Cultural Change

I hope you’ve had a chance to see some of the publicity surrounding the announcement of our Innovation Founder 2012, Tom Eakin, founder of medical device company, TG Eakin. If you missed it, have a look at NISP CONNECT Innovation Founder 2012 for example. The award was given to Tom following  public nomination to seek out and publicise those who have founded, led or built a Northern Irish life sciences or technology-based business. As a result of winning the award, Eakin will now give the commencement speech to the ten finalist teams at this year’s NISP Connect £25K Awards gala dinner at the end of this month (Sept).

As a pharmacist, Eakin had worked with ostomate patients (those people who have had a surgical operation to create an opening in the body for the discharge of body wastes). This compelled him to set up his own business – TG Eakin – in 1974 to make his own innovations around ostomy pouches available to improve the patients’ experience. He created a more effective adhesive to join the pouch and the skin and began to sell his product in both Ireland and the UK and ultimately to other parts of Europe and beyond. TG Eakin has since expanded its range of products and now has factories in Wales and Northern Ireland, employs more than 200 people, and exports to more than 30 countries worldwide.

Tom’s second task as Innovation Founder 2012 will be to help us pick the Award winner for 2013. Already in the bag are good candidates who will be carried over but if you have a nomination, please sharpen your pencil and get it ready for the call which will be issued early next summer. Our aim with this competition and other things we do is to change our culture of scientific and entrepreneurial laissez-faire. Somehow we have allowed the wrong stereotype of a business person to invade our mind. Go on, admit it, as soon as you read the word, you think of Joe the Spiv in Dad’s Army or Arthur Daly and their screen equivalents.

Equally, when we teach science to our children, we leave out why and often where the discovery or the invention was made. Full marks to 360 productions for their two series James May’s “All you need to know about….” and Dan Snow’s “Dig WW2”. I nearly missed the latter, thinking it was a time watch type programme, but thanks to taxi drivers and others waxing lyrical about it I got to it in time. If you haven’t seen it either, do use the i-player before it’s too late.

Even figures like Galileo are stripped of their profit motivation in school histories. After he had travelled to Holland and had been introduced to the principles of the telescope, Galileo realised what he and it might be used for. He returned to Venice and paid the glass maestros of Murano to teach him their art. Then secretly he practiced until he could make a better device. To repay his investment, he persuaded the captains of trading ships to fly coded flags that only he could read from a long way out of port; so he would know how prices might move and hence how he could earn a ducat or two. Only then did he look heaven-ward and the rest is well known history.

Tom joins our band of Innovation Founders, John Anderson (sadly passed away), who brought ultraportable defibrillators to the world, and Hugh Cormican, who following his dream of discovering exo-planets created a £100m business in West Belfast, just as smart but a lot more ethical to my mind. They are the real role models for 21^st Century business and we can use just as many as we can create and motivate.

Why do we do it?

Followers of this column will know that, at the end of September, we had the culmination of our annual £25k Awards, a “weed-and-feed” process which as usual begins just after Christmas and runs continuously thereafter.  Teams from the research base in NI bid business ideas bid for a total prize fund of £25k, put up by our main sponsors (Bank of Ireland) and augmented in each of four categories by IBM (high tech), Warner Chillcott (bio-tech), Dow Chemical (clean-tech) and  Aepona (Digital media). The competition works by a series of selections and refinements, in which, in the words of the old music hall comperes, “the stars of the show are you, yourselves”, the generous and experienced entrepreneurs of NI. By your efforts, these early ideas get honed into companies with a better than even chance of getting to market.

Publicity goes naturally to the winner but it is vitally important to understand that the effects are much more pervasive than that. Here are the words of one of the runners-up.

“I just wanted to pop you a quick note to add my personal thanks and that of the GenSaf team to the ‘roast moment’ you had last night!

We all had a great night and have come away from the NISP CONNECT £25K Awards in much better shape than we went into them five months ago. We have learnt SO MUCH through the mentoring and assessment exercises which has allowed us to test our team, our product, our market and our strategy.

