In July, Manchester Digital held the first ever Chair’s Dinner, hosted by Graham Benson, Chair of Manchester Digital and CIO of rentalcars.com.
The director-level dinner, supported by Adalta was a huge success with 30 of the region’s biggest businesses in the room to discuss the role that they play in developing the ecosystem in the North West.
At the beginning of the evening, Graham Benson posed questions for discussion and outlined the importance of organisations such as Manchester Digital, who draw together the digital and tech communities. He stressed how important it was that the companies in the room work with us to deliver solutions around topics such as skills and infrastructure and help to create a cohesive strategy in which to attract talent to the region.
Without exception, the businesses in the room which included Valtech, Country Attire, AccessPay, Moneysupermarket, Autotrader and Barclays agreed that they do have an important role to play in developing the ecosystem here and that there is a responsibility upon them to collaborate better and provide resource to smaller businesses.
The first point for discussion was why being part of the North West ecosystem is important to the success of your business. Many of the attendees recognised that having access to the plethora of tech start ups, grass roots community groups and meetups that exist in the region helps them to innovate and attract new talent. Businesses think being involved in the community helps with their talent retention and is seen by some employees as an additional benefit.
The guests were also asked to consider whether we need to create more collaborative relationships between large organisations and small businesses and how it would benefit both parties. Some felt that the North West would be ahead of the curve in this respect as this sort of collaboration doesn’t happen in other cities. It was also noted that all businesses would benefit from an investment in attracting talent to the region; the existence of larger employers provides ‘line of sight’ of a multi company career and career development.
To round off the evening, we asked our guests to consider whether there is a danger that we will ‘overheat’, with more and more employers choosing to move their operations to Manchester. It was widely acknowledged that there is a danger of this but by encouraging technology adoption / interest at a younger age and offering more internal training, businesses might combat this problem. It is also the responsibility of every business to be careful and respectful and focus on staff retention.
The most commonly occurring thread that came from the discussion was that businesses must collaborate better, both on a local and national level to ensure a cohesive approach to the problems that our region and industry faces.
Chair’s Dinners will be held quarterly and are a new membership benefit for our corporate members. Each dinner will focus on a topic from our 5 areas of focus.The content will be blogged and the opinions gathered used to develop further products and services that will help all of our member’s businesses grow and develop.
Reviewing the output, Chair of Manchester Digital Graham Benson commented that “Manchester Digital exists for its members, so we are keen to capitalise on the output from this session; we will be continuing discussions with both the dinner attendees and other large scale businesses in the region about how to best nurture the evolving digital ecosystem in the North West”.
