You don’t need to squint to see the impact of technology on Teesside.
Wander down into the walkway under Middlesbrough station, and you run into Kevin Moussa-Mann, grinning from a poster on the wall. Kevin built an “iTunes for Comics” in Middlesbrough, took it to a prestigious accelerator in Colorado, and later returned home to develop a new idea. Kevin says Teesside is a “fantastic place” to develop a business.
Twist your neck the right way when you pop out, and you can see Boho One, the £10m flagship building that emerged in 2009. It’s seen five summers, and has played host to a range of ambitious businesses.
Since then, Middlesbrough has introduced live/work spaces for entrepreneurs, new office spaces, and even artist studios. The town’s historic National Provincial Bank has found a new lease of life as the privately-owned Boho Four building, while a 1960s office block in the centre has become Boho Six. Cash has just been secured for Boho Five, which will create a home for 50 startups on vacant land in Middlehaven. The Boho Zone is growing.
This matters to Teesside. A recent report by Growth Intelligence and the National Institute of Economic and Social Research observed that there were “high concentrations of digital economy activity” in the town. The area’s Local Enterprise Partnership – Tees Valley Unlimited – has identified digital as one of its “key sectors”, alongside advanced engineering and manufacturing, renewables and chemicals.
Many people have helped build what we see so far. One of these builders is DigitalCity Business, the organisation charged with developing Teesside as a viable home for digital firms.
Last month, DCB’s CEO Mark Elliott (pictured left) wrote a column in the Evening Gazette, marking the tenth anniversary of the DigitalCity project. He mused that this was merely the “halfway mark” in the plan to deliver a “supercluster” for digital in the area.
At that point, he had a pretty good idea that the next phase would happen without him.
Mark informed the DigitalCity board that month that he would be leaving. He wrote an email to select friends and colleagues saying that he needed “new challenges” and that it was “time to move on”. While he doesn’t know exactly when he’ll be clocking off for the last time (it could be nine months, or as little as three), he’s shooting for a smooth transition to the next incumbent.
“If we get it right, everyone in and around DigitalCity will have forgotten I’ve left, before I’ve left”, he says.
Mark has spent more than a decade as the figurehead of DigitalCity Business, an organisation charged with helping Teesside’s digital business community to develop. Before that, he’d worked 15 years as a commercial and corporate film-maker, spending a lot of time in London’s Soho district. The area provided some early inspiration into how a cluster might work.
“The first thing we did was get the networking going. 10 years ago, it seemed like there was none at all here. People were too scared to talk to their competitors.
“I once dragged someone down to Soho and said: ‘Look, they’re all in pubs talking to each other’. That’s important. You can spend 20 years in Soho next to people and not compete with them once.
“Your competition isn’t in the next room. It’s in Silicon Valley and Singapore. The phrase that there’s no room at the top is complete bollocks. There’s plenty of room if you’re good enough.
“One of the things I’m most proud of is how much informal support companies give to each other. That’s a really important aspect of a cluster. It’s incredibly important that people can trade support and advice, and that happens on an hourly basis in Boho One. It’s about getting rid of that silliness.”
Boho One alone already houses 200 employees, and is worth £8.4m a year to the local economy. It’s also witnessed the growth of businesses such as games studio Double Eleven and mobile app development company Thap, which are part of a community of digital and creative professionals with global clients.
“If you walk around Boho One now, the majority of companies will say they trade internationally. One company turned up and said they did most of their work with clients in San Francisco, as they had a reputation for being better, quicker, faster and smarter than the competition. That’s a lot of progress in ten years.
“I have no doubt that businesses in the North East can compete on a world level. We’ve got the talent and the resources and the ability to do that sort of thing. But they need access to finance, networks and markets, and that’s the sort of are where organisations like DigitalCity come in.”
The growth of that community hasn’t just come from DigitalCity Business. For example, Refresh Teesside has grown into a popular meet-up for creatives thanks to the efforts of Thap’s own James Mills. Mark stresses it is important to have a variety of people pulling in the right direction.
“Any good ecosystem will have lots of drivers. The whole point is that the elements interact, and there’s no command and control. However, you do need spines, and DigitalCity can provide that sort of focus.
“It’s about being deliberately messy, and producing something that’s capable of working in the real world. When (North East regional development agency) One North East was running, there were times when people sat around tables talking about various things, and something got lost along the way. We’ve always concentrated on getting things done, and that’s been really important. Of course, sometimes that means figuring things out on the fly.”
Mark is confident about the immediate security of the DigitalCity project. It receives financial backing from Middlesbrough Council and the European Regional Development Fund, and he believes there is scope to maintain funding until at least 2020.
“I’d say the project can look forward with some confidence to at least another six or seven years of funding.
“There’s a lot of goodwill towards it in Brussels, and it’s in a good place. There’s a good team in place at the University and DigitalCity Business. I look at half the people in Boho now and they’re half my age. I’m always reminded of that phrase: ‘If they’re talented enough, they’re old enough’ and there are some extremely talented 20-somethings here.”
