This week I visited Accelrys, a University of Cambridge spin-out with a European R&D unit that helps materials scientists share their work. The company is now headquartered in San Diego, and has grown through merger and acquisition of a series of companies from Cambridge, Oxford, Leeds and elsewhere, so we are fortunate that the European unit employs 120 people here. 

The ability to simulate, visualise and share molecular structures with teams around the world has been important in pharmaceuticals for a while. Accelrys is being used in 20 of the top 25 pharmaceutical companies, each with hundreds of expert users producing simulations that may be consumed by tens of thousands of colleagues through web services. It has become the world's favourite way of encoding stereochemical information and storing it in Oracle or Excel. Partners providing workflow and data management for chemicals or pharmaceuticals companies include Microsoft and Deloitte.

The company is enjoying double digit growth in materials modelling, helping oil and gas majors with catalysis and other members like Johnson Matthey on fuel cells. With a lot of the most innovative chemicals companies still located in Germany, a European focus on materials makes sense. They have a pattern of scientific collaborations with mainly European universities working on visualising and simulating molecular structures for materials, including several with the University of Cambridge.

It reminded me of my own doctoral research on ARM, a company that was able to provide common microprocessor architectures to clients around the world because of widespread adoption of Electronic Design Automation software. EDA was developed by big,vertically integrated microchip companies to simulate performance of microchips in design phase, share that information around the world and streamline the workflow to get a product to market faster. But once it was in place and working effectively, much smaller companies like ARM could also play an important role without having to own the fabrication plants.

How will improved simulation change the world of chemicals and materials? We're lucky to have one of the companies driving that change from here, still incorporating Cambridge ideas that change the world.

Businesses like Procter & Gamble probably don't need to come to Cambridge to learn about the principles of Open Innovation, although it turned out they did know of the work going on here on the topic. P&G's success with the approach made the concept popular, and they mandate that 50% of R&D projects need to be carried out externally. Our visitor is just one of 30 scouts around the world constantly meeting with potential partners and signposting them to the right people in the business to assess their technology and scope a potential project.

Obviously nobody was talking in detail in the lunches and dinner breaks about the local companies and University units that they rated most highly. There is simply too much potential overlap between the innovations that a PepsiCo or a Procter & Gamble could exploit. But they were prepared to say how many "hits" they had got from their last visit - initial meetings that resulted in successful collaborations. They were clear that the process of pre-qualifying from among many potential leads locally generates many more hits than they get in equivalent partnering sessions elsewhere in the world - typically 3 or 4 in a two day period. For our Members who kindly sponsored the event, East of England International and Cambridge Science Park, those projects also represent a hit - new investment and new exports from this region.

At the dinner, we heard about Open Innovation from one of our Founder Members who had first come to Cambridge as a visitor on Cambridge Gateway. Philips Research have an active policy of inviting other companies to co-locate with them in Eindhoven - but still chose to locate a research unit here in Cambridge to participate.

Clearly the Corporate Gateway is helping Cambridge ideas to change the world - and I was personally very happy to find each of our guests so satisfied at the end of their visit.

Last night I learned how some of our companies are engaging in China at the Finance Directors Special Interest Group dinner. Finance Directors from Biocair, CDT, CSR, Cambridge Consultants, and Xaar and others were there to share their experience. The presentation by Deloitte highlighted the tight control achieved by the Chinese tax authorities, very different levels of taxation levied on services compared to Intellectual Property, as well as the great range of negotiating styles in different sectors and age ranges of Chinese executives.

It was clear from conversation around the table that Members are helping each other into China. Biocair have just established a Chinese operation, which will allow their pharmaceutical customers there to pay locally to ship samples to other global locations, and they praised the support the Shanghai office of TTP had given to helping them work out how to contract to hire employees there. The informal accounts that participants felt free to give in a closed forum of their peers makes more such collaborations likely.

It is good to see companies sharing experience. It doesn't necessarily happen everywhere. One of the participants had served a company in another town in the region for the past couple of years. He commented that the only networking he had experienced during that time was going into events in London - and said he was very glad to get back to the Cambridge community. We need to find more ways to bring together peers in this way.

