Mixing Ingredients For Success

I think it’s important to appreciate the relationship between three key ingredients in any business: enterprise, innovation and finance. An entrepreneur is a person who operates and assumes the risk for a business venture. Innovation which is the process of making improvements by introducing something new. Every successful company needs combination of these two ingredients, plus a healthy dollop of money. And they need to be mixed!

Getting these three ingredients to work together is the key to success. Each needs better understand each other’s language, motivations and values. This is doubly important in the UK where VCs and equity funders traditionally have an accountancy background compared to their more tech savvy USA counterparts.

Initiatives like the Enterprise Fellowship Scheme funded by Yorkshire Forward is a sterling example of how researchers can get some entrepreneurial DNA spiced into them without compromising their academic integrity. Having a potential commercial outcome in mind from the outset can inform the research as much as that all important journal publication. At Connect, we are increasingly involving academics on our company assessment panels to help assess technical innovations coming from the private sector.

Great companies are built by teams that bringing together money, management and ideas. You need a critical mass of these components and the infrastructure to connect them. People are the ultimate technology transfer agent and commercialisation is a ‘Contact’ sport. And organisations like Connect can provide an important mechanism for catalyzing and promoting this reaction, linking entrepreneurs and innovators with the resources they need to succeed.

Our upcoming Connect Investment Forum provides a key platform for promoting this interaction. We also provide online introductions through MyDealMaker and publish a periodic Investor Bulletin to bring companies on our radar screen to the attention of potential investors.