IC Tomorrow Wants To Remove Barriers For UK Startups

For many startups, coming up with the initial idea for a technological innovation is the easy part – it’s getting to market that’s difficult. Numerous barriers stand in the way, obstacles the government’s Technology Strategy Board (TSB) want to remove.

The TSB’s IC tomorrow programme provides networking events, workshops and funded contests to help startups get their idea off the ground and establish valuable commercial relationships.

“It’s about getting the right people in the right room together,” the TSB’s Mitra Memarzia told TechWeekEurope. “We facilitate that.”

Innovation Contests

The funded contests are the most obvious form of assistance and are held every few months, with recent competitions focusing on industries like sport, fashion and advertising. Each contest comprises five challenges set by industry organisations or companies and aim to encourage solutions for industry problems.

These challenges are specific but it is hoped that the technology used to solve them can be applied generically and used in multiple situations. Applicants are whittled down to three finalists in each category and invited to pitch their idea in front of a judging panel comprising representatives from the challenge partner, the TSB, the media and the technology industry.

The winners receive up to £25,000 in funding and the opportunity to work with the challenge partner to produce a trial that will test the technology in a real environment.

Final round

TechWeek was invited to sit on the judging panel for one of the five challenges that made up the most recent contest, which invited companies to come up with solutions for real-life data problems.

The first challenge was set by the Ingram Content Group and proposed solutions for the more efficient processing of data. It was won by Release Consulting’s ‘SystemSync’, an extract, transform and load (ETL) tool that lets users build on top of public cloud storage services like Dropbox, Box and Google Drive.

EE was the challenge partner for the second category and tasked firms to come up with a way of commercialising mobile data. Indestinate’s ‘Now Arriving’ application emerged victorious for its use of real time and historical location data to deliver personalised travel experiences.

The Ordnance Survey (OS) asked entrants to find novel ways of using its geospatial mapping data and its challenge was won by ‘OS BIM’ by Inform Architecture. OS BIM proposed using the OS’ OS’s 3D data to see whether Building Information Modelling (BIM) planning applications were likely to be successful or not.

The Birmingham Community Healthcare Trust set the fourth challenge and wanted to find new ways of visualising data and analytic decision making. ‘Public Health Measures’ by Matrix Knowledge won the funding by proposing two prototype applications – one of which visualises public health, workforce and estate data and one which allows users to monitor changes or benchmark institutions.

The final challenge was set by the British Library and concerned the value of public domain data. Peter Balman’s ‘Content Usage Dashboard’ was the judging panel’s choice after he proposed a solution that proactively searches for the British Library’s web content to see where, when and who is using it.

Attracting partners

All fifteen finalists differed in sizes and stages of development. Some were startups while others were companies looking to expand their existing business with support from the challenge partner. Some, like Peter Balman, were at the pre-startup stage and simply proposed an idea that required funding to get going.

“We are definitely at the smaller end of the scale,” said Matt Sansam, who heads up the IC tomorrow initiative. “Something like 80 percent of the companies we work with are less than ten people.”

The £25,000 of funding up for grabs is obviously very useful in helping these small companies achieve their vision, but the opportunity to work with the challenge partner is just as important for some. This is especially true of the data contest as many of the proposals required access to large amounts of guarded data.

Initially it was quite difficult for the TSB to secure partners for the early contests, but this has become easier as time has gone on and some companies even ask to be involved, depending on the competition.

“With the data competition it was quite a challenging competition to bring the partners,” said Memarzia, who speculated that some didn’t want to supply their data to a startup while others might have been embarrassed about how they collected information or thought it was unusable.

For public bodies this is less of an issue: “For the British Library, it was a no-brainer”, she said, adding that all five challenger partners offered something different.

Networking focus

The TSB believes these contests are the best way of allocating funding because they provide startups with experience of presenting their ideas and place them in a room with big players from the industry, allowing finalists to make connections.

There are also dedicated networking events, matchmaking sessions between small and large companies and ‘Meet the Innovator’ events that let startups pitch for five minutes to relevant companies.

“That’s not really highlighted, but it’s a huge aspect of what we do,” adds Memarzia. “We’d like to shout about it and I think we need to do it a little bit more.”

The contests also provide a chance for losing finalists to see 14 other firms present their ideas and all entries receive personalised feedback, which, along with IC tomorrow workshops, should put them in a better position to bid for public or private funding in the future.

“There’s quite a lot of funding out there if you know where to look,” said Sansam.

Public safeguards

But of course TSB intervention is required when a company cannot access funding through other means. What is effectively procured through the contests is a trial that eliminates the risk on the part of the startups and puts them in a better position to commercialise their idea.

This is public money and the TSB must be reasonably responsible. What if the trial is never delivered?

“It sort of depends on why it didn’t happen,” said Sansam. “A lot of what the TSB does with funding is inherently risky. We’re not expecting all these companies and proposals to be a success.”

Contest winners receive some of their funding once they have come up with a plan for their trial and then receive another instalment just before the trial starts in order to ensure the project goes ahead. But there was one instance of a challenge partner going bankrupt before it could go ahead.

“Things like that are out of our hands,” said Memarzia.

The next IC tomorrow Innovation Contest is themed around ‘Entertainment on the Move’ and the TSB will be hoping for more success stories like Second Sync – a social analytics platform for Twitter that was used to monitor interactions around the X-Factor before being bought by Twitter earlier this year, demonstrating just how far startups can go.

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