Knowledge Peers

G-Cloud:  Government ICT procurement and the opportunity for SMEs

We all know about the speed of change in digital technology. We see it around us every day. Cloud computing is at the heart of these changes, and has brought about a step change in the economics and sustainability of Information and Communication Technology.

UK Government is committed to the adoption of cloud computing, and through its G-Cloud procurement framework<... Read more

The Impact of Cloud IT on business working and culture

Wildbore & Gibbons LLP April 2013

Background

Wildbore & Gibbons LLP were established in 1887 and with such a long history serving a client base of very diverse brands we have certainly experienced many changes to both our business and our markets.

The world of trade mark advice is a very dynamic one. Trade marks are valuable e... Read more

Over the past few months, the rate at which money is flowing towards crowdfunding platforms has accelerated noticeably. This could be a temporary blip – one of the regular swings between excess supply and demand that you’d expect to see in markets such as these that are growing very rapidly. But the forces driving this cash towards the lending platforms, both consumer and business sites, are p... Read more

On 11 April 2013, we are staging another Charity Leaders’ Exchange event (click for details). This one has generated particularly significant and rapid interest. We have hardly started marketing the event, ... Read more

When running your own business there is always going to be a significant element of business development – I have found that if you stand still on this critical component of business for five minutes, you can be left behind without even realising it.

This has been especially relevant in the difficult economic times when businesses are competing for a share of a crowded market space. There are however a number of businesses that have gone against the trend and ... Read more

For those who watch the world of alternative finance, the past few weeks have hugely strengthened the view that this industry – a growing wave of non-bank organisations from start-ups to listed PLCs that provide debt and equity to small businesses – is approaching an inflection point. December saw two big announcements, both of which will bring alternative finance further into the mainstream, helping to speed its growth and reinforce its credibility.

First, it ... Read more

Over the last few months, I have found myself having more and more discussions around cloud based systems. This may be to do with my involvement with Xero, a leading online accounting system, as people see the benefit of this system and start hunting around for other cloud solutions to their various needs.

Just look... Read more

 A business breakfast organised by Harvey Nash – October 2012

At 8am in the morning (ugh), the great and the good of the engineering world (well some of them anyway) plus me, were arriving at the Lanesborough Hotel in Knightsbridge, central London, for a free breakfast. For those of you who don’t know the Lanesborough, when it opened some years back, it announced that it was London’s first 7 star hotel! Far be it from me to comment on that claim, but i... Read more

Many thanks to Paul Grant for writing this blog. If you'd like to learn more about alternative funding routes, why not come along to our event this Friday 5th October -  The Exchange 2012

Small businesses are the life-blood of our economy, they employ nearly half of the people in this country and deserve to be seen as the vital force that they are.

Yet in terms of technology, small and medium enterprises – SMEs - are often seen as tagging along, late adopters and behind the times.

With the advent of cloud computing that no longer needs to be the case.

With the availability of fully integrated cloud based IT ... Read more

It is becoming clear that a defining feature of a healthy 21^st century labour market is its flexibility. As many developed economies have struggled their way through recessions, it is those countries with the greatest level of flexibility in their labour markets that have enjoyed the lowest levels of unemployment. Germany eschewed mass lay-offs as output fell and instead pursued policies that encouraged employers to retain workers but on fewer hours. This sort of progr... Read more

By Russell Rothstein

Follow Russell on twitter @RussRothsteinIT

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In a time of government cuts to careers guidance and enterprise, and the removal of statutory work experience, it is vital that businesses get involved in schools and invest in the future. With youth unemployment reaching record highs, one topic has been hotly debated in recent times: Are young people employable and ready for the world of work? 

What is becoming apparent is the need for students to develop real employability skills and be ready for the wor... Read more

The meeting on “The Third Industrial Revolution – Industrial Policy and Disruptive Technologies” took place at the House of Lords yesterday. Committee Room G was packed – standing room only for the late arrivals (like me!). It was run by POST – the Parliamentary Office of Science & Technology. On their website, they say that POST is “Parliament's in-house source of independent, balanced and accessible analysis of public policy issues related to science and technology”.

... Read more

For many years now there have been repeated press attacks on non-‘Doms’ and frankly I don’t fully understand what all the fuss is about.

Dom Perignon, whilst often the preserve of the rich is not the only illustrious champagne available. Perrier Jouet, Krug and Bollinger are, in my view, equally worthy and interesting. So being a non-Dom fan in my book is all well and good!

Now that I have got the ridiculous misinterpretation out of the way l... Read more

Do you know what your customers are saying about you on Twitter, or Facebook? If someone makes an adverse remark, do you ignore it or respond to it? Is it a trending topic or a one-off to be lost amongst the zillions of tweets being posted all the time? Can you spot and highlight the good remarks?

Twitter now generates over 340 million tweets per day - almost double the amount of six months earlier. No wonder people call the Twitter data stream “firehose”. Face... Read more

By Russell Rothstein

Follow Russell on twitter @RussRothsteinIT

 “All of the vendors sound the same.”

“Your competitor claims to offer all of the same features you just mentioned.”

“How do I know what you are selling is really special?”

Sound familiar?

If you work for a technology vendor you likely h... Read more

Usage is up: 242% increase over 5 years to 29 minutes a day per person (Ofcom in Jul 2012)

Rich, functional experiences: 51.3% of consumers are using a Smartphone in the UK, up 17% in one year (Dec 2010 - Dec 2011, comScore MobiLens)

 Increased trust to transact over mobile: a 584% increase in mobile ecommerce is forecasted between 2010 and 2012 (internetretailing.net).

