[Music]
good morning everyone and welcome to
Coventry my talk is from hero to zero
and it’s talking about how we might
reboot Coventry in the future as we
drive at the a45 towards Coventry from
the South you see a sign to bagging ttyn
you don’t usually go left but imagine
this time that you do and you drive
through a corner of northern
Warwickshire that eventually takes you
to the Lunt fort and that’s where my
story about Coventry begins the Romans
arrived here around about 60 ad about a
hundred years after Julius Caesar landed
in England its primary purpose was to
pote was to support the northern
territorial expansions that the Roman
army wanted to achieve at this time what
is now Coventry was part of the Old
Forest of Arden with plentiful supplies
of oak and natural resources and to the
south in the Feldon area there was
plentiful high-quality land where arable
products and livestock would be kept and
the food for the Roman legions could be
developed at this time that was about
all that was needed to survive in that
world plus of course it was useful to
have a little bit of knowledge about
military might and how to survive in
challenging environments the Romans
stayed here for many hundreds of years
and as was their way they built lasting
infrastructure that had massive
long-term impact and like everywhere
that the Romans conquered by the time
that they the empire collapsed England
went into a period of fairly dramatic
decline as nobody else could match the
technological and scientific skills that
the Romans had then during the 8th
century the Saxons moved into
Warwickshire and made good use of the
remaining Roman legacy they started
mixed economy farming and over time the
beginnings of a prosperous wool industry
started and Coventry was back on the
Christianity was a very important part
of that society and monasteries and
convents followed bringing advanced
Civic structures and leadership which
provide this provided a platform from
which further development could take
place by the 12th century country had
its own castle a symbol of power and
success but this wasn’t to last as a
hundred years later it had gone however
by that time a vibrant and successful
trading community had emerged and the
city that we now know had started to
take shape aided by its central access
Coventry continued to grow and prosper
and over the next few hundred years we
saw glass making agriculture timber
harvesting textile manufacture and other
things all generating wealth and
actually making Coventry into a
prosperous City by the time of the
peasants revolt in the 14th century
Coventry was one of the largest cities
in England it had its own town walls it
protected to protect its houses it shops
and its marketplaces and it had its own
mint where it produced its own currency
this was clearly a sophisticated and
vibrant society and one that was the
leading light in in both England and
Europe moving forward then to children
Stuart’s times things started to go
backwards a little bit from what much of
this time Coventry stagnated and growth
slowed this was arguably caused by
strong guilds restrictive practices
being ability to expand be behind the
city walls that were there to protect
the people but in reality the challenges
were much deeper as seafarers opened up
new worlds creating new markets new
opportunities and new competition both
at home and overseas political
instability was caused by Henry the
eighth and the dissolution of the
monasteries and of course after that the
English Civil War which ended in the
beheading of Charles the first and the
end of monarchical rule reflecting
breaks it isn’t really that much of a
challenge
sometimes the legacy of success is
complacency and those with vested
interests don’t want to change and they
often resist that change and I think
that there was some ingredients of that
taking place too however by the mid 17th
century the home-based silk ribbon
weaving industry began to flourish and
grow and over the next 200 years this
became the bedrock of the economy and
the major employer of the city later
factories were developed with larger
machines in some of which could be seen
in the museum now which was sold and
products were sold globally eventually
though cheaper imports again began to
come in and this industry began to
decline but already a new technological
sector had begun to appear and that was
the English clock and watchmaking
industry which was based in Coventry and
I remember going around Hill Fields in
the 1970s and looking up at the
watchmakers houses before they were
knocked down and seeing the big workshop
windows that were needed to provide the
natural light to perform intricate tasks
of making watches and cloths this was a
fragmented home-based industry with
brilliant craftsmen engineers
technicians and salesmen they sold their
products internationally and Coventry
proceeded Switzerland as the world
leader in watchmaking but by the early
20th century this industry too went into
decline as new competition came but
again another generation of industries
have begun to emerge and that was in the
transport sector a sector that was to
make Coventry the envy of Europe by the
end of World War one Coventry had to do
had created the largest cycle industry
in the world and the expertise gained in
mass production led easily to the
manufacture of motorcycles cars and
tractors throughout the 20th century and
of course these skills and prepper and
knowledge were used to support the war
preparations in the late 1930s a
consequence of which the city was
carpet-bombed in 1941 overnight the
grand old city was zeroed leaving little
that didn’t need rebuilding there the
remains of the old cthey
of course could be seen today so after
1945 the city had to be totally
redesigned and rebuilt and
simultaneously reshaped and rebooted it
soon became one of the biggest and most
