Start-up numbers growing?

The UK is still a massively attractive place for investing, Simon Walker, chief executive of the British Private Equity and Venture Capital Association said recently that the private equity industry in this country constitutes 60 per cent of the European market.

And the move to make money out of ideas is getting into the mainstream media, with the BBC’s Money Programme taking a look at “Britain’s Brilliant Ideas” recently. But this is about ordinary people with ideas trying to turn them into businesses, they are unlikely to be able to do the design, prototyping or research themselves.

Yet there are more and more of them. The Intellectual Property Office says that the number of patent applications from individuals is increasing, and could account for 30 per cent of applications in 2007.

There is the popularising effect of the successful programme Dragon’s Den to take into account here. But in our world is there a rising number of high-technology and electronics start-ups?

Having watched the number of technology start-up firms quite closely for about 8 years now, it feels that there is no great surge at the moment in the number of hardware technology start-ups, but rather a steady stream. But what feels different is that we are getting better at sorting wheat from the chaff and then backing the good ones.

The Silicon South West network is definitely setting a standard for this sort of activity. The organisation is also currently considering extending to a Cambridge version of its activities and it is currently fast-tracking five start-ups:

Art of Silicon
aTempo
Power Oasis
Silicon Basis
Systems4Silicon