That’s not to say he hasn’t got some concerns about the current direction of regional politics. DigitalCity has received a lot of support from Tees Valley Unlimited, the Local Enterprise Partnership set up out of the ashes of One North East. But the formation of the North East LEP a year later means there are now two different LEPs in the North East, and Mark worries that this may affect how the broader region works together.
“If One North East did anything, it got people to think about the area as one thing, and our funders didn’t mind us moving around.
“We were applying about 40% of our resources outside the Tees Valley in those days, and I actually think it’s a bit sad that lines are being re-drawn a bit tighter across the North East.
“Big cities keep getting richer because the number of people with ideas is greater. We’ve got around 2.5m people in the region, spread out over a large geographical area. If the North East is really going to compete as a region attracting interest from elsewhere, it’s too bloody small to break itself down any further.
“We need to make sure we’re drawing in as many people as possible and any partisan lines are immediately taken down. Not naming names, but there’s a networking event going on in the North East in the next few weeks which is absolutely only for people in that area, and that’s sad.”
Recently, Teesside established its own accelerator called Searchcamp, backed by Teesside University and private partners. It will hold its London demo day this week, and Mark says the University deserves credit for investing. While he wouldn’t go into detail, he added that a second seed fund might turn up on Teesside by the end of the year.
Searchcamp’s teams have recently moved into incubator space in Boho Four
“Universities haven’t been historically known for their engagement with businesses, but Teesside University is putting its money where its mouth is here. I’d say it’s one of the better universities for business engagement, and Searchcamp could be a good avenue for them to find out even more about it.”
This isn’t Middlesbrough’s first accelerator. Three years ago, Middlesbrough and Sunderland Councils got together with One North East to back an idea from investment manager Jon Bradford, who would go on to manage the prestigious TechStars London programme. The Difference Engine was the first UK project of its kind outside of London, and helped develop companies such as Screach, CANDDi and Recite.
“I met up with Jon, who had a great idea but needed help to put it through the mechanics of One North East. It was a bold experiment, and One North East took an intelligent risk in backing the project.
“Of course, tech accelerators are only part of the game. You’ve got to have a whole range in a cluster. You’ve got high growth potential companies, organic growth companies, and niche and freelance firms. I get really excited when I meet a freelancer who suddenly comes up with a great idea which could be huge. It’s a phase transition.
“The key is to have many different types. If I was staying, I’d be pushing to get more and more involved with colleges. There’s no reason that 16 year olds can’t come up with brilliant ideas for businesses.”
So – after 10 years of building – how would he market Teesside’s digital cluster to businesses?
“It’s a place you can go from pre-start right through to international markets under one roof, at your own speed, and with the best possible support system. That’s not a claim many places can make, and that’s how you’ve got to sell it.
“You can’t sell it on cheapness of labour – even though it is cheaper to work out of the North East – because obviously you’d like your people to earn as much as anyone. And we don’t necessarily tell people to come and put the whole of their company here. It might make sense for some companies to have their business development team somewhere like London or Silicon Valley, but for a tech HQ this is a pretty cool place.”
Mark hasn’t fully decided yet what his next move will be. He’ll be moving somewhere near Edinburgh though, as his wife Janet Archer was appointed CEO of Creative Scotland earlier in the summer.
“I don’t think I want to do the same role as DigitalCity again, but I think it’s almost inevitable I’ll want to help people. That might just involve me being that guy in the pub, dispensing advice.
“One thing I really want to do is go back to my creative work, some of which had to be put on hold to do DigitalCity. I’ve got a 360 project which is quietly building steam, but we’ll see.
“A few years ago, no one was talking about the relationship between technology and content. It’s been interesting to talk to people who’ve stayed in the film industry about trends in computer games and the importance of big data. They look at me like I’m from another planet.
“The point is that we create new technologies and then find out how to use them. I used to show people a picture of the Iron Bridge in Shropshire. It’s the world’s first iron bridge, but it’s also the world’s last wooden bridge. The iron masters of the time wanted to demonstrate to the world that they could do something like this, but built it like a wooden bridge because they didn’t know how to use iron yet. We’ve got this fantastic new technology infiltrating all parts of our life, and we’re in that period where we’re discovering how to use it better.
“I’ve really benefitted from talking with brilliant minds, and the exciting thing is I don’t know how it’s all going to play out. It’ll be interesting to be part of that conversation, and see all the disasters along the way. Because failures aren’t failures. They’re experiments in what’s possible.”
As Mark prepares to depart for this new experiment, is there one thing he’s particularly proud of?
“I suppose you can talk about creating a vibrant digital hub, but when I think about it, it’s probably the fact we helped people. If I’d have died 10 years ago, some people might have said that I made some decent commercials and created a certain amount of wealth for people. If I die tomorrow, hopefully people might say I helped with something important and helped build aspiration for one or two others.
“We’ve helped some people to create businesses they never thought they’d create. That’s a powerful drug.
“A lot of fantastic people have done a lot of fantastic things over the last ten years. If I had one piece of advice for the person who’ll come after me, it’d be this: ‘Keep going, and doing it your way’.”
Headline image taken by John Lord, used under Creative Commons