@T: ALWAYS THE TWAIN

Tonight BBC One will show the final of The Apprentice, the business reality show in which Sir Alan Sugar, the founder of Amstrad computers who’s estimated to be worth GBP700+ million, puts candidates through a series of business trials in order to select someone who will join his business empire. He’s one of the UK’s best known entrepreneurs and has more recently moved from computer manufacturing to property development and management.

I have to admit I haven’t been following this series, but I will be watching the final.

It’s proving to be a busy week for Sir Alan Sugar. On Friday he was proposed as the “Enterprise Tsar” in Gordon Brown’s Cabinet reshuffle which means he’s expected to be awarded a life peerage and a seat in the House of Lords, making him Lord Alan Sugar. According to some media channels, there may be potential conflicts of interest since it may not be possible for Sir Alan Sugar to spearhead a flagship program of the BBC’s — which is supposed to be politically independent of any government — and also be an appointed member of the government. This morning Sir Alan appeared on The Andrew Marr Show on the BBC and on Sunday Live with Adam Boulton on Sky News to say that his role will be an advisory one on how to promote enterprise in the UK and SME issues.

I like Sir Alan Sugar for his forthrightness and the fact he “calls a spade a spade”. What’s noticeable about successful people whether they’re the likes of Sir Alan, Simon Cowell or Oprah Winfrey is that they try to tell it as it is rather than with hyperbole. This type of personal honesty is probably why other people enjoy making the journeys with them to discover the next apprentice, the next big music talent and the next important social issue / book to read / lifestyle to develop, respectively.

On a more personal level, this appointment of Sir Alan Sugar is interesting because it made me think about entrepreneurialism and its many facets — particularly in relation to technology. Now it’s incontestable that the UK hasn’t fostered nor sparked tech ventures of the scale, depth and breadth of Silicon Valley, Bangalore or Z-Park (Zhongguancun Science Park in China). There are no homegrown eBays / Googles / Paypals / TouTubes / Facebooks / Twitters / Wipros / Infosys / Gurijis / QQs/ Alibabas / Baidus. Certainly government agencies like NESTA (National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts) and private venture capitalists like NewMediaSpark (who invested in lastminute.com) try to help techco’s at later stage investment, but there doesn’t seem to be as coherent or integrated an ecosystem of tech entrepreneurial support as American, Indian and Chinese experiences.

Hopefully, this is an area Sir (Lord) Alan Sugar will look into.

Now here’s something remarkable. There are some British-born entrepreneurs who have global profiles like Sir Richard Branson, Sir Martin Sorrell of WPP and Sir Philip Green of Arcadia (TopShop etc.), but notably none of them are from the technology sector. Interestingly, British technology brains seem to have migrated over to the US to develop their work and to contribute to the advancement of innovative technology. Think of Jonathan Ives who designed the iPod at Apple, Stephen Wolfram who’s attempting to disrupt search and knowledge representation models and offer an alternative to Google and also of the inventor of the Internet, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, who founded the W3C and is leading the way towards the Semantic Web at MIT rather than at Oxbridge or any other Russell 19 group institution (Russell 19 are the top 19 universities in the UK). Think also of Michael Moritz, the renowned venture capitalist and partner at Sequoia Capital (investors in Google, Skype, Yahoo!, Cisco, eToys, AdMob, LinkedIn, Joost, NVIDIA, Plaxo, imeem and more), is British and has opted for a career in Silicon Valley rather than in the UK. It really is a remarkable trend that seems to have escaped the radars of successive British governments, Business Secretaries and Enterprise Tsars.

Quite a lot of media commentary has been made about how the demise of manufacturing in the UK and the explosion in financial services caused by Thatcher’s 1980s Big Bang in the City of London has contributed to the UK being particularly vulnerable to the global banking meltdown. Some people insist that, “Oh if they hadn’t closed the shipyards and sold the car manufacturers to foreign investors, we would have been alright. The recession would never have happened,” etc.

This blog has commented previously on the concept of cause and effect.

Unfortunately, too often, governments and companies adopt fairly short-term responses when what’s needed is logical and proactive strategic vision and implementation. Governments decide they can no longer subsidize under-performing factories and try to privatize them without also giving due consideration to how they can cause and effect employment transfer from one failing industry into core emergent ones which have potential growth. They also seem not to grasp the importance of targeted risk diversification. In other words, don’t make your country over-reliant on one industry for its economic well-being.

Actually, if successive British governments had thought more clearly about building conducive environments for technology entrepreneurialism they would probably have weathered the vagaries of the lack of industrial manufacturing and the risks of banking proportionally better than they have done. Britain would now have the US$ billions global technology brands that it, unfortunately, doesn’t. These techcos would be able to act as economic buffers, employment alternatives and increasers in the tertiary and quaternary skills base of this-and-next generation and positioned the workforce for the future — instead of being nostalgic about an age of manufacturing which can’t return because of the superior wage economics of India and the Far East.

It’s fairly strange that twenty years after a British genius invented the Web there are no British US$billion Web companies and that Government hasn’t thought of policies to make this happen or how the tech sector could potentially contribute to the country’s economic diversification.

In any case, I’ll be crossing my fingers and waiting to see what policies and advisory frameworks Sir Alan Sugar and Lord Peter Mandelson of Foy (First Secretary of State, Business Secretary and responsible for the technology and innovation portfolio) will put into place to support and accelerate technology entrepreneurialism.