The article notes that, over his career, Frazer has started up three technology businesses in his home city of Cambridge and is now chief innovation officer at PA, advising others starting up.
Frazer says there are three main factors common to creating the kind of environment seen in Cambridge, or other UK cities such as Manchester, Bristol, Edinburgh and Oxford: technical talent and IT; commercial ambition and market vision; and capital.
“Cambridge has those three in spades,” he says. “But it is absolutely Darwinian in its emergence, and that’s really hard because many people want to replicate what Cambridge has. I have lost count of the number of visitors who have come to my lab from across the world and tried to understand how it works. It’s really hard to paint that picture, other than to say ‘we don’t really know how to bake the cake but we know you need these three ingredients’” Frazer continues.
Read the full article in Economia.
Illustration: Neil Stevens