Things we learned at our summer party, Part 2
This is the second post summarising three collaborative design exercises we ran at our Summer party. The first exercise was a ‘state-of-the-nation’ exercise looking at the start-up ecosystem as it stands today. This second post looks at the future, and where we should invest time, money and other resources to help build and strengthen the ecosystem.
Dot Love
We ran a dot voting exercise called ‘Dot Love’ which proposed 16 initiatives which could potentially have a positive impact on the Norwich startup ecosystem.
Participants were given five dot stickers to vote on the ideas they thought would have the most impact. It total we got 288 of these dote votes, so about 50-60 people from the Norwich start-up ecosystem gave their views. Here’s the percentage breakdown of how the voting went:
Initiative:
Mentoring & non-exec help: 10.1%
Meet-ups & community events: 9.7%
Free/cheap access to legal/accounting help: 8.3%
Free/cheap workspace for pre-revenue teams: 8.0%
More public awareness comms & events: 7.3%
More startup support from universities: 6.9%
Better/more incubators & support for early stage ideas: 6.3%
Startup community news & comms: 5.9%
Build the angel investing community: 5.6%
Help with finding & applying for grants: 5.6%
Schools outreach: enterprise on the curriculum: 5.2%
Engage/attract VCs and other investment funds: 5.2%
Free/cheap access to design & marketing help: 4.2%
Local politicians champion the startup community: 3.8%
A city-centre conference centre: 3.1%
Adult training and vocational skills: 2.8%
Perhaps not surprisingly, the ecosystem seems to value immediate, practical measures over long-term initiatives.
Access to mentors, legal & accounting skills plus cheap or free workspace for startup teams scored strongly. Getting early-stage teams access to this kind of support should be a focus.
Interestingly ‘Meet-up communities and events’ – already a strong feature of the city’s ecosystem – was the second most voted initiative. We suspect this shows the value that the ecosystem attaches to a healthy meet-up scene and that this needs to be maintained and extended.
The longer term initiative with the most support was to get more involvement from the city’s universities. This might be worth exploring. The universities are centres for both know-how and new talent, both are assets which could create more value for the local economy.
At Akcela, we’ll take it as a back-handed compliment that the city needs more or, ahem, better incubators. We’re working on it!
The other obvious insight is just how widely distributed the votes are. While ‘more of everything’ isn’t necessarily actionable, it does perhaps show us that the community is looking for support across a wide range of initiatives which its councils, politicians, universities, companies and investors could provide.