A bit like spring mating, the rush to match investors with companies and projects looking for funding is hotting up.

A bit like spring mating, the rush to match investors with companies and projects looking for funding is hotting up.
 
We’ve been running round the country, last week presenting at a Philips-led Cambridge small business conference on commercialising IP (we’re selling a portfolio of advanced mobile device patents) and engaged in business development on our smart DC grid technologies, identifying further trial sites In Nottingham and East Anglia. Today we went up to Derbyshire on work we are doing on commercial energy efficiency in industrial plants.
 
We’re leading various European and Technology Strategy Board projects, which is critically supporting activities and research with multiple partners and universities on energy technologies. That’s all the more important when funding is so hard to find from the angel and VC market (and non-existent from banks more focused on giving bonuses out than supporting growing businesses). Even the VAT man has been particularly unhelpful – we’ve been waiting 12 months now for VAT approval for one of our companies.
 
Yesterday we were at the Shell Springboard awards in Cambridge as one of 24 national finalists (out of more than 200 entries) up for a free ‘40k’ award. This is the annual gig where Shell helps out the renewables sector, along with other programmes of theirs such as Livewire for younger entrepreneurs.

The Springboard forms part of the annual calendar for any small businesses looking for funds. Like the Veuve Cliquot calendar of sporting functions, Shell comes alongside the regular Carbon Trust, TSB, EU, FP7 and other opportunities to raise cash. Sadly most of these are now literally sport, sometimes (in the case of angel networks) maybe even a blood sport. Many of the main funding boards are now run as competitions, following too often the X-Factor/Dragons’ Den fad of recent years. A Darwinian filter that tends to shut out really groundbreaking innovation – ideas need to be “sellable” and obvious today to carry the audience.
 
This was my definition of innovation shared last week: innovation is about making a connection faster than the audience. Entrepreneurship is about timing it well. If it is too advanced – no one will get the joke, or if it’s past the peak, it’s like watching an re-run of Have I Got News for You on Dave. Just not funny.
 
Timing is all about getting the gap right. Too early means extra time, funding to cover to breakeven or huge amounts of money to spend on marketing. The act of creation and consumption are highly interlinked. ‘I could have thought of that’. If you get this right – things sell, globalise in an instance, in a tweet.

Unfortunately, much R&D doesn’t look like this. Darwin spent 20 years before sharing results. Dyson spent 10 years prototyping. Windows is still trying to get its code right and Apple-like. Google is still developing search (probably knowing that the worse the search is, the better value the advertising links). For a small business developing IP and R&D, you have to be sufficiently ahead of the market, and therefore early enough to stand a chance of gaining patents, differentiation, something new. The challenge for the UK remains funding this up to the point when others get it.
 
Sadly Shell Springboard went down party lines – favouring traditional solar PV innovations. Yawn. But important. Solar is what has worked on and off since the seventies. Despite the horrible cloudy weather, and absence of sunlight on my train up to Derbyshire this morning. Solar sells.
 
As one of our fellow Springboard “contestants” observed, quoting Churchill, ‘Success is the ability to go from one failure to the next, without loss of enthusiasm’. This is probably a catch phrase for all entrepreneurs. Persistency remains critical.
 
Anyway, in a few weeks’ time we’re off to Nasdaq. We’ve been invited to a financial adviser event as a ‘next great consumer brand’ or something, and some jolly photocall where we get to ring the closing bell. We’ve won global design awards alongside Apple already, and our view is that the real solution to energy will be design and innovation led, so lets hope that there is more money looking for risk and growth opportunities over there. Then again, it might all turn out to be another, more high-level kind of sport, with the zillion dollar bonus hungry bankers looking down at us, forecasting some future IPO day and chuckling.