Bernard Ginns: Would the Government support a Tech City in Yorkshire?

One evening, they took me to Stanford Theatre, a beautifully preserved 1920s cinema dedicated to showing classics from the golden age of Hollywood.

It was showing a season of Audrey Hepburn films to celebrate the life of the waif-like actress who had passed away earlier in 1993.

We watched War and Peace, the epic retelling of Tolstoy’s story about the French invasion of Russia and its dramatic impact on Tsarist society.

A pianist entertained us on stage before the show, disappearing into the pit as the curtain went up. After the film, we emerged on to the streets of Stanford. It was buzzing with smart young students from the nearby university.

I remember my hosts telling me about this prestigious institution. But two decades on, I don’t think any of us could have predicted how Stanford would play such a central role in developing the new technologies that today rule our world.

Look at the alumni: Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the founders of Google, Sandra Lerner and Leonard Bosack, the founders of Cisco Systems, Jerry Yang and David Filo, the founders of Yahoo!, Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, the founders of PayPal, and William Hewlett and David Packard, the founders of Hewlett-Packard.

Fittingly, the Stanford Theatre was restored by the David and Lucile Packard Foundation.

Why am I telling you all this? Because Stanford has to be seen as exemplar for the university at the centre of economic development in Yorkshire. We need our academic institutions to step up.

Steve Almond, the global chairman of Deloitte, picked up this theme during a visit to Leeds last week.

He told me: “At the heart of Silicon Valley’s success is Stanford and it is just absolutely accepted at Stanford that if you are a university professor there you are also likely to be on one or two boards or engaged in one or two ventures because you are trying to monetise the benefits of the research.

“That’s built an ecosystem over quite a long time. The US is way ahead of us, not just in scale but in how long they have been going for. They have developed this huge ecosystem, this culture, which says the purpose of innovation is to add value to the commercial world and potentially to society at large rather than an end in itself.

“Obviously, we have world-class universities and always do well in any survey, but we tend to have a culture where research is an end in itself.”

With the exception of the biochem cluster around Cambridge University, Britain has failed to create a culture of commercialising innovation, added Mr Almond.

He said: “The other side of that culture in Silicon Valley is that it’s okay to fail.

“Whereas our product of our universities tends to be great research that doesn’t get out of the lab and students who are channelled into firms like Deloitte – safe careers – rather than taking a risk with something that may or may not work.

“That’s what we need to do: build around that fantastic heritage and current performance of world-class universities.

“But how do we move from world-class universities to world-class businesses?”

The figure springs to mind that something like 90 per cent of university disclosures remain on the shelf. Not good enough.

But should we just blame the boffins of academia? A common complaint in this country – and region – is that the funding for start-ups is just not there.

But David Sproul, chief executive of Deloitte, disagrees.

He told me: “I was with a group last week of small start-up tech businesses and the one thing they weren’t complaining about was funding. They are going to crowdfunding. This is not £100m, this is the first £1m.

“If you had asked me two years ago I would have said this is a big problem. It is just not an issue for them.”

What Yorkshire needs is its own version of Tech City, the so-called Silicon Roundabout in London, which is home to an estimated 1,300 digital companies.

Tech City has enjoyed plenty of backing from senior ministers. Would Number 10 support a regional version here in Yorkshire? Tech Dale perhaps? Our universities could, and should, be at its heart.