TECH CITY UK

Abstract

The article draws the main lessons from the evolution of Tech City, the IT-business cluster in the UK, and from government policy towards its support. The authors focus on the evolution of Tech City UK from small IT-business cluster in the East London to national success story of supporting IT-business growth across the whole territory of UK. The evolution of Tech City UK has gone through three distinctive stages, from Tech City 1.0 when East London housed small number of IT companies to Tech City 3.0 when it became a development institution working with all British cities. All significant tools applied in Tech City in order to support IT-business startups are observed and summarized. It is demonstrated that government has increased its support to the Tech City UK but its success is based first of all on natural advantages created in East London’s IT cluster. Then it developed due to favorable economic conditions as a whole. In order to apply these observations to Russia’s modernization agenda Tech City UK is compared to two leading Russian projects – “Innopolis” (Tatarstan) and “Skolkovo” (Moscow). The benchmarking has shown that “Innopolis” and “Skolkovo” are more “green field” projects than Tech City UK. This means that Russian innovation centers have much weaker historic background. “Innopolis” is being developed independently though relies on regional and federal authorities. “Skolkovo”, based closely to the Russian largest Moscow IT cluster, is benefiting from competences originated in thousands of local IT companies in Moscow and around. Lessons of Tech City UK allow to conclude that “Skolkovo” would benefit in case of more targeted support of IT industry while “Innopolis” faces a more difficult task of entering the international market.