Wednesday January 1st 2020

Macro news, trends and innovation in the GRID marketplace, November 2015:

More new businesses; 75% fail | Crowdfunding mergers; 20% fail | Maths & Scaling up | Start-up Cities UK | 40% LSE overseas-based | Top 100 innovators: France 10, UK 0.


MORE NEW BUSINESSES; 75% FAIL

UK business start-ups boomed in 2014, data show | Emily Cadman, FT. 24 Nov.

More new UK businesses opened their doors in 2014 than at any point since 2000, according to the Office for National Statistics. The data though does not split out how many of these businesses were one-person operations created as part of the boom in self-employment. ….351,000 businesses started up last year, an increase of 1 per cent on the year before.

In all, taking into account those companies that folded, the ONS calculates there were about 2.55m active businesses in the UK in 2014, up by 102,000 on the previous year.

London … recorded the highest rate of new businesses and company failures.

… impact of the recession, with only one in four new businesses in Britain founded in the depths of the recession surviving into their fifth year. Of the 236,000 businesses started in 2009 — when the economy contracted by 5.2 per cent — just 98,000 were still operating in 2013. ….notable sectorial variations. Half of health and education companies were still in business five years on, compared with just 33 per cent of accommodation and food services businesses.


CROWDFUNDING MERGERS; 20% FAIL

Crowdfunding and P2P sector set to consolidate | Hugo Greenhalgh, FT. 20 Nov.

A wave of consolidation is set to sweep through the crowdfunding and peer-to-peer (P2P) lending sector, as smaller platforms struggle to attract a viable number of investors. Crowdfunding sites ….Investors in the UK can currently choose from 189 platforms, including sites offering equity and lending as well as other finance-raising models.
Industry experts believe such numbers are unsustainable in the long term.
….investors face significant challenges: one in five companies that raised money on equity crowdfunding platforms between 2011 and 2013 has since gone bust, according to a study this week by AltFi Data and law firm Nabarro.


MATHS & SCALING UP

Me and my mentor | Hannah Prevett and Peter Evans, Sunday Times. The start-up list. 15 Nov.

Sir Terry Leahy: “…entrepreneurs in the UK sell out too early and give up too early. They don’t let the law of compound mathematics turn their business idea into something of scale.”


START-UP CITIES UK

The start-up cities |Andrew Lynch, Carly Chynoweth and Kiki Loizou, Sunday Times. The start-up list. 15 Nov.

BIRMINGHAM’s office market offers the best value for money in Britain; an office in the business district is said to be cheaper than London, Edinburgh and Manchester with operational costs up to 55% lower than the capital.
BRIGHTON …. the average digital firm in the area is growing by more than 14% a year, while its digital sector is experiencing jobs growth at more than 10 times the rate of the wider British economy.
SETSquared, an alliance of Bristol, Exeter, Southampton and Surrey universities has already been crowned best university incubator in Europe three years running…
CAMBRIDGE has long been a hub for thriving ventures and today is the region that houses the largest concentration of fast-growing companies in Britain. Among other factors, the high number is owed to the university’s focus on supporting and promoting growth for the many spin-outs produced each year.
LONDON. Accelerator programmes tend to take equity from start-ups in return for their support and funds while incubators are mainly hubs of free support. ….there are more than 30 accelerator programmes in Britain, and over 20 are in the capital.
READING has the UK’s highest proportion of SMEs in the hi-tech and digital sector, with ….(and) more than half of (it’s) SMEs are in the digital, creative and professional services sectors.
SOUTHAMPTON ….Europe’s most productive port and thriving aerospace, marine and environmental technology sectors.


40% LSE OVERSEAS-BASED

SAB: last of London’s internationalists | Kate Burgess and Scheherazade Daneshkhu, FT. 13 Nov.

Today, the LSE says there are broadly 520 foreign-based businesses on the main market and the junior Aim — around 100 of which are African — and they have a combined market capitalisation of about £1.7tn. That means about 40 per cent of UK quoted companies, including the likes of Ryanair, are based abroad and derive most of their earnings overseas.


TOP 100 INNOVATORS: FRANCE 10, UK 0

Zut alors: Not a single UK company makes the Top 100 Global Innovators list again - but French firms make up 10 per cent of the list | by Emma Haslett, City A.M. 12 Nov.

For the fourth year in a row, not a single UK company has been included in the Top 100 Global Innovators list.
France was named Europe's most innovative country, with 10 per cent of the companies in the rankings,
… the UK's gross domestic expenditure on research and development: 1.63 per cent, against Japan's 3.47 per cent and France's 2.23 per cent.
… the UK applied for 80 patents per million inhabitants - below the EU average of 109 and France's 126, and way below Sweden's 290.
…only three UK companies filed more than 100 patent applications in 2014.

Why the UK always falls short in global innovation rankings | by Bob Stembridge, senior IP analyst, IP and science at Thomson Reuters, City A.M. 12 Nov.

… the latest Thomson Reuters study on the 100 most innovative companies in the world. So why do we seem to fall short? One reason is the make-up of our economy. The UK is heavily biased towards services rather than manufacturing. Because we compile our list by analysing the patents that companies file, it tends to mean the service industry is overlooked as its innovations, like new business methods, are not patentable in Europe.