A chat with Colin Dart of SETsquared Exeter at the Incubator Space

hi i'm colin dart have you had your lateral flow device test i have yes hi i'm sarah i'm with digital and tech exeter hi thank you very much i'm colin dart i am the set squared extra technology manager where are we so we are currently in the university of exeter enterprise zone incubator this space is home to the business acceleration team and the support that we deliver to high-tech high-gross businesses as they start their journey exciting it's really it's such a nice space so and what do you do as part of this because you're in the space and you know a ton about it and you've been involved with i think the whole process of everything for a while so how do you fit into the uh this space okay so i'm the technology manager um for set squared exeter so set squad exeter is um as i said the business acceleration team um well our part is anyway so what we do is um we try to engender an entrepreneurial spirit and then provide the building blocks for succeeding as a company as you start so we do this in many many different ways everything from our kind of student startup team trying to teach students the kind of entrepreneurial nuances as well as getting started with ideas such as market research validation and so on when they come to us they tend to be have a bit more of a formed idea and with that formed idea comes the challenge of trying to work out what to do next and often the barrier is that they don't know they have a maybe a solution to a problem or they have a problem with no solution so my job in the first instance is to help validate and help people try new technologies so it may be everything from ar and vr all the way through to 3d fabrication or maybe even just understanding things like software packages that they might need to learn to if they're going to scale we do that in multiple different ways we hold workshops and events just introducing concepts to people at a kind of academic and practical level so theory and practice um the events tend to kind of bring people together so they can talk to each other um which is a really key part of all of this and then we really get down to the nitty gritty so that's the kind of what do i do so the technology manager is there to assess the kind of what's needed next so we take a founder and we say okay what do you know already what are you trying to solve what do you need to know to get there to get to a solution and with that we can start to plan a bit of a technology strategy and that's you know 12 months of intensive support alongside all of the other support that set squared offers oh wow that's great so what i'm hearing is that you basically get to play with tech all day that's when i'm here okay cool and tell people how they can play with tech as well no it's great though because i think introducing people to different concepts that they haven't thought about means actually that they get a lot of worth out of their time with you and i think that's sort of one of the keys of how an acceleration program can be successful or must be successful because there's no other way except for exposing people to new ideas and new concepts and new ways of doing stuff and i have many questions don't you worry but um can you quickly just maybe delve into why you do what you do because obviously it'll take a certain type of person to be good at being a technology manager i wouldn't be a good fit i would not um but that's why i also don't do it but like what how how have you come to this particular job and position and and maybe what do you really enjoy about it most yeah of course so um first and foremost um it's a parental role um you know my psyche and i would happily say that the rest of the team are very similar is we are ones that that want to see um the people that were supporting you know fly off and do great things you know we don't mind if we're you know they never mention us again um but what we what we really want to see is success in these people because their success is our success and in terms of why i do what i do um it quite simply brings me great satisfaction to see someone that might not have been able to achieve their dream without us and hoping that whatever we give them even if it's small or a big influence that that's the difference that that's what gets them to their goal and that they can then flourish um you know and often we find that the people we're supporting i'm not going to say they're not happy where they are but there's something missing you know they're trying to do something new and if we can help them make that transition and make it a success that's just an amazing feeling um in terms of how i got here it's a a long-charted history of doing the same thing but becoming less commercial each time okay so i started off as a designer and i specialized in helping young companies to create an identity and a brand so that they can again very similar story so they can get to the next stage and seem professional and feel professional from that point onwards it really became just keep stepping to the point where you feel you can make a bigger and bigger difference and it ceases to be the okay i've helped this person win a contract um or get some sales and it starts to be i've helped this person set themselves up for the rest of their life um which is a big overblown statement but i'm i would happy to say that that is the case for some of our people so safe to say that that has also been your favorite part of the role to see them succeed to see them actually achieve things that they didn't think they were able to because they felt stuck maybe when they came to you um that is a really fab favorite part to have i mean that's really great in general what skills or key skills would people need in order to sort of start a career in in tech managing technology and ideally you know playing all day with new inventions and getting people to interact so it's called many things i mean technology manager is one or i've heard evangelists and so on and so forth um there's there's a few key elements to the role and they tend to be the soft skills um you know as i said before i'm not an expert in well in many fields at least um but that's the key you don't need to be um the key thing about being a technology manager is one is learning to be a good facilitator a good networker and have excellent liaison skills you know what you're doing essentially is spending all day with people listening to them um and gaining the right amount of data from that