modern car manufacturing cities in the
world making it the Detroit of the UK
however again this success was not to
last forever as global competition
struck newly developing nations were
able to design better cars
cheaper and more efficiently the
engineering expertise and skilled
workforce that had so long provided
competitive advantage to Coventry began
to be less important as was the
innovation in manufacturing processes
that started to look dated and for the
ensuring forty years
Coventry has been relatively in the
doldrums but as we’ve seen it’s happened
before and it’s always been able to pick
itself up and it can do that again so in
a few moments we’ve seen that Coventry
has a long history of change based and
change based on the twin forces of
success and failure but it’s always been
able to move on the keys to this were
innovation inventiveness ingenuity
imagination and investment built into
the culture and psychology of the people
it’s always the people that eventually
rise to the challenges and come up with
the solutions to to the situation of the
day and as King Canute found it’s
impossible to resist the force of the
tide the ability to adapt to adopt both
physically and mentally are critical to
surviving and thriving this infers
working in new and different ways and
this can be tricky of challenging and it
creates winners and losers and the key
to success is to provide sustainable
advantage through nurturing and
harvesting the talents of the people
history demonstrates that in to survive
in difficult times
imaginative civic and political
leadership are critical to navigating
the unknown one of the major challenges
that we now face is that the region’s
often
fewer large anchor organizations with
which to make decisions
this quote consequently reduces the
capacity and capability to provide the
consistent visionary leadership that we
need we often talk about knowledge-based
economies and economists of knowledge
perhaps implying that the modern era is
the first to think in this way yet we
know from history but Minoan Roman Greek
Egyptian Aztec and many other
civilizations have been fantastic at
creating and applying new knowledge to
add value to their societies and
cultures but what has changed is the
speed of change what used to take a
decade century or millennium can now
happen in days months and years and that
creates a huge new challenge in the way
that we do things and design solutions
too often our procedures and systems are
over engineered and outlived their
usefulness a quick digression to
dinosaurs or rather their extinction
their strength eventually became their
weakness their end was fast
ugly and uncompromising they became
extinct because they were in agile
unadaptable and inflexible put simply
they became unfit for purpose as their
living environment changed the for
dinosaurs today potentially think of our
large ankle organizations and businesses
of tomorrow and that includes our
universities arguably they should adapt
before they actually need to but it’s
not easy to persuade modern-day leaders
to change drastically if it’s not an
immediate imperative however the biggest
can and do fall the fastest and the
hardest remember Nokia blockbuster
Hoover VHS Enron toys-r-us
Woolworths and the list goes on they
went from hero to zero very quickly in
1851 cardinal henry newman asked a
question as the industrial revolution
was progressing what is the idea of a
university up until then the purpose of
university was to support theological
learning and the
training of clergy and priests behind
the question what he was really asking
is is there now a more important role
for our universities as the population
shifted from the countryside to the town
and as work moved from fields into
factories and as new communications
opened up new markets far away he was
asking whether universities themselves
needed rebooting fast forward 170 years
are the same questions not as pertinent
now as they were then we have moved by
periods of industrialization through
automation – digitization all with
equally profound social economic and
political effects new ways of doing
things disrupt the old and at alarming
speed and its entrepreneurs using
innovation as their primary tool that
ruthlessly exploit those moments in time
they rapidly assess the new environment
looking to provide new solutions to to
existing and old problems current
challenges including aging populations
economic and political migration social
and economic inequalities broken
Democrat and democratic processes global
warming and the consequential economic
environmental damage to name but a few
these are not only the issues of today
but very much those of tomorrow and we
need enterprising and entrepreneur
entrepreneurial people to find
successful solutions to those problems
these won’t be easy nor painless I would
argue that we need to do much more to
nurture and develop these changemakers
as Einstein commented if we do what
we’ve always done
we’ll get what we’ve always got and that
becomes a really big problem if that
doesn’t work our universities and
colleges can and do play a role in this
already challenging conventional wisdom
and orthodoxes and creating new models
but as ever there’s more they can do and
that includes new ways for identifying
encouraging developing and nurturing
those the might have an idea
where
can make a difference and it doesn’t
matter where they come from age class
culture gender and educational
attainment should pose no barriers
Coventry has two big and very successful
universities Warwick and Coventry both
are shapers influencers and leaders and
in many any complimentary ways combined
they have 70,000 students currently in
the city and they have millions of
alumni these are potentially underused
assets and both could play both direct
and indirect roles in regenerating
Coventry in their missed will be could