My editor tells me that over 200 jobs have been posted or renewed on our jobs board in the last week. Almost half the vacancies are in the software, web development and engineering disciplines, and scientific, research and technical jobs account for almost a further quarter of jobs offered.  Roughly equal numbers of openings in sales and marketing, and in financial, administrative and professional roles - in human relations or quality assurance, for example - make up the total.

The Members who are hiring cover a wide range of industrial sectors: software, electronics, Life Sciences, and scientific instrumentation among others. Clearly the skills required to make these products have a high overlap, or all these different sectors could not fish from the same pool. The jobs they are offering are highly skilled and keep a diverse community busy here. Members can post up to 20 jobs a week for free - but I am sure they wouldn't be doing so if they weren't ready to hire. These companies generally export their products, so if they are anticipating growing markets, that means new money coming into the country and the region.

It is good to be able to share people between such different sectors, and to see the confidence of our Members that they can do more next year.

Last night I had the pleasure of being on a panel with some great start-ups that came out of the Cambridge University Entrepreneurs. The pleasure was an unexpected one - my co-founder Tim Minshall should really have been on the panel, having stayed close and supported the competition through the last 10 years, but he asked me to stand in. Another co-founder Shirley Jamieson was there too. But it was nice to review the impact of the volunteer student-run business plan competition we started with a group of enthusiastic undergraduates 10 years ago.

The numbers were impressive. £0.5M in prizes has led to 40 companies forming that have raised over £30M in investment, the majority of which are still trading and employing 110 people full-time. But more impressive were the personal accounts of the CEOs who had founded as a result of engagement, from Aptivate, Cambridge Temperature Concepts and iSolve. Networking with the blend of technically savvy students and local business people who enter the competition and being mentored by local business angels had clearly helped each of these CEOs build a team and skills. They fielded the questions from a packed lecture theatre with the confidence of teams that are bringing money into the economy through export sales.

Looking out across the audience, I wondered how many more CEOs-in-the-making were sitting there, and how they will contribute to our Cambridge economy. I wondered how many of the employees of the companies started by CUE will form their own companies, just as the employees of Acorn did. The competition was once just a small thing, an idea with some people who believed in it. It is good to see that idea growing.

This week I spent some time with old and new colleagues at the Institute for Manufacturing in their impressive new building on West Cambridge site.

Elizabeth Garnsey presented some data from her group, who have been studying employment growth in the High Technology cluster of 1,500 companies, refining data collected by Cambridgeshire County Council over a 20 year period. The seminar had standing-room only, with a mixture of academics and local business leaders keen to understand more about what they have learned (if you are curious, many of their working papers are available on their website).

Elizabeth steadfastly denied that Cambridge presents a blueprint for the future growth of new jobs in new industries across the UK. I have to say that I agreed, having spent time earlier that afternoon with a visitor from Karlsruhe who was keen to see what good practice we had in encouraging entrepreneurs to start businesses and retaining them in the region. It is hard to extrapolate from a region formed around a large research-intensive university to a post-industrial grouping of many research institutes.

She did however present three local working models for funding R&D and creating employment. She identified these as "smart" ways to fund R&D because the companies concerned didn't need to start out with huge resources, but were still able to control their own destinies and create employment :

1. Technical consultancies such as Cambridge Consultants and TTP which have not generated huge margins, but are responsible for many local patents and spin-offs such as Domino Printing Sciences and Xaar;
2. IP licensing operations such as ARM, which has become a major local employer as well as dominant in designs for most microchips outside of the Personal Computer;
3. Software companies like Red Gate, where short lead times to market and quick customer adoption via internet download have enabled them to build out a product bundle and enter new markets.

She contrasted this with the poorer control gained by inventors and uncertain local employment outcomes of the "spin out, spin up, sell off" model, where investors put in money and look for a quick exit. Obviously, this is just my understanding of her points - you should go directly to her papers at the link above.

What do you think? Do you agree that early exits have less impact? In your own region, what working models are delivering high margin new products and new jobs? What other ways are there to do smart R&D?

Last week, we heard from Gareth Jones about how to lead clever people. He ran Human Resources in both the BBC and Polygram, where clever stars need the organization to achieve their goals but are quite capable of avoiding the authority of anyone who tries to manage them. He started out in research in University of East Anglia, and now works in London Business School.