conversation so really really finding out what what the obstacles are where their skill space is and so on and so forth beyond that it's about then connecting them with the right resources now sometimes that's us and that's a really easy win but most of the time it's not it's bringing in other people be it peers academia the industry people they might be able to partner with people that might be able to teach them and getting the right people in compared to just getting someone in is a big difference so understanding is key and i think the biggest part and i thought about this beforehand um you have to take it personally you know a technology manager in this sense um but in a vast amount of sense is all about supporting people but it's other people's dreams or it's other people's processes and jobs and tasks but you have to take it personally because essentially what you're saying is i'm not an expert but i'm going to find out um and that can often take a lot of effort your own personal effort um it can take you know a bit of a learning curve for yourself to go away and say i'm going to find out enough about this thing that i can come back to and give you the best advice and if you don't take it personally that's not going to happen so it becomes a bit of a personal mind you know coaching element to it so you basically become an advocate for them as well in other spaces and actually going oh i need an answer for this person this is their problem like do you know about the solution and then basically not pushing but pursuing it until there is a good enough answer and the right answer if there is one you have to provide as much passion for them as they're already putting into their project um and i'm not gonna say you're not of use to them if you don't but you become of best used for them if you are of course of course so as we're thinking about you know one of the things that we're seeing with the pandemic and i'm sure you've seen as well is that people are using the space and this disruption either out of choice or because of their situational changes to completely reinvent themselves and one of the things that we're very passionate about is obviously encouraging people and to stem businesses because this is where we work this is where we find our joy how do you think we can encourage more people to make the step into digital tech all of the other stems and and and do you think that there is maybe also opportunities that weren't there before the pandemic from your view if you talk to anyone um that deals with people that come to the tech industry at a later time what you realize is that they haven't had the grounding in kind of school and college age the biggest barrier to the stem industry at the moment is that it's patchy if you go to a primary school secondary school or college and then go to another equivalent in another area how they approach technology learning is all different you know even within exeter you know the core center we see schools that are highly technological technological and they approach it as part of all of their learning and then the others that have the traditional once a week we have an i.t lesson and it's a vast gap so i think what we can do as a kind of a community is start to make that kind of opportunity to learn about the stem arena more visible and more accessible to everyone so to then carry on as to all those people that maybe find themselves having an opportunity the worst case scenario is they say i have an opportunity but i don't know where to go so it's visibility it's accessibility is there a workshop that i can attend without paying without having to be part of an institution or a professional body without having to know someone else is this is this stuff visible and accessible to me and at the right level so am i able to see introductory content to then take it further so that we can ignite passion and then further thought about what they were thinking about and that's not always technological sometimes it's you know we see them around things like demo nights where you can stand up on a stage and say i have an idea and everyone else can say that's a great idea you should really think about that further why don't you talk to because they're running an event you know and that's that's where the community can really drive that how why do we think or what makes exeter the perfect home for tech and digital people and businesses so the situation we're in currently is that we get lots of influx of people moving out of bigger cities where they've experienced the less than optimal pandemic and they just need to be out and obviously we have the space here we have um we have this beautiful surrounding we have got excellent acceleration programs but um what makes x what what what difference does exeter make do you think for two digital and tech people so i think um i think first and foremost extra has always been a good place but it's a bit of a secret um a best kept secret um i think geography has maybe stopped people thinking about exeter for a long time you know it's a long way away from the large cities of um of this country however with better communication links better transport links and so on that's almost a moot point now and then once that's the case and we can work from anywhere um you know what you've got to look at is what resources are there for me to start a business or continue a business and also as an individual where do i want to be now you said it a little bit there so and it would be a complete remiss to to avoid the fact that it is a beautiful part of the world you know i'm not born and bred exeter i've lived around i've lived in london i've lived in other places but the key thing for me was as soon as i came here maybe through circumstance i've never leave and that's choice because why would you want to you know we have the moors we have to see the cities are nice it's clean it's a great place to raise a family all of those things so it really becomes a question of can i do what i wanted to do in exeter and the answer to me has always been yes we've got the university of exeter which which does a couple of things um it's not just a great university for people to come and study what it means is there's a constant stream of talented people that are graduating and are able to do work so if i wanted to start a business here and i was worried about access to talent um or who was going to take forward the company if i grew you know that that answers that question you know they've got great computer science departments