Last night, we had the CTO of SiSaf, John Stanton, across with us from Silicon Valley, California and he had a ground-breaking opportunity to meet with the AFBI CEO, Dr Seamus Kennedy, and several AFBI Board members after dinner. In addition, several senior civil servants from DARD were also there to learn more about what GenSaf is planning to do in the future. AFBI is now much closer to spinning out a joint venture company with a private sector partner, and this has been strengthened by our participation in the NISP CONNECT programmes – PitchFest and the 25K Awards.

I set up Veterinary Northern Ireland in 2005 and ran it for 2 years – I fully appreciate the work and efforts required to organise an event like last night which was a MASSIVE success in its own right, let alone the preceding 25K programme! All credit to you, Trudy, Elaine, Meagan, Steve and the rest of the crew for all your efforts over the last period of time… but I’m guessing that it’s almost time for you to start planning for the 2012 programme already…!!! [I hope you can take a well deserved break for a wee while anyway]! We are taking a bit of ‘time out’ for our Boards to look at Heads of Agreement, licensing etc over the next month or so but we are hoping to contact Joanne soon to register for NISP CONNECT Springboard to help us move forwards to the next stage… so we’re NOT going away!!”

We and they are worth it! Thanks to everyone who takes part and helps in anyway.

We Do Need More Heroes

I beg to differ with the sentiment of the Tina Turner classic – We Don’t Need Another Hero – especially when it comes to the Northern Ireland innovation scene. The problem is we don’t have enough of them, and believe me it is not because we don’t produce enough innovation entrepreneurs who deserve hero status.

The reality is for too long we have not celebrated the success of local innovators who have trailblazed the way, established industry and created wealth here, based on their enterprising and innovative spirit and talents. I accept that this is partly to do with the inbred Northern Ireland modesty and the tendency to hide our light under a bushel, but that is not the whole story. As a society we have not done enough to recognise these people and to celebrate their achievements and contributions.

At this year’s NISP CONNECT 25K Awards we are setting out to change this, with the inaugural Innovation Founder Awards designed to honour Northern Ireland’s most successful science and technology entrepreneurs who have founded successful companies here and helped put NI innovation on the map.

We are currently looking for nominations of people who have acted on their innovations, taken the calculated risk to set up companies and succeeded. People who can become heroes to the next generation. People like Professor John Anderson. At last year’s awards we decided to honour this leading local medical engineering entrepreneur for his contribution and dedication to the promotion of entrepreneurship and innovation in Northern Ireland and he delivered an inspiring keynote address at the awards. Professor Anderson was a key member of the team at the Royal Victoria Hospital that created the world’s first defibrillators and recognising the commercial potential he took this life saving technology to market. Today, John is best known as founder and Chief Technology Officer of HeartSine® Technologies Inc., a world leader in life-saving defibrillation therapy. He is also a founder of Intelesens, the manufacturer of world-leading body-worn vital sign monitoring devices based here in Belfast.

The positive feedback we received about this award showed us the value of recognizing and celebrating such innovation founders and we decided to launch a more formal award to do just that. As well as receiving the award this year’s recipient will be a keynote speaker at the 25k Awards gala dinner in September where he or she will address a gathering of over 250 members of the local business and research communities. We also intend to promote them via our website and use them in our various programmes to encourage and inspire. We know there are plenty of worthy recipients out there and we are keen to encourage nominations through http://www.nisp.co.uk/innovationfounders before the end of July.
Interestingly when you look at the Top 10 shortlist for this year’s 25K awards, which is designed to identify, qualify, prepare and present the best knowledge-based ideas with the most commercial potential from the publicly funded research base in Northern Ireland, we have a strong leaning towards the life-sciences and bio-technology in particular. There are range of companies featured which are involved in biomedical industries including animal vaccines, cancer diagnostics and heart disease treatment, as well as a number of other health related innovations . See http://www.nisp.co.uk/Connect/25k-award_174.aspx Perhaps we can attribute this surge in life-sciences innovation in some way to the recognition given to John Anderson last year, proving the importance of celebrating our unsung heroes. What we do know is that it is critical that we inspire the next generation of innovators to step forward and realise their dreams and what better way than to showcase those who have gone before…or to borrow another Tina Turner classic – to recognise Simply the Best !