His message was simple "Be yourself more, with skill". Clever workers need to believe their leader, so role playing and facades just weaken their contribution. Their leaders need skill to both show strength, but also reveal weaknesses where they need their team to help. His best analogy was that of the parent who both genuinely cares about their childs' development yet knows how to achieve distance when discipline is needed.

Gareth talked to two different groups that day. In the afternoon, he worked with a small group of 12 CEOs and Division Heads in a peer-group learning session of the Cambridge Leaders Academy. In the evening he addressed a much larger group of 240+ academics and business people from a very wide range of local organizations including Abcam, Addenbrookes, ARM, Aveva, CSR, Hays, Microsoft, Medical Research Council, Mills & Reeve, Nokia, Qualcomm, Philips, Red Gate, TTP, and Xaar. It was good to see that so many of our members care about improving the way they lead. I was very happy that the clever people I lead in our team had managed to get the word out to so many great organizations.

As Gareth told us, 7 out of 10 new jobs that will be created in the UK will be in the "clever" economy. We are lucky in Cambridge to have such clever skilled people - and lucky that our leaders want to raise their game together.

Last night I met with a friend from Deep Visuals, Alan Payne, at the Cafe Networking event we run for growing companies seeking staff and for jobseekers among our membership. I last really talked to him on my first day in Cambridge Network this Spring, when Kodak announced that they were closing their Cambridge unit with the loss of 21 jobs. Alan was already an old friend from my work in London, and I had spent time with him there talking about the places to live around Cambridge. So it was a shock to see the unit closing, driven by a decision by Eastman Kodak to consolidate all activity to the US HQ. We offered help, both through advice on CV writing delivered by The Learning Collaboration and through our own networking events. From Alan's account, East of England Development Agency and other groups who had helped them relocate to the region were also very helpful. However the context of hiring freezes in many Cambridge companies made the situation seem bleak.

The unit finally closed at the end of June, and, due in no small part to the job-seeking training and busy networking, already 17 of the 21 staff are employed, mostly in Cambridge. 2 new companies have been formed in Cambridge. One of these, Deep Visuals,  has now moved to larger offices and taken on new staff. For the 4 software programmers developing ways for consumers to engage with photo collections that they or a museum have captured, their job has not changed that much. For Alan, who served Kodak after his initial apprenticeship as Laboratory Head and later Research Director until this Spring, the job is very different. A chemist by training, he is not involved in software development, but basically does everything else ! Like many CEO’s of start-ups he has discovered that he acts as office manager, operations manager, HR manager and CEO. He needs to sell, and he needs to make alliances with other companies to pursue opportunities. He finds the Network a useful way to make those contacts. He is happy that he is based in Cambridge.

Earlier this week I met with Sam Weller at the Greater Cambridge Partnership International Forum, where we heard ARM present on how they had achieved scale economies by sharing training purchasing through the The Learning Collaboration. Sam wants to help more companies move to Cambridge. As Director of Kodak's European Research Division, he organized the consolidation of several research units across Europe. He understands the priorities of corporate Foreign Direct Investors, concerned to find good staff close by, and the concerns of incoming workers, keen to see alternative careers if the risky business of technology innovation doesn't work out. Networks like Cambridge Network, Eastern Region Biotech Initiative, and Cambridge Wireless make those communities visible, and give incomers the confidence to move. Programmed events like the Cambridge Corporate Gateway make it cost-effective for corporate scouts to make initial contacts.

Networks are more resilient than any one of their nodes, because activity can route around a break. We look forward to seeing you this Autumn and helping you make those connections.

What do your clients really value about the thing you make? How do you organize the technologies and capabilities that you have into products that really match up to the competition?

On Thursday night at 6 pm in Red Gate, product managers from Aveva, Cambridge Broadband Networks, DisplayLink, Imerge, Qualcomm, Philips Research, Red Gate and others will get together to discuss a new Product Management Special Interest Group.

Product Management drives new product development, delivering higher margins and differentiating the company. Planning, marketing and co-ordinating with other functions to deliver new products on the timescales promised in the company roadmap are skills that technical staff often have to learn 'on the job'. So a lot of these people have acquired the title of Product Manager because that was what their company needed from them - but still want to improve the art they are learning.