And there’s another thing ……. why did you bring your business to NI? 

Like so many of my generation I’d been ignoring Northern Ireland all my life.   Standing in a builder’s hut on a wet and windy construction site at the far end of a derelict shipyard in Belfast I was, in 2003, quite prepared to believe that all my stereo-typical pre-conceptions of this place were true – even down to the legendary ability of the natives to speak in riddles.

Then, bang on cue, the Clerk of Works said, “Looking back, we were so forward looking” - and took me outside into the wind and rain to show me just exactly what he meant.

I saw him again last week.  John Beattie was, with a gaggle of excited school-kids, peering through the stainless steel railings at a very long hole in the ground.  “How tall was it?  I’ll tell you how tall it was.  It was as tall as that building just there” he said, and waved his hand towards the new Citigroup offices - a building graced with three columns, each matching the height and angle of the wave-cutting bows of the White Star ships, Britannic, Olympic and the Titanic. 

Back when the Thompson dock was built, Belfast was making the largest ships in the world.  It was the centre of the UK’s rope making industry and much more besides.  Late 1800’s Belfast was a confident powerhouse born of the industrial revolution and well-able to invest in outlandish schemes like giant dry docks for vessels of unsurpassed size crammed full of novel technologies.  

About 10 years before my first visit to Northern Ireland I’d had the great privilege of meeting the technology pioneer and Nobel prize winner Arno Penzias.  He was retiring from his job as research director of Bell Labs.  He had just published his final book and delivered a brilliant lecture in Westminster for the Parliamentary Information Technology Committee.

In this lecture he described the technological journey that all industrialised economies have taken – a journey presented as comprising three distinct era: Quantity (what we call the industrial revolution and automation), Quality (the post-war transformation of process management and quality control) and, finally, the era of technological Harmony – the emergence of standards for interoperability and systems integration.

Rendered down to the bare essentials Arno was talking about a technological evolution that has taken us from (1) making things, (2) making things that work and (3) making things that work with other things.

The economy of Northern Ireland has followed the same journey - but on the way to today’s ‘harmony’ there have been a few diversions.   Why had I and many of my generation been ignoring Northern Ireland ?   Frankly, it was too much trouble.  And, to an outsider, it seemed that the economy had few of the cross-cutting linkages between different sectors and enterprises that are at the very root of collaborative innovation.  Isolation re-melded as silo-nation.

For decades, Northern Ireland’s  talent and enterprise had been exported.  The ambition of well-educated youth was to (a) get a degree and (b) get out – sometimes in the reverse order – and (c) promise to return, maybe, perhaps, one day, possibly, who knows? 

Now, more than a decade on from the Good Friday agreement, that tide has turned.  Northern Ireland is being recognised as a place of ambition, a destination, a great place to live and work, to make money and to invest in.  People are voting with their feet. Outsiders can see a much bigger picture emerging.  It takes time to re-energize economies and, although the new bigger picture may not yet be fully recognised across the community, there’s a real buzz, a new confidence, about the place – and, shockingly, thousands of curious tourists are disembarking from giant cruise ships to enjoy the discovery!

The economy that’s emerging is also shockingly different to that of the old silo-nation.  It’s an economy where investment plans recognise their mutual interdependencies.

You can plan a creative campus in the heart of the 21^st century Titanic Quarter re-development not just to serve the nascent media industry but because it naturally fits with the science park, the tourism projects, the local pool of craft skills and the education campus – each living off and benefiting the others.

You can launch the European Centre for Connected Health not just because it will attract inward investment in high-tech products or because it’s an area of research interest for the universities, but because it’s also exactly what is needed to boost the delivery of healthcare for the whole community.

You can deploy a new link into a nearby transatlantic cable not just because the finance sector needs lower round trip delays for State-side transactions, or because the Creative Campus can then compete with California for animation projects, but also because GB and other parts of Europe need the backup resources of high quality secure data centres powered by NI’s green energy. 

You can move the Belfast Metropolitan College to Queen’s Island not just because it has a convenient space but because it adds essential vitality to the mix of business, residential and leisure spaces that are key to building new century urban environments that really work.

You can encourage deployment of advanced communications technologies like mobile broadband not just because they are needed across umpteen sectors within the country but because we can differentiate the place as a global hub for new sorts of business – most of which have not yet been dreamt of. 

This new and sustainable Northern Ireland economy is about diversity, enterprise and innovation.  But above all that it is about making better connections – not just at home but around the world, and especially with those whose roots may have once have been here.

Arno Penzias won his Nobel prize not for his research work in telecoms but for Astro-physics. He well understood the power of cross-cultural development.  So, what would Arno Penzias make of Northern Ireland’s innovative energy?  He would I’m sure see the parallels with his classification of technological development trends and his era of inter-operability and technological harmony.

This country is not just investing in things that work.  It is investing in things that work with other things.

From relative isolation to well-connected collaborative innovation within two decades - and now, almost everyday at the Thompson Dock, you can see a new generation of school kids getting a great lesson on how to look back in order to grasp the idea of being forward looking. 

Does that answer your question?

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Notes:

'Harmony:  business, technology & life after paperwork' by Dr.Arno Penzias, published by Harper Business 1995, ISBN 0-88730-724-8

Picture shows Dr Arno Penzias in discussion with the founder of Groupe Intellex at the House of Lords, 1996. 

See also European Connected Health Campus - www.echcampus.com