal of any in Silicon Valley and believe me the complexity today would make Dummer’s eyes water; he had a few transistors on his chip, these days it’s now 2 Billion! If your business needs an ASIC and no-one else can help, don’t worry, the A-team’s in Belfast already.

More business from 400 years of modern astronomy

Previously I showed the synergy between Galileo’s telescope and the business and trading of the day. Perhaps this wasn’t too surprising a link, after all trade, ships and navigation are pretty clearly linked. This week’s might be less obvious.

The revolution in which Galileo was engaged was sweeping through the whole of Europe, funded by governments and benefactors in many regions. The resulting studies of the planets began to reveal that not only were their motions sun-centred, they were not spherical.

Since ancient times, mystical significance had been attributed to the sphere and all the regular solid shapes that fit neatly inside it, and the new measurements caused much consternation (literally). Johannes Kepler saved the day. He recognised that the orbits were ellipses, which he could relate to the mathematics of spheres, and so the natural order was restored. Kepler’s work paved the way for Isaac Newton to add his inspired theory of universal gravity and set the world on today’s scientific course.

The insight required for this leap of interpretation has always astounded me; even with today’s calculators and computers, it wouldn’t be easy to interpret scrappy lists of numbers produced by many, many, sleepless nights of observation. So how was it that this one scholar of Euclid came to recognise that the patterns of numbers produced by the observers belonged to the ellipse? The surprising answer lies just as much in wine barrels and tax as it did in his religious and aesthetic sensibilities.

In those days, wine producers each made distinctive casks. The volume of wine in the casks was measured by dipping rod but there was not even a standard for the location of the whole. It was Kepler, presumably on a commission from the King of Bohemia, who recognised that the one common feature of wine barrels was that they were solids of rotation (a volume described by rotating a curve about a single axis). Cutting short a long story (in fact one of Kepler’s major works “nova stereometria doliorum vinariorum [new stereometry of wine barrels, 1615]”), he showed what they needed to do to offer accurate pricing and tax collection. And so it was that the work of the greatest mind of natural philosophy and mathematics was just as valuable to the mundane work-a-day problems of trade and tax.

I think this could happen because the courts of those like the King of Bohemia were great mixing grounds and meeting places. Those fortunate to get in, included all walks of life that in ordinary circumstance would never meet. Stove-piped and siloed organisations and societies lack creativity and innovation. Any inventive sparks are snuffed out by the silos just as fire-breaks prevent the spread of forest fires.

Our society is siloed for accountability and efficiency but we need to remember that to get innovation, we must work just as hard to make the barriers as permeable as possible.