How Britain could have invented the iPhone: And how the Quangocracy cocked it up

I've worked for a public body that started out with a decent remit to help business, but I saw it descend into a quango that just provided pointless jobs for political cronies. We may mock states like North Korea, with their nepotism and self serving elites, but they are just an extreme version of what we have here as the positions of power held by the Powell clan show. Don't know what the answer is, but we need to get rid of the patronage and as well as ensuring that serial incompetents at the top don't just move on from one disaster to another. For example, when the head of the quango I worked for found his position untenable when Labour lost power he called in a favour with one of the UK's leading entrepreneurs and went on to a directorship elsewhere. Of course, if he'd been a little less of a public-school educated dimwit and brown nosed a few more politicos from both sides of the fence he could have happily stayed on as an overpaid quango boss on a six figure salary ...

In this case competence is tangential.

It is tempting to give NESTA the benefit of the doubt and ascribe their bungling to incompetence - but I really don't think the pattern of their behaviour supports that. On the one hand you have a guy with some IP and who wants to build a tangible product that could generate income. On the other hand you have artists - the vast majority of whom make a net loss on their output, and in some cases it isn't even possible to monetize their output. Yet NESTA supported the high-risk-zero return activities without hesitation, they subsidized their mates' hobbies and no intention of supporting money making activity/innovation.

It's a pity that Fentem didn't hedge his bets, that said I am not sure I would have done any better in his position at that age.

Theres goes my blood pressure again...

But, how stupid (or naive is probably a better word) do you have to be to not realise this would happen if you got involved in something like that? Or to not bail out when it is obvious that what it is obvious would happen happens?

Britain has led the way

Britain has often led the way; but that does not mean that commercial success will land in British hands. There is a lot more to it than inventing or developing a technology; the success of Apple goes far beyond using 'touch screen' displays.

I am no great fan of Apple but their success is in giving the customer what they want (and particularly in convincing the customer that it is what they want) and delivering it in a quality manner with a premium price. That is where Britain often fails. It doesn't matter how good the tech is if one cannot turn it into a desirable product.

I remember an Alexi Sayle joke that if Britain had invented the Walkman it would have been the size of a tea chest and made of polished mahogany. That sums up what the problem often is with Britain's inability to dominate commercial markets.

No Sympathy - whining because one of many possible funding sources was used and they did not give as much funding as needed is entirely the guys fault. Why did he agree and sign a contract if they were only providing a derisory 20K an order of magnitude less than required to get to a manufacturable product? Thsi smacks of wishful thining by someone without any sort of commercial clue. yes the British establsihment is woefully bad at supporting industry with a shockingly poor understanding of science, tehcnology and how to get things done but they are at least trying. The fact they gave money to someone who is commercially naise and incompotent reflects badly on all parties but the prime responsibility for failure belongs firmly with the guy who conceive dthe idea and set up th eproject and company not a government body who provided funding.

Depressing

I think in this position best to go round different companies yourself.

The incompetence of Nesta was staggering

Dependency culture

Implicit within this story is that it was the responsibility of Nesta to filter from 1000's of applications the ones where the innovation alone has the potential to drive major shifts in business, and then to back those regardless of any of the other circumstances. The telecom industry, and I suspect the inventor, didn't anticipate the iphone phenomenon, yet we expect a government agency to have that kind of foresight?

I was investing myself during the period concerned and saw 1000's of applications, and yet never saw this inventor approach me for seed funding, and from the sound of the article, if efforts were made to raise commercial money they were not successful. Could it be that the inventor was a key limitation to commercialising his own technology? My experience is that no amount of brilliant innovation is sufficient to mean that you can commercialise a technology if the inventor has either attitude, capability or experience limitations. Perhaps we also expect that our government agencies should step in to fix those problems too?

During the years up to its recent change in status I know that Nesta invested in many truly innovative and brave technology ventures, often to the tune of several £100'000s. Every commercial investor in early stage technology knows you must miss some great opportunities in the 1000's you must reject. Putting pressure on such agencies to account for missed opportunities is likely to breed exactly the kind of defensive investment behaviour that will depress their potential for positive impact. What we should be judging Nesta on is those that it did back vigorously and the returns that those investments made.

My experience of Nesta was that it did have its limitations and constraints. However I did work with people who had a good understanding of what they were doing. If we believe that the state should be intervening in our economy through innovative seed stage investments then maybe the more important issue is that instead of improving provision, we've simply given it up. Nesta no longer does seed stage technology investment and as far as I am aware no alternative has been put in place.

It is not just NESTA

I was acting as an advisor on a complex (really really) issue for UK Gov. One of a number. We were given (as a group) a pretty demo/pitch by the Design Council. The area is complex and it is very obvious that human, technological and mathematical issues are all very important. In my review I commented favourably on the Design Councils ideas but suggested they get teamed up with a decent technical group so that some balance and measure of effectiveness might be reached.

My original submission was counted as positive. My attempt to correct with a positive but of no fucking use unless someone does a reasonable set of experiments, was ignored by the (Home Office) meeting secretary (not someone who just types by the way). A second attempt to correct this was accompanied by a 'do you want to work with us again, we intend to support the Design Council'. I left. As far as I know the ~Design Council got the funding for something that had little chance of validation,

Anon (well vaguely) for obvious reasons

NESTA bad

I was briefly involved with NESTA while it was being set up and got out as fast as humanly possible. it was clear that they had no actual intention of doing anything seriously technical. What they loved were computer-created artworks. Some early ones were lovely and fun, but it was a huge organisation and its output was artwork. From the very first day it looked to make itself a very comfortable nest for birds who could not do anything other than feather their own nests. The entire mentality of the place was corrupt, i.e. looking to support the longevity of the organisation as its sole purpose for being an organisation. I still feel unclean from the fact that I even walked through their doors.

Having said that, I suspect every quango is the same. NESTA's ostensible purpose was merely rather more nebulous than most.

Why ask the government for help?

Sorry, but the best thing the government can do for business is keep out the way. Plenty of other ways to raise money.

This is a story of the bl**din' obvious from day one. Okay, this was all pre-Dragons Den, but surely anyone with a half-decent invention and a modicum of common sense would have been making serious efforts in going to other sources of funding and demonstrating the possibilities.

Oh, and not to disgree with the points about the New Labour cronyism, but a quick read of Private Eye shows that it's just as endemic across all the other establishment parties.

The whole economy is turning into this - where only those who are personally insanely rich can afford to participate.

Quote: "It’s a long-standing – 100+-year-old – complaint about Britain that we invent lots of great stuff but someone else makes money out of it. "

I've seen and heard this in so many fields. My background is mechanical engineering - we saw this all the time in the 70's 80s and 90s. We invent and develop stuff, the Japanese copy it and then perfect and manufacture it.

Why NESTA and who else?

An interesting issue here is why go to NESTA in the first place and were any 'real' VCs approached and what did they say.

Whilst NESTA has a track record of talking up its endowment and not much about its actual investments, they were ( at least then before the conversion to charity, may have changed but I still see them as too overtly following the political zeitgeist) always going to have the political and bureaucratic issues of a public sector body. The UK was absorbing about half of all the VC funds in the EC at the time iirc.

A real danger of talking up state investment is the drowning out of other approaches. The state is almost by definition a funder of last resort ( unless it is funding for its own consumption, then its a supply side intervention) if there is a business case a business should be doing it. If it is too long term, too radical or too subject to regulatory risk or that the economic dividend is too dilute then there are good reason for state involvement but this does not seem to be in that category.