Measuring Up at the University of Strathclyde

It is very important to me that I respect the confidentiality of the people I work with, so when I write this blog I seldom say much about the work I’m doing at any particular moment in time.

A few months back I started working on a Proof of Concept project at the University of Strathclyde, and since Scottish Enterprise have written an article on the subject I thought I’d share it:

http://www.scottish-enterprise.com/news/2013/04/tech-start-commercialisation-newsletter/measuring-up.aspx

Help Shape the YCF Guide to Finance for Young Companies!

From the YCF Newsletter:

“In Autumn 2013, YCF plans to launch a Guide to Finance for Young Companies, online (as a website) and offline (as a printed publication).  This will include a directory of useful contacts such as investors and advisors, and a selection of articles giving guidance and advice.  The Guide will be free of charge, and will help young companies to consider the funding needs of their business through to profitability, and provide the information needed to find appropriate sources of finance.

We have set up an online survey to canvass views on the content of this Guide – please let us have your views and comments.“

I think this has the potential to be a great resource for the entrepreneurial community, so I’d really encourage you to give your input!

Apply now for 2013 Saltire Fellowship

Back in 2009 I was part of the first cohort of the Saltire Fellowship programme.  It was an outstanding experience in my life, and recently I was asked to provide the top three things I thought made the experience worthwhile and different.  These are the answers I came up with.

• Learning from Veterans:  During my undergraduate degree I was taught by some brilliant people, but the majority worked in universities because they wanted to do research.  Some were also excellent and committed teachers, but very few had experience of practising engineering in the real world.  The people who teach the Saltire Fellowship at Babson and elsewhere are all veterans of starting, building and growing businesses.  They are all teaching from personal experience rather than from a purely theoretical perspective, and they are teaching because they are passionate about passing on their knowledge and experience.  Most are all active in a variety of businesses as well as teaching, and I don’t believe any of them needs the money they make from teaching…
• Learning by Doing: The programme is not about sitting in a classroom being spoken at.  The programme is about participation and solving problems using the knowledge you are acquiring, so you come out with experience as well as theoretical learning.  This ranges from group work in the classroom to consulting projects and placements, but expect to work hard.  This is not about sitting taking notes – this is about getting stuck in.
• Building Networks: The professors at Babson become part of your network, as do the rest of your fellowship cohort, other Saltire alumni, and the vast number of people you meet along the way.  This network will be invaluable whatever path people choose to follow after completing the fellowship, and is not about a list of e-mail addresses or names on LinkedIn.  These are people we can go to and get advice, help, support, inspiration, more contacts…  This is a very real network.

Apply now for 2013 Saltire Fellowship

The 2013 Saltire Fellowship is a prestigious, world-class entrepreneurial leadership programme in partnership with Babson College (#1 Business School in the world for entrepreneurship) and the GlobalScot network.  Taught by successful entrepreneurs who have run, sold, bought and invested in high growth firms, the Fellowship offers a unique blend of teaching with hands-on placements (one in the US then one with a Scottish high growth SME).

There are two channels to the Fellowship:
1.     Company Fellow: a company can place a member of their team on the programme.
2.     Open Enrolment: for individuals who are looking for a new direction in career (bursaries of up to 80% of the cost of fees, dependent on financial circumstances).
Applications deadline: 15 March 2013.

To find out more visit http://www.saltirefoundation.com/FellowshipProgramme/Fellowship.aspx and contact Linda.Barclay@SaltireFoundation.com

Bitesize: SEIS CGT relief can be extended

Thanks to Jonathan Harris at Young Company Finance ( http://ycfscotland.co.uk ) has very kindly given me permission to reproduce the following article from their newsletter.  From what I have heard, SEIS has not been used as widely as some of us hoped, and the extension of the additional tax relief gives it a welcome boost.  It also removes the April deadline that was putting a couple of possible SEIS deals I am looking at into question.  I thought this news was important enough to merit sharing!

SEIS CGT relief can be extended

HMRC has recently clarified the position on the Capital Gains Tax (CGT) re-investment relief available under the Seed Enterprise Investment Scheme (SEIS).

