BRIMFUL OF IDEAS

source: Electronics Weekly

Since its opening last year by the Welsh Development Agency the Technium high-technology incubator has seen a dozen firms take root and the plan is for a second building for them to grow into. Alex Mayhew Smith saw for himself
At the end of a dusty, bumpy road, past piles of rusty cars and vacant, overgrown lots which must have once had some industrial use, sits a gleaming, modern building. Standing on the shore of Swansea’s old dock area, the building with one wall of glass and sails and another with neatly positioned square windows appears poised to take off across the bay.

Such an occurrence may seem just a little fanciful but if ideas were the building’s engines, it could have long since set out on such a voyage, for it is home to a community of early stage high-technology firms.

This is Technium, the £2.2m flagship building of the Welsh Development Agency’s (WDA) plan to incubate high growth, high-tech firms. Within Technium around a dozen enterprises have set up since it opened last year; a mixture of start-ups, existing indigenous firms and inward investors, says Dr Stephen Davies, chief executive of Technium.

Opposite the building lies an empty lot, used temporarily as a car park because it is the projected site for a second building, known as Phase 2. Firms currently at Technium are there for two years and it is to this second site that Davies imagines they will proceed, providing larger premises to the hopefully expanding firms.

"If they all follow their business plan they will have to move on for lack of space," says Davies, "they can be in Phase 2 for longer."

Technium is a joint scheme with Swansea University, providing a place to which the enterprises based there are happy to bring their customers. Rent for one of the units is low, about £6,000 a year, says Davies. For a start-up other enterprise schemes can cut costs further.

The universities are an important connection for Technium and also for plans to set up further Technium sites.

"Agilent came to Technium after looking at Ipswich and Glasgow. It was the optoelectronics expertise at Swansea University. When they came they started a dialogue with the director of undergraduate courses and Agilent made suggestions for these courses. It makes the undergraduates more employable," says Davies.

The WDA says The University of Wales (which includes all the major Welsh universities, apart from Glamorgan) produces around 2,000 engineering graduates a year.

Alongside a corridor running down the wing of the building, visible past the series of sails, swans glide across the water. On the inside a series of offices house some of the enterprises based here. Davies points out the firms as we pass their offices: an Agilent Technologies R&D team; a semiconductor light source firm, Enfis; a laser medical device company, ICN Pharmaceuticals.

Already the benefits from a community of high-tech firms are apparent. The ICN team is developing a semiconductor-based medical laser and found it could source semiconductors from Enfis. "The collaboration would not have happened without Technium," says Davies.

Upstairs in a light, spacious office with its own balcony overlooking the water, two second time around entrepreneurs are developing their telecoms products business: Small Planet Technology.

Brian Docherty and Jim Churchman previously built up their payphones business - Tetrel - to a 105 person company and sold it to Marconi Interactive Systems (called GPT Payphones at the time) in 1999.

The two men are infectiously imaginative and brimming with ideas for products, variations of products and routes to marketing. Captivated by the free flowing ideas they conjure, it is impossible to stop from joining in and offering ones own thoughts and suggestions.

All very well, you may say, but what about products? Well, the firm already has a deal to supply a domestic line splitting device to one of the UK’s biggest fixed line telecoms firms. Manufactured in the Far East, it is due to appear in the shops in September.

Manufacturing is certainly an issue for Wales. In a way it is one of the main reasons why Technium exists.

"This is a strategic change. In the past Wales attracted manufacturing operations but we are not so successful now because there are cheaper areas in the world to do this. We have to move up the value added chain," says Davies.

"In the UK the lowest quote for tooling the product was $18,000, in the Far East it was $7,000. We tried to make it in the UK," says Small Planet’s Docherty.

Scotland has been promoting and creating high-tech jobs for a number of years and with a great deal of success. The question is whether there is enough talent in the UK to drive a second regional centre for technology excellence.

The WDA seems to think so, because while Technium in Swansea mixes technologies, there is a longer term plan to focus on specific technologies. There are plans to set up a series of Technium sites, focused around existing "Centres of Excellence".

These include: power electronics; materials; manufacturing engineering; magnetics technology; multidisciplinary microtechnology; electronic product engineering; and industrial and commercial optoelectronics.

From these technologies and their corresponding Technium incubator facilities it is hoped that a raft of indigenous high-tech companies will emerge.

Meanwhile, Small Planet has a bigger plan which it has already targeted at mainland Europe: a payphone system which can use cheaply printed bar-coded payment cards and makes use of unused space from the bigger telecoms operators.

"These are for high footfall locations with an orientation for international calls," says Docherty. Clearly there is a market for these services, hence the number of high-street international call shops in any city in Europe.

"How about a plug-in for your mobile, then you can use your own handset," I can’t resist offering. "Well Bluetooth is the current thinking..."

The conversation rolls on as do the ideas. If further Techniums can find similarly erudite and imaginative inhabitants, it will be no surprise to see them sailing across the Welsh landscape.

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