A Gentle Persuasion to Collaborate - Organizing and Building the Cambridge Network

A Gentle Persuasion to Collaborate ” Organizing and Building the Cambridge Network

The Cambridge Network is a limited liability company that was jointly founded early in 1998 by 3i, Amadeus, Analysys, Arthur Andersen, N.W. Brown, and the University of Cambridge. All of them are shareholders and each takes a seat on the company's board. Professor Sir Alec Broers is its chairman. In March 2001, Dr. Peter Hewkin was appointed the Cambridge Network's CEO.

The network's focus is to encourage the exploitation of ideas and the birth of new ventures . Among others, it was the driving factor in the establishment of the University of Cambridge Entrepreneurship Centre, and has actively promoted the "Technologies of Tomorrow" campaign, which is designed to promote technology teaching at an early stage in the educational system.

The most important tool enabling the Cambridge Network to carry out this mission is its Web site at www.cambridgenetwork.co.uk, which gives general listings as well as detailed information about the activities of its members (company profile, products and services, news, job vacancies). In addition to this publicly available information, network members have access to special intranet pages, where they can exchange business advice on technology transfer. Network members are also encouraged to make suggestions to the management board in order to improve the effectiveness of the network. Via the Cambridge University Research Division, which acts as a transfer body within the Cambridge Network seeking to connect university research with outside businesses, a database covering collaborative research programs with industry and consultancies, the licensing of intellectual property, and the ongoing formation of start-up companies is provided.

Dr. David Cleevely, the managing director and founder of the consultancy Analysys, ^[10] is a leading authority on the digital economy who has worked with governments at a national and supranational level to create policy frameworks encouraging innovation and growth. He has advised the U.K. government on its "[e-mail]" report, and, most recently, contributed to government thinking on convergence and the Internet. Dr. Cleevely was also a key figure behind the development of the Cambridge Network. His explanation of the beginnings of the Network once again portray the Cambridge culture: The initial motivation for the local hero entrepreneurs who conceived and initially set up the network, was to give something back to their community by building a platform for business based on open standards.

David Cleevely

The evolution of the Cambridge Network

It is said that the Cambridge Network is the most important thing that has happened in order to enable technological cooperation in the region. In 1997, there was a Cambridge University Local Links dinner, which Alec Broers, Herman Hauser, and I happened to attend . We started to talk about the fact that Cambridge wasn't marketing itself, after having spoken to some Malaysians who were packaging what their region had to sell and were making it sound really good. Herman Hauser at the time was already keen to invite some analysts from the U.S. to write about and publicize what was happening in Cambridge, so I decided to launch "Cambridge 2020: Meeting the Challenge of Growth."

In other regions across Europe, Munich for instance, the government would have done all of this by throwing lots of money at a marketing campaign or something similar. In Cambridge, on the other hand, it was being done because people sat around a table wanting to change something. Herman has a big sense of civic entrepreneurship about him. Later on during that same year, he called a meeting with about 30 people and the idea of marketing Cambridge came up again, this time within the context of a Web site. Herman came up with a logo and the idea of the Cambridge Network started developing. There were six founders, and all of us put in approximately $30,000 as a guarantee. When the local government asked us what they could do, we sent them away because we had already seen what they could do.

The support we have gotten from local industry has been phenomenal. Today, we can pull in more than 300 people into a Cambridge Network meeting. The Web site is the icon of the organization. It takes information from the members, and shares it with the members. The Cambridge Network itself hardly produces any of the information shown on the Web site and none of the information is commissioned. The whole thing is bound together by a structure that enables the sharing of the information in the network.

The six founders have put a lot of time and effort into the project, which has already started to help the Cambridge high-tech environment. For example, a small company recently wanted some money to hold a number of workshops, so the Cambridge Network gave them approximately $3,000, with no strings attached. For the same reason that the Internet is successful, we try to offer our members as many services as possible without charging for them, because the bigger the network is, the more use it is to everybody. Strategically, if you are confident that your network works, and you have hundreds of members, you can help anybody with anything they may need, because they will find that they prefer a sort of cooperation over an inflexible , strictly fee-driven model.

Adding new dimensions of entrepreneurship to Cambridge's existing innovation culture has necessitated an environment built around personal initiative and trust as opposed to third-party direction and bureaucracy. Structures that enable collaboration while respecting the individualistic character of Cambridge's scientists have been built. Once again, strong personal leadership, role models, and international success stories have proven fundamental to the successful development of entrepreneurship throughout the region.

Whereas the Bavarian government plays an important role supporting entrepreneurship in Munich, the Cambridge environment rejects government intervention almost entirely. Next we explore why Cambridge entrepreneurs are so skeptical of government aid, and which role they believe the government should play.