Background to SEIS: SEIS provides investors with 50% income tax relief on their investment in qualifying companies, to a maximum of £100,000 per tax year.  In addition, HMRC and HM Treasury had previously indicated that, to ‘kick-start’ this relief, CGT re-investment relief (a pound for pound exemption on chargeable gains re-invested this year) would be available for the 2012-13 tax year only.

However, HMRC has now clarified that investors can claim to treat SEIS investments made in the 2013-14 tax year, as if made in the 2012-13 tax year.  This means that, practically speaking, the one year CGT relief can be extended by a further year, provided that the individual concerned has income tax to relieve and chargeable gains to exempt in 2012-13.

Clearly, the ability to claim investment reliefs in the 2012-13 tax year on investments made in the 2013-14 tax year presents investors with tax planning opportunities. In addition, it provides time for investors to consider which companies to invest in.

BiteSize: Contemplate in the Press

I should have posted this a couple of weeks back, but the end of the year was a pretty busy time one way or another!  It was great to see a company that I have done a lot of work with over the last two years in the press:

Software Firm Unveils Program to Beat Costly Computer Failures

Christmas Shopping…

Scottish Soapworks is an Edinburgh-based Social Enterprise, producing traditional, organic, handmade soaps and related products.  I think they smell and feel wonderful!

If you still have some Christmas shopping to do, you might like to check out some of their gift sets: http://www.thescottishsoapworks.co.uk/

(my interest is that I volunteer as a director and trustee for the parent charity – it’s a great cause and every purchase supports their work)

BiteSize: Entrepreneurship Babson Style

I was at a Saltire Foundation event the other night where Elaine Eisenman, Dean of Executive Education at Babson College was speaking.

She recounted a talk given by the President Leonard Schlesinger in which he exhorted would-be entrepreneurs to “Just start“:

• Take Action
• Embrace Uncertainty
• Create the Future

Good advice for everyone involved in growing businesses I think.  For many people coming from a big-company or academic background, “take action” and “embrace uncertainty” are very much new territory, and I think that they can be linked intimately.  My objective is very often to try to help businesses identify the most important uncertaintaies they face, and to take action to find out things that reduce the uncertainty to embrace-able proportions.

Elaine also showed a slide suggesting that key ingredients for Entrepreneurs include:

• Being Cognitively Ambidextrous, making full use of both the reasoning and emotional/creative sides of the brain
• Recognising thatbusinesses have Social, Economic and Environmental Responsibilities
• Using Self and Social Awareness to take best advantage of opportunity

A combination of creativty and rationality, a rather Google-like “do no evil” clause and a grounding in a strong sense of self seem like a pretty good starting point to me, and seem to be things that successful entrepreneurs I work with share.

I’m not sure that I really have a point to make, but I wanted to share these thoughts because they resonated with me at the time and continue to do so.

BiteSize: A Market Researcher’s View of the Referendum

Ruth Stevenson, who is Research Director for Salient Point, recently blogged her professional views on the proposed Scottish independence referendum question.  If you have any interest in market research, or in the future of Scotland, I strongly recommend that you take a look!

Don’t just take my word for it – the blog link has already been widely distributed on the internet (her site has had one of it’s busiest days ever) and even more importantly the article has been syndicated by Research Live – the website for Research Magazine which is the official publication of the Market Research Society.  The article is currently featured on their homepage too.  Ruth has previously been published in the International Journal of Market Research and her research has won an award from the Royal Society for Public Health.

We’re very proud that Ruth’s work has been recognised this way, and we think this one again demonstrates that even though we may be a small organisation, we have deep expertise in our specialist areas including Market Research.

Update: It’s now also syndicated here on the Huffington Post!

BiteSize: Free Stanford Courses

Standford University in Palo Alto is legendary for having spawned incredibly successful startups.  This spring  they are running a number of free courses online, including one in Technology Entrepreneurship. I’ll be joining it to see what they have to say, and you can sign up now to be kept informed by e-mail if you would like to do the same.

There are a number of other introductory courses available too including ones on startups, computer science, information theory, probability and many more.  Just scroll to the bottom of the Technology Entrepreneurship course page for more information and to sign up.