The technology super-powers understan... Read more

Cloud Computing appears to be brilliant yet baffling in equal measure. Perhaps this is because it offers solutions to problems that most businesses are not even sure they have, and untold rewards with seemingly uncertain risks.

I’ve been spending quite a bit of time recently with CEOs talking about Social Media and its impact on their business.  Most conversations tend to  begin with “My marketing guy tells me that I need to do it, and that our firm needs to do it, but I just don’t understand why”. In most instances they’d really rather “it” just went away so they could continue with business as usual and not have something else on their plate that they needed to a... Read more

Despite an unclear business outlook, SMEs (companies with less than 2,000 employees) will continue to invest in business applications and SaaS, with key areas of investment including CRM, analytics, mobility, and industry-specific software. PAC expects the SME market for business application and SaaS to grow to over £2.1bn by 2015, which is a faster rate than in the large enterprise segment.

Fast-... Read more

Many thanks to Paul Grant for writing this blog. If you'd like to learn more about crowd funding, take a look at our topic hub for The Exchange 2012

In June www.escapethecity.org raised £600k on the crowd fun... Read more

Over the last few years I've had numerous conversations about the cloud in all its forms with businesses large and small. Having worked at one of the leading Information Security vendors in a previous life, conversations inevitably turn to the security (and associated but not the same, availability) of information. This is where conversations start to diverge rapidly.

                    ... Read more

Many thanks to Russell Rothstein for writing this blog. If you'd like to learn more about Cloud or Digital Business, take a look at our topic hub for The Exchange 2012.

In today's economy with sluggish job creation, there's much talk about the change in skills required in today's workforce. Drill down into the world of information technology, and there is an even greater shift happenin... Read more

It is all too easy to get comfortable in business and forget that innovation can take many forms. It is not just about the big R&D spend each year. Innovation means many things to different organisations however the context I wish to talk about is the Innovation starting with a small ‘i’.

Innovation is a creative word that means thinking out of the box in all areas of the business. Everyone in the organisation is perfectly capable of making really useful suggestions to ... Read more

Beer and Partners is not one of those brands that does what it says on the tin; there was no beer at their London Investment Fair in Pall Mall last week (although to be fair there was wine.)

The business angel network has been running the Fair, connecting investors wishing to invest between £50,000 and £3m with promising companies, for well over a ... Read more

This entry describes the case for a fresh approach to enterprise financing, particularly the so-called equity gap. It proposes an instrument called royalty funding, which would enable effective owners and managers to hire risk capital, rather than be hired by it.

The equity gap is widely seen as one of the most intractable financing problems facing the start-up business and the small and mediu... Read more

It is true to say that managing change and growth is exciting and fills the air with optimism. However at times it is also stressful for all concerned not least because the change element feels unsettling for employees who are used to the past.

Every seven years all the cells in the human body are replaced (not all at once – thank God!) and we sort of go through a rebirth allowing our bodies to fight on! Business is similar. Re-morphing is essential to stay relevant to the ... Read more

BCG predicts that the percentage of UK spending on online advertising (of all advertising) will increase from 28.9% in 2010 to 37.3% in 2016 - not a bad performance for a channel that simply did not exist twenty years ago.

According to BCG, SMEs who use the web effectively (“high web users”) grow and add jobs more quickly than those who do not.

Already 80% of “high web users” use Search Engine Optimization” (SEO). But only 16% o... Read more

Bob was right all along (no – not ‘The Builder’ – I mean Dylan)! Those never ending shifting sands that we do not see each day have moved the desert further on and a new wilderness, just like our markets, has emerged. But it’s not just about the markets, many of which are limping along like a three legged crab! Because world markets have become much more volatile it is time to re-evaluate the typical business route to access foreign markets. It has to be a multi-channel approach to succ... Read more

Today we had a visit from Ed Miliband and Ken Livingstone. They had a tour of Kennington Park, owned, developed and managed by Workspace Group, home to lots of interesting, growing businesses. People seem to like working here and it’s a hub for sharing ideas, business and resources.

Read more

I'm having breakfast with Ed and Ken tomorrow morning (Monday 30th April). Seriously, I got invited yesterday and will have the chance to chat to them over coffee and croissants. All thoughts on questions would be very welcome, and I'll update this blog tomorrow once I've met them. We're even taking the KP video team along.

More from me later, but do add questions to this blog!

Stakeholder engagement can trace its origins back to the early participatory movements of the 1960s. People in environmental and community groups wanted to have a say in the way that their local areas were being changed. Governments and community leaders realised that they had to make sense of the process as neither the mechanisms of protest nor of public inquiries worked.

In particular the Sherry Arnstein, a town planner from the USA developed the Ladder of Participat... Read more

Last month I was a panellist in a debate at NFPTweetup about the role of digital media and how it can help tackle the challenges facing the sector. (For those of you who haven’t been, NFPTweetup is a fantastic quarterly meet up for charity sector professionals with an interest in digital and social media). It was a really interesting evening and it’s led to a light bulb moment for... Read more

Leap trains young people to help them manage conflict in their lives so that it doesn’t deteriorate into destructive behaviour such as violence, self-harming or low aspirations.  They not only go on to communicate better, with a greater sense of self-direction but they also learn to confront conflict in their schools, prisons, families and our communities.  We’ve lots of evidence about the powerful impact of our training like better attainment at school and reduced offending.&... Read more

A recent report by the Boston Consulting Group shows that the UK's online industry is set to grow at an annual rate of 11%. The UK is ranked top of all G20 nations in terms of the amount the internet contributes to its GDP.

It also shows that if the internet were isolated as a sector in its own right, then it would be the 5th largest in the UK - bigger than healthcare, education and construction.