Getting inventive
My partner has got into jeggings. It may sound like a Boy’s Own hero from the comics of our youth, but it is in fact a sort of cross between leggings and jeans with an elasticated waist and no pockets. Someone, somewhere came up with this idea and presumably a lot of money has been made from a fairly simple concept. (And if you’re reading darling, they look very nice.)
I’ve been working on our 42-under-42 feature this month – our annual profiling of young entrepreneurs in the region – and so I’ve had many “why didn’t I think of that?” moments. Often, the brainwave is to set up a company doing something other people are doing already but trying to do it better, but in some cases, there is a real spark of invention and – as Dragons’ Den proves – this is an area of business that really captures the public imagination.
The larger economic point of course is that ideas – in areas such as medical or biotechnologies, digital, IT and high-end manufacturing – offer the tantalising prospect of creating another Dyson or Google. A number of our cities and universities – Walsall with its gigaport, Birmingham with its digital sector, Nottingham with BioCity and Coventry University with its Serious Games Institute feeding the companies working in that sector in nearby Leamington Spa – are actively targeting businesses with the potential to become world beaters.
Of course, the problem with this stuff is that there are no guarantees. I always think of our 42-under-42 feature as being like a youth football team. For every future Wayne Rooney, there are maybe ten who fail to make the first team. All business support bodies, universities and city and regional support agencies can do is to create the conditions to help these fledgling businesses survive and hopefully thrive. It is a type of hothousing, if you like.
I think that here in the Midlands – as some of the above examples suggest – we have gone a long way down this road, as well as down the parallel track whereby established companies in difficult sectors – perhaps in a supply chain – are encouraged to think laterally. It might be a firm in the automotive sector adapting to work in areas such as aerospace, medical technologies, green technologies or the nuclear sector, for example.
I meet companies all the time who have had a tough recession but have made brave decisions and have re-shaped their business to, hopefully, put themselves in a better position to face the future. Birmingham manufacturer Metalrax is one example, but the manufacturing feature in April’s Midlands Business Insider highlights a number of others.
What we have got to hope now is that the hard work that has been done by companies and support agencies over the past 24 months will stand the regional economy in good stead for the recovery. I sense a degree of confidence out there that the climate for business is getting less frosty, but things will undoubtedly remain tight for the rest of this year – a bit like jeggings in fact.
Comments? Andy Coyne, editor, Midlands Business Insider
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