engineering departments they're really high on the agenda for some very hot topics you know i think i might get this stat slightly wrong but i know quite a lot of the top 10 climate scientists in the world exist in exeter and you know that kind of access to people who are being taught by that level of academia is is impressive if i wanted to say start a revolutionary company um i can go to the university and i can use one of their many projects that are available for people to access assuming they're eligible and i can undergo the kind of research studies that then underpin what i'm going to do next and that's a big big deal for innovators but it's not just exeter we've also got plymouth university down the road so you know mirror all of that sentiment but in the marine sector and we've got cornwall around the corner um which has a vast amount of natural resource and also projects running as well so wherever you come into tech be it from one particular discipline or another there's going to be someone in this region that can help you from a research innovation skills talent point of view and i don't think you can say that about many places in the uk i think you're completely right one thing that was really surprising to me is as well that there is a community of people so um digital and tech exeter obviously support that community and are active in it but there is just among tech people a real excitement about what they do and they do it out of passion so it's not just people behind laptops and computers coding but there is a real diversity and that diversity i think as you said is found in the southwest as well and i think maybe also geographically it's always not been really a thing but i think because people are re-evaluating as well where they stand in life and what is important to them um it's going to grow further and actually we're going to get a lot more talent coming here and they're already coming it's really positive as well and i've got to reiterate that um the landscape everything from you know tech on the ground you know be you know people working in the tech industry to people trying to change it to people trying to start businesses there's a real sense that this area is one where people come out of choice yeah and because they come out of choice they want to better the region and because of that the communities aren't there because of competitiveness or trying to undermine or trying to get into a market those communities exist because those people want to help each other to create a better environment and places like tech extra digital extra tech southwest you know all of these kind of things whenever whenever we speak to those people and whenever we're speaking to the other people who are members of those networks it's always a positive conversation and that's again you can't say that about everywhere absolutely so if you were to choose exeter again if you had the choice blank slate i i can do do over do you think you would choose exeter again having having maybe had mumbles about how great it is um absolutely um again i think possibly it would have been a harder choice in the past and that's visibility um exeter is um is a great place and i think a lot of people wanted to keep it a secret um i think if you if you hear people talking about exeter it becomes top of the list in terms of choice or at least in terms of places to look at um you know the the geography is unavoidably beautiful and i think if you were to choose anywhere to live it would probably be somewhere like here and then you would try and work out if you can whereas i think now i think that question is less of an issue and it's now do i want to live here yes well i know i can everyone is telling me i can so this incubator the sex squad extra incubator is it's this room is not the incubator the incubator is the science park center um so we are the acceleration services that drive that incubator interestingly enough on top of the building on top of the building of course we are so um the rationale is that the science park as a whole um is the is the place where um the stem industry can grow in this area um it's the place where you'll be able to cross-pollinate um it's the place where you can share talent and ideas you can build a home and you can see a pathway for that home all the way through your scale the science park has everything from what you see here which is informal kind of drop-in places where you can undergo things like the accelerator through to hot desking small offices big offices floors of buildings and then eventually buildings you know and that's a really key thing about places like science parks in general but definitely here is that if you want to innovate if you want to scale you can come here stay here and not have to see that as a barrier to your scale you're not having to think about where you're going to move to next how much it's going to cost it's it can be all mapped out for you so what does the science park then give you by being here i mean one it's right on the m5 it's near extra airport it's a short hop away from a train station it's got great cycle and warp links into town you know it's incredibly accessible if you walk around here um i was only speaking to someone today this is a beautiful place to work you know it's very green there's ancient trees in the field next door you know you can see the estuary it's a wonderful place to be anyway when the sun is shining at least um but also there's a real sense that um it doesn't have to be too much hard work to make a community here you can walk down the corridor and you can see people that work in vastly different arenas but they'll have an interesting conversation with you and it will spark an idea you know it can be someone that works in photonics speaking someone works in agriculture but they might have something in the middle um and you know be it sitting in the cafe and speaking to those people having a coffee in an incubator even just making your tea at a kitchenette is a really important part of that so when you grow and scale you also know that those people are still here but they're new fresh people and that's just part of that kind of churn of community to be quite honest there's not a lot of outtakes there no but we don't know yeah well just off me though so that's fine it's fine it's fine because you can cut it in in another way so you got the sound and just put things like old clips from rainbow or the gummy bears

2021-07-07 14:12

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