PROFESSOR DYLAN JONES-EVANS

Too knackered to blog much today except that my team will be up until after midnight preparing for our 'elevator pitch' and business plan presentation tomorrow, after which I fly back to Wales. It has been an amazing experience and it has given me a whole new perspective on a range of issues. More importantly, it has refired my enthusiasm to make a difference which, of late, ahd been waning a bit. watch this space....

Walked out at 7am this morning into a blizzard, which is par for the course this time of year in this part of the world. Fortunately, the Cambridge Innovation Centre , which we visited this morning was only a short walk away. Whilst people may have an image of high technology incubators, they would have been surprised by this building which was essentially serviced offices, albeit in the heart of one of the most innovative parts of the World. Appearances can be deceiving, because this nondescript building houses over 175 firms and, since inception, the resident firms have raised over $825M in venture capital since 2001. It is also a private sector business that gets no subsidy whatsoever. The main lesson is that Boston has a highly developed and sophisticated support system for innovative firms which is largely non-existent in the majority of European regions such as Wales. It also has, on its doorstep, one of the greatest universities in the world – MIT – where starting a business is ...

Day 3 began at 7am with breakfast to discuss our business plan. The international team of eight is gelling well and we think we may have a winner on our hands in terms of the business plan, although that has to be tested in the crucible of MIT’s business plan panellists on Friday. At 8am, we then started the first of our company visits this week, to a software firm called hubspot . It was fascinating to do a Q&A with someone who expected his company to grow to the next Microsoft, although it was noteworthy that he was turned down by Sequoia Capital headed by the Cardiffian Michael Moritz . Some great lessons though and shows that many companies achieve success in Boston. We then started a series of lectures on a range of topics, ranging from organisational design to choosing an entrepreneurial team to factors for success for high technology start-ups, which eventually finished at 7pm, twelve hours later! The lectures by Professor Diane Burton were slightly off the wall but totall...

Day 2 started at 8am and finished at around 10pm (and that is a light day apparently!) The day was mostly an introduction to MIT and its success story in creating high technology entrepreneurs. The statistics are startling MIT students, alumni and faculty have founded over 5,000 companies. Approximately 150 new MIT-related companies are founded each year. These companies now account for employment of over 1.1 million and annual sales of more than £200 billion. We have already been put into a multinational team and have to do a 55 second ‘elevator pitch’ and a 5 minute business plan presentation at the end of the week. Dragon’s Den here I come! Apart from lectures, we had a number of business owner-managers come in and speak to us. For example, one of the entrepreneurs we spoke to yesterday had just raised $140 million for a medical devices company with projected valuation of $1 billion. It is an amazing place and with news from over the pond of the hundreds of jobs being lost at Corus...

Have arrived at MIT for Entrepreneurship Programme following a four hour rail trip from New York this morning. The course began with a four hour networking event where we had to try and meet as many people as possible and create a team of eight for the business plan and elevator pitch competition at the end of the week. Met a great group of people from countries as diverse as Dominican Republic, Saudi Arabia, Canada and Ireland. Interesting to note that Scottish Enterprise had paid for eighteen participants from Scots high tech firms but there were no representatives from Welsh organisations apart from yours truly. That is a great disappointment as we need Welsh-based entrepreneurs to attend such high quality courses on a regular basis. Hopefully, I can get some onto the next strategic MIT course to be held in be Edinburgh in March.

Having been here in New York since Thursday, I literally have had no time to sit down and write a blog entry as it has been meeting after meeting from first thing in the morning. Following Obama’s inauguration earlier this week, the big story has moved quickly to his bailout plan for the USA economy . This involves spending $825 billion to create or save more than three million jobs through a combination of spending and tax breaks. Of course, there are already debates on the make-up of the rescue package but there has been a broad welcome for this move, especially in terms of providing tax incentives to business, something which the UK Government has singularly failed to do. For example, there is a provision in Obama's plan that would allow businesses to carry back their losses into taxes filed for the previous five years, which would put cash very quickly in the hands of businesses. Despite the doom and gloom, there remain business opportunities here in the USA as some firms are ...

With the credit crunch hitting every business sector, little attention has been paid by politicians and policymakers to entrepreneurship and the role it can play in revitalising economies. That is why the results from this year’s Global Entrepreneurship Monitor study are important in examining how the wealth creators are performing around the world. The GEM programme is an annual assessment of the national level of entrepreneurial activity. Started in 1999 with 10 countries, the GEM 2008 study conducted research in 43 countries. Released last week, the 2008 report – which surveyed 150,000 adults just before the economic slowdown last summer – shows that, even then, there were reduced opportunities to start a business among non-entrepreneurs and, more critically, more were afraid of starting a business in case it might fail. At that stage, this fear of failure had yet to affect the rate of new start-ups globally, which had stayed at approximately the same level as last year. Of course, ...

