Date published: 2006/09/30
The Financial Times says (subscription service):
Growth of Cambridge's cluster of technology start-ups has stalled, according to a new report.
Library House, a research business founded to help explain innovative companies to potential investors, found that 12 of the cluster's companies listed on public markets and a further 24 were sold or merged with other businesses, generating more than £1bn of value for shareholders and management teams in the past 18 months.
However, Library House has seen a net decrease of 1.5 per cent in the number of companies it tracks over the past 18 months.
Levels of investment in the Cambridge cluster have also fallen from £154m in 2004 to £125m last year, although this is partly due to a shift from later stage to earlier stage deals, which typically receive lower levels of funding.
The report proposes that Cambridge link with London, Oxford and parts of the Thames Valley to create the world's first supercluster. This combined area already receives over half of the venture capital funding in the UK.
For some reason the powers that be still run Cambridge as if it's a boom town. But Cambridge has not been doing that greatly ever since the collapse of the internet and telecoms pyramid scheme in 2000. Fortunately biotech has taken up some of the slack. Unfortunately the Cambridge politicians and bureaucrats don't seem to care whether or not Cambridge receives any inward investment, they spend their time trying to build thousands of new homes and to heck with worrying about where the jobs will be for existing or new residents (including kicking out one of the city's largest employers, Marshalls, in order to build thousands of homes on that site).
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