Creating an Entrepreneurship Culture

The Cambridge entrepreneurship culture is centered around the university and its long tradition of scientific innovations and international thought leadership. Until recently however, collaboration between the business and academic worlds was lacking, leaving many innovations' commercial potential underexploited. We will describe some of the key drivers that have enabled academic achievement to link with the business world to create new regional wealth for Cambridge and the surrounding county of Cambridgeshire.

Building an Entrepreneurial Environment Around a Traditional Breeding Ground for Innovation

During its 800-year history, the University of Cambridge has become a worldwide leader at the creation of intellectual capital ” from Isaac Newton to Stephen Hawking, it has earned an unrivaled reputation for scientific achievement. The sheer quantity of scientific inventions originating from Cambridge is breathtaking, indicating the university's role as a global breeding ground for innovation.

The university's enormous intellectual potential has increasingly attracted businesses to the Cambridge region. These businesses have a natural interest in the creation of an entrepreneurial, market-focused application of what is "inside the university's heads." Peter Hiscocks of the University of Cambridge Entrepreneurship Centre comments that "most businesses today rely on the university for their intellectual capital, by collaborating with its departments for the recruitment of employees ." Leading the pack at successfully creating an entrepreneurial environment that fits the Cambridge mindset, were the technology consultancies that increasingly began to settle here. Cambridge is a very intellectual environment. Many students eventually feel so at home that they take on positions within the university after graduation, often spending their entire lives in Cambridge, enjoying the quality of life and being surrounded by similarly gifted and intellectually driven individuals. The consultancies offered Cambridge graduates just that, plus a market orientation that promised interesting financial perspectives. They created an intellectually stimulating environment, within the direct vicinity of the preferred Cambridge environment, where Cambridge graduates would be surrounded by "their kind" and would be enriched by working together with top graduates recruited from other leading universities in the world.

Lindy Beveridge has been working together with the university in order to promote the entrepreneurship environment in the region. As author of The Cambridge Entrepreneurs ” In the Business of Technology , she emphasizes the importance of the historical element to intellectual capital in Cambridge and the consequences this has had for the development of consultancy practices in the area.

Lindy Beveridge

Innovation through criticism in the pure sense of the word

An important source of innovation in Cambridge is the study of science itself. This goes back to the 17th century and the local Puritan culture: the belief that one had to save one's soul by a long and arduous process, in which one was willing to be criticized by one's peers while living a sober, austere, and humble life. This is a quintessential part of the Cambridge culture that has never been lost. It gives people the right to ask any question at fundamental levels.

As opposed to certain cultures in other places, innovation in Cambridge is not an accident ” it is part of the culture and the system, supporting and producing innovation at an intellectual level. It identifies interesting ideas, picks them up, and develops them. I believe that there are very few universities in the world that cultivate this kind of innovation, while I do not mean to imply that other universities cannot be successful at generating successful high-tech business. In general, universities aiming to create such a culture should try and establish centers of excellence in a relatively limited number of fields. Excellence is what I consider the whole global market in technology to be all about, it has to be there ” this has to be the objective.

One of the first consultancies here was Cambridge Consultants, which mirrored this culture. Its founders had been students at the University of Cambridge and were happy to examine any new concept, to "throw it around and kick it to bits." This kind of criticism is a very crucial process for successful innovation. Once an idea has been tempered by this procedure, it has earned a kind of permission to look for the additional financial support needed for its realization. These procedures certainly happened at Cambridge Consultants, which is considered to be the grandfather of all consultancies in Cambridge.

In the meantime, the Cambridge technology consultancies have launched a large number of companies. Their special ability to nurture concepts from ideas to becoming independent businesses is based on a mindset that originates from the university and is referred to as the "research- group mindset." It describes groups of colleagues that roll out projects together ” like-minded people who understand the environment and who actually want get together and work, relying on thorough support from their parent organization.

The research-group mindset furthermore implies a trust environment relating directly to individuals, without any intervening bureaucratic or hierarchical management structures. The way to accomplish one's goals in Cambridge is to become accepted within this trust environment. It is a question of becoming known and being referred by people. Personal network systems are the vehicle for this, not institutional or bureaucratic ones.

Cambridge Consultants were the first company willing to invest in a Cambridge start-up, which is considered to have been a key moment for the development of the of funding of early-stage companies in the region.

As Cambridge graduates increasingly began setting up successful high-tech businesses in and around the city, the university's administration began to consider establishing links to the business world to enable a more efficient transfer of academic innovations.