I am over in New York and Boston for the next ten days. The visit to the Big Apple is to look for new business opportunities which are still out there if you look hard enough. However, in Boston, I will be taking part on a taught course for the firt time in 20 years, albeit at MIT. Will try and blog as much a spossible on what is going on over here.

Yesterday, I published some new figures on the decline of manufacturing in Wales during the last eleven years of a Labour Government, which showed that the sector contracted by over five per cent between 1997 and 2006, the last year for which figures are available. In contrast (and surprisingly for some), under the last Conservative government, the sector grew by 31 per cent between 1989 and 1997. The research also reveals that: 57,400 manufacturing jobs have been lost in Wales since 1997, at a time of a massive increase in the number of employees in the public sector. Manufacturing in Wales was responsible for 28 per cent of GVA (the index which tracks prosperity levels) in 1997 but had fallen to 18 per cent by 2006, the same as business services Key sectors such as hotels and restaurants, so vital to the tourism industry, have also stalled under Labour. During the period 1989-1997, this sector grew by 82 per cent but only by 50 per cent for the period 1997-2006 and their overall cont...

Last week’s decision by Anglesey Aluminium to stop smelting at their plant in Holyhead, with the loss of 500 jobs, will have been met by enormous disappointment by everyone on the island, which is already the poorest county in the UK. However, many will be shocked that we have reached this situation, despite considerable warnings over the last two years that this would happen if the plant did not get access to an energy source. Incredibly, this is probably the only company in the UK that is not shedding jobs because of the current credit crisis but because of a power issue that has been flagged up by the company to politicians on numerous occasions. Yet little seems to have been done to deal with this problem and Anglesey faces the disaster of losing millions of pounds more to the local economy. So what has gone wrong? Surely you would have expected politicians and officials, within both the Assembly and the British Governments, to have come up with a plan to ensure that a major emplo...

Last week was probably one of the worst in living memory for the UK economy. While one government minister was seeing mirages of green shoots, the rest of the country was being battered by economic statistics that indicated the depth of our economic problems. An economic survey from the British Chambers of Commerce showed that key indicators in both the manufacturing and service sectors had recently plunged to record lows, leading to predictions that the recession would be “worse than the early 1990s”. Although the decrease in the value of the pound has made exporting more attractive, the bad news is that the slump in manufacturing is accelerating, with output plummeting at its fastest annual rate since 1981. According to official statistics , manufacturing output fell by 2.9% in November 2008, the steepest monthly fall since June 1985 and, more tellingly, the trade gap with countries outside the European Union widened to £5.3bn in November, the worst performance on record. Other secto...

The press is reporting that, as expected, the Prime Minister will bypass Parliament to unilaterally give permission for a third runway at Heathrow. I will not focus on the environmental arguments here but one has to ask why London is again receiving a £9 billion boost? Surely, it would cost far less to upgrade regional airports around the country and, if need be, link them into London City Airport if this is about getting financiers into the country. Alternatively, how about spreading the wealth in terms of a new build, as I have discussed previously. Despite their sustainability agenda, the Assembly Government is supporting this development , saying that the high speed rail links to Heathrow will benefit Wales. Shame, therefore, that the rail link to his own national airport remains incomplete and passengers are left stranded a mile from the Cardiff Airport terminal.

Regular readers of this blog and my newspaper columns will have noted a number of pieces on statistics related to the Welsh economy over the years. Just before Christmas, the latest GVA data (which track the prosperity levels of the various nations and regions of the UK) was released by the UK Statistics Authority and over the last weekend, I finally got some time to examine them in more detail. Perhaps the most shocking finding was that an extra £4.2 billion would have been generated in if the Welsh economy had growth kept pace with the UK average over the last decade. The analysis of Gross Value Added (GVA) rates between 1997 and 2007 also reveals that the gap between London and other parts of the UK has widened, with Wales among the hardest hit. The average annual GVA growth rates for all regions apart from London was higher between 1989 and 1997 than over the last 10 years. In 2007, the GVA per head for London was 152 per cent of the UK average, with Wales at 75 per cent and bottom...

