Amid the moans about
skills shortages,
and a general raging against the dying of the light in the UK IT
community, it is heartening to know that the heartbeat of
technology innovation is still strong.
Not since the dotcom boom has there been a better time to start
a technology business. The economy is on an even keel, people are
starting to buy IT equipment again, and the habit of
entrepreneurship is more embedded than it used to be, as
demonstrated by the popularity of TV programmes such as Dragons’
Den and The Apprentice.
There is a temptation in UK IT to look with envious eyes to the
innovation clusters of the US. But things here are not so bad. As
Cath Jennings reports, business angels, the UK venture capital
scene, the growth of the London Stock Exchange’s Alternative
Investment Market, and the National Endowment for Science,
Technology and the Arts, offer seeds of hope for budding technology
entrepreneurs.
Investment is marked in mobile and green technologies,
Web 2.0 and social networking sites, and information security.
But, as ever, technological inventiveness is not enough: sales
talent and managerial bandwidth are crucial. And market research to
determine the real business opportunity and an exit strategy are
vital.
Much of the lamentation around the state of IT the UK – led by
colleagues who learned to code in the 1980s, and who would rather
their offspring repudiated IT in favour of law or banking –
diminishes in volume as one tunes in to the creation of new
business value, in the form of start-ups and other new ventures.
Computer Weekly extends an invitation to innovators to get in
touch.
E-mail us at:
innovation@computerweekly.com