Cambridge Consultants Blog
Rebalancing the Economy: Accelerating start up companies
By Alan Richardson - Last updated: Wednesday, May 12, 2010It has been a common theme of the General Election that Britain needs to rebalance its economy and reduce its dependence on financial services. All the politicians hope that the new economy can deliver jobs and prosperity in new industries. So how can you accelerate start up companies? I’ll illustrate with a few examples in our experience, which are examples of open innovation in action, but one key aspect is to use partnering to accelerate aspects of the business so that you use valuable investment in the way that grows the company fastest:
- If you business offers an innovative service then partnering to realsie the enabling technolgoy can save a lot of time and money. Show Translations http://showtranslations.com/ has launched AirScript™, the world’s first closed caption system for theatre productions. They partnered with Cambridge Consultants avoiding the time and cost of growing their own R&D and achieving fast time to market (http://www.cambridgeconsultants.com/news_pr256.html)
- Very often core technology can be obtained from outside organisations including universities and independent research organisations. The Hauser report has suggested govenrment sponsorship of Technology and Innovation service centres to enhance this. Ember www.ember.com converted itself into a fabless silicon company by licensing an 802.15.4 PHY and acquiring a team to bring its single chip ZigBee solution to market fast http://www.cambridgeconsultants.com/news_pr111.html
- CSR www.csr.com formed from a core development team who had unique experience in single chip CMOS design and grew its own development team fast. But it also partnered with Cambridge Consultants by licensing processor IP, software stacks and using Cambridge Consultants as a development partner to build its development kit. The acceleration gained enabled subsequent investment to be secured at a lower price because of the extreme acceleration in time to revenue.