The latest economic data does not make pleasant reading: 'Frightening' deterioration in UK economy Thousands of UK jobs go in bleak day for economy Profits warnings at seven year high UK 'set for worst downturn since Second World War' Output from UK factories hits fastest rate of decline for 28 years The labour market isn't working Worst December ever for retailers UK trade deficit balloons to a record Financial services gloom deepens Tesco results add to UK economic gloom Certainly, any hopes that the recession will end in the second half of this year have all but disappeared.

Last year, this blog discussed proposals by the Welsh Assembly Government to introduce legislation to suspend the ‘right to buy’ for council house tenants in Wales. This was to be one of the first ‘Legislative Competence Orders’ which would, under the 2006 Government of Wales Act, essentially give Wales the power to pass its own laws, albeit after seeking permission from the House of Commons and its all-party Welsh Select Committee. Given the emotive content of the legislation, commentators had suggested that politicians in Cardiff Bay should have chosen something that would have been passed with little opposition, thus embedding the legislative process for subsequent laws. By focusing on housing laws in this way, some thought that the Assembly was ‘picking a fight’ with its bigger relative in St Stephen’s Green as it was clear that there would be difficulties with this issue from the start. Indeed, as the Labour Party, in its wisdom, has set up a process whereby the UK Parliament coul...

There are still those who believe that the Welsh Assembly Government can do very little to help the Welsh economy which, given the way that the current lot in power seem to have given up on devolved powers , is not surprising. However, as pro-devolutionist and an optimist, here are three suggestions as to how the Welsh Assembly Government could help the business sector tomorrow if they so wished to: Business Rates First, it must urgently re-assess the current business rate regime and reduce the burden on small firms across Wales. It seems to me that, while the Assembly currently has devolved responsibility for this form of taxation, it has yet to realise that it is exactly the worst sort of tax during a recession. This is because, unlike other forms of taxation on firms, business rates remain the same regardless of the performance of the business as it is based on the property occupied by the business and not on turnover or profitability. To many businesses it is a fixed cost that must...

According to the Daily Telegraph, there are rumours that Alistair Darling is " considering emergency plans to print more money ". If true, this suggests that the UK Government's strategy for dealing with the current crisis have largely failed and that the only approach left is to adopt third world economic development policies. The Weimar Republic anyone?

This time it is Waterford Wedgwood - the glassware and china manufacturer - which is entering administration 250 years after it was founded. The firm employs 1,900 people in the UK, mainly at its manufacturing operation at Barlaston, Stoke-on-Trent, and at retail stores and offices. It also has 800 staff in Ireland. Many of those manufacturing jobs are highly skilled the likes of which we may never see again. The design and manufacture of glass remains one in which individuals have to go undergo years of training and having visited the factory in Waterford a few years ago, I saw, at first hand, the experience and expertise the glassmakers had developed. Clearly, it can be argued that this is exactly the type of creative destruction that is the hallmark of recessions and that companies that can no longer compete shoul;d be put out of their misery. However, I remain saddened that the legacy of Josiah Wedgwood, one of the world's greatest innovators, will now be lost. For those who ar...

“Happy New Year!” was the refrain across the land as the clocks struck midnight on Wednesday night. However, many economists would suggest that “happy” would be the last adjective they would use to describe 2009 and that it looks like being one of the worst years in living memory for the business sector. Certainly, the reality of the situation is beginning to hit home with the man and woman in the street. A recent survey showed that less than 20% believe the Chancellor of Exchequer’s prediction that the recession would end this year. The latest economic data makes grim reading for even the most optimistic observer. The British Chambers of Commerce believe that there will be a fall of nearly 3% in economic growth during the next year, worse even than the 1990s recession. It has also predicted unemployment hitting three million (or 10% of the workforce) over the next two years which, if translated to Wales, will mean around 150,000 out of work. In terms of the housing sector, little seem...

It would seem that all is not well with European funding in Wales. As the Western Mail reports here and here , there are real issues emerging not only with the old Objective 1 programme that ran from 2000-2006, but also with the new Convergence fund programme. Ministers and their spinmeisters will, as usual, dismiss this but it must be remembered that it was the whole subject of Objective 1 which brought down Alun Michael. If the Assembly, at a time of economic crisis, is squandering opportunities to give Wales a real competitive advantage, then there should be a full investigation by the appropriate Assembly committee and censure for the relevant politicians and civil servants. Whatever people say about the Western Mail, this type of story does show the paper's reporters at their best and shows the need for proper accountability within our public services. There have been numerous warning signs about the increased bureaucracy and micromanagement of the latest round of Europea...