Cambridge University's brains the power behind 46,000 jobs

By PAM GRAHAM

Those in the vanguard of the knowledge economy in New Zealand had a chance this week to hear how one of the oldest and greatest science universities in the world has been turning academics into business people.

Peter Hiscocks, a director of the University of Cambridge Entrepreneurship Centre was on a visit funded by Industry New Zealand to talk about "spin-outs from academia" in Cambridge, England.

The idea appears to have worked, because there are now 1550 high-tech businesses, employing about 46,000 people, in the area surrounding the university town.

The main building block for this was quality research. New Zealander Sir Ernest Rutherford helped split the atom in Cambridge, Frank Wittle did work on jet engines and Crick and Watson discovered the structure of DNA. Graduates of the university's colleges have been awarded a total of 72 Nobel prizes, more than any other university in the world.

Science parks providing for businesses to tap into the town's intellectual resources began appearing from the 1970s and the process gained momentum in 1996 when Sir Alec Broers became vice-chancellor of the University of Cambridge.

The Australian had studied electrical engineering at colleges in Cambridge before working for IBM for 20 years.

He decided to engage the university in the process of spawning new business ventures.

"We have learned about how to make that happen," said Hiscocks.

"There were no silver bullets, rather a series of events that were linked together into a 'golden chain'."

Among them were leadership, building an entrepreneurial culture, providing training on how to set up businesses and early stage funding.

"You need to have leadership within the university and a local community that believes in the culture of entrepreneurship."

The town's local newspaper helped with the latter requirement.

The basic concept was that scientists who had been working on a particular idea could start a company to develop it. They did not have to become chief executives but they could get involved in the commercialisation of their work.

"We don't want to turn every scientist into a businessman and we don't want to turn the University of Cambridge into a contract research lab, but we want people who are doing great research to be thinking at the same time 'could this be a business idea?"'

Hiscocks said there had been failures in Cambridge and he listed six in his presentation.

But the point was that people could learn from the mistakes and had to celebrate the successes.

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