The geeks versus the greys

When we talk about successful entrepreneurs in this country, we still refer to our ageing knights, Richard Branson, Alan Sugar and James Dyson. We have the talent, the temperament, the entrepreneurial zeal, and as a nation we are natural problem-solvers and inventors - but where are our dynamic young technology pioneers? Our Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook), Garrett Camp (Uber) and Andrew Mason (Groupon)? And why are they all sitting at desks producing dazzling (but pretty useless) apps, when they could be solving technical challenges in other sectors?

For my day job, I have the great honour of visiting the owners of manufacturing and engineering companies across the country. We discuss their innovative processes and the problems they solve for their clients, but mostly I'm speaking to a generation who remember the Beatles and the first moon landing. I don’t think I have ever come across a technological whizzkid in a factory or workshop setting. Why?

Six years after the launch of Tech City, venture capital into London is now ten times higher than in 2010. So we should be seeing massive growth, but the UK is lagging light years behind tech leaders in California’s Silicon Valley. And where are all these bright young things when it comes to engineering and manufacturing technology?

I think there’s a desperate need to bridge the huge void in the UK between the boiler suits or grey suits of traditional business, and the hipster geeks designing a brave new world that is almost invisible beyond their techie silos. The UK’s whole business mind set and landscape need to change if we want to compete on a global scale, not just in the digital sector, but across the broader economy. Our young innovators speak a completely different language and have business models that are entirely alien to most fiftysomethings. We need a new generation of translators to bring the worlds of the suits and the geeks together. It’s the missing link in our economic development.

In manufacturing and engineering we need to embrace new technologies and not see the techie industry as a separate entity. We need to appreciate the possibilities it might bring and how it can integrate into our sector to support our growth and increase our always slender profit margins.

Meanwhile, our techie innovators need to branch out of their hot desks and adopt a vocabulary that can be better understood. They may be bursting with brilliant ideas but too many are inept when it comes to business, finance and networking. They are failing to reach full potential because they don’t know how to leverage the experience of us greys, and they don’t understand how their innovations could be developed to become relevant and even essential to other sectors, not least in manufacturing.

The UK economy will never reach its potential growth unless the old meets the new - established businesses in all sectors need to understand and embrace the value of developing new technologies to maximise efficiency and drive performance. I suppose you could say we all need to get out there and hug a techie, bring them into our workplaces and task them with putting their brilliantly disruptive minds to solving client problems and increasing our profits.