be entrepreneurs both social and
economic and other highly enterprising
people and there will be those have
already found success who might advise
mentor and support those that are up and
coming
somehow a modern university needs to be
available as a connector for life
building mutely supportive
intergenerational bridges the glue that
holds complex components of modern
society together we need to give local
people hope and realization that they
can influence and shape their own and
their city’s destiny and their forebears
have shown this in the past
I’ll finish my call my talk with three
calls to action these hopefully might
give lasting substance to what Coventry
rebooted really means firstly provide a
free citizens Enterprise hub which
welcomes all would be and could be
entrepreneurs and also establish a free
and ongoing ideation program there helps
to shape those ideas secondly link
entrepreneurial academics to all schools
and colleges in Coventry to provide
expertise encouragement and support
and at the same time establish a
postgraduate teacher Enterprise
Development Program that up skills our
future enterprise educators finally to
organize a citywide competition for the
big idea with significant and meaningful
prizes and to provide at least ten ten
thousand pound bursaries to support
entrepreneurial
future stars with an innovative Coventry
rebooted entrepreneurial program
actually that’s my first wish list I’m
laying down monitor ball and measurable
metrics but there’s a couple of other
things I think are really important it’s
really important that we focus on those
already in work employed or looking to
progress and this is predicated on two
core facts firstly that our population
is aging and retirement ages are rising
and secondly in terms of productivity we
are we lag behind our global competitors
we have forgotten the rhetoric of
lifelong learning and we need to get it
back part-time numbers have fallen off a
cliff in universities and that cannot be
a good thing there are many unplanned
reasons for this I think universities
need to look long and hard at how they
can deal with those reasons as we all
live and work longer in a technology
propelled environment we’re going to
need to constantly rescale and upscale
our workforce and our society this could
create vibrant new markets for
universities and something in the future
I think they will need without this we
will never achieve sustainable
improvements in our productivity we’re
going to need newly designed anytime
anyplace any pace access to learning
that’s related to work and work
experience for most employees they now
work in small businesses we need new
ways of organizing high quality training
for those small businesses as they can’t
do it on their own and finally within
our universities and colleges I would
like to see enterprise and
entrepreneurship engagement rewarded in
the same way that researchers
encouraging our academics to invest in a
clear career pathway that was so
critical to our future well-being on
reflection this starts to frame a
response to the question that Cardinal
Newman asked all of those years ago what
are our universities for the city of
culture 2020 one creates an opportunity
to reframe an agenda at for the next 20
last years it gives us the chance to
reboot the heart and soul of a grand old
city I hope that during this talk you’ve
learned something new about your city
and perhaps inspired to find something
out more by visiting the free museums or
looking around the environment about
doing so will inspire civic pride and
engagement and encourage all of you to
proudly and loudly say we’re from
Coventry and we love our city working
together we can achieve all of this and
I look forward to seeing the impact as
soon as 2020 – thank you very much
[Applause] [Music]
good morning everyone and welcome to
Coventry my talk is from hero to zero
and it’s talking about how we might
reboot Coventry in the future as we
drive at the a45 towards Coventry from
the South you see a sign to bagging ttyn
you don’t usually go left but imagine
this time that you do and you drive
through a corner of northern
Warwickshire that eventually takes you
to the Lunt fort and that’s where my
story about Coventry begins the Romans
arrived here around about 60 ad about a
hundred years after Julius Caesar landed
in England its primary purpose was to
pote was to support the northern
territorial expansions that the Roman
army wanted to achieve at this time what
is now Coventry was part of the Old
Forest of Arden with plentiful supplies
of oak and natural resources and to the
south in the Feldon area there was
plentiful high-quality land where arable
products and livestock would be kept and
the food for the Roman legions could be
developed at this time that was about
all that was needed to survive in that
world plus of course it was useful to
have a little bit of knowledge about
military might and how to survive in
challenging environments the Romans
stayed here for many hundreds of years
and as was their way they built lasting
infrastructure that had massive
long-term impact and like everywhere
that the Romans conquered by the time
that they the empire collapsed England
went into a period of fairly dramatic
decline as nobody else could match the
technological and scientific skills that
the Romans had then during the 8th
century the Saxons moved into
Warwickshire and made good use of the
remaining Roman legacy they started
mixed economy farming and over time the
beginnings of a prosperous wool industry
started and Coventry was back on the
Christianity was a very important part
of that society and monasteries and
convents followed bringing advanced
Civic structures and leadership which
provide this provided a platform from
which further development could take
place by the 12th century country had
its own castle a symbol of power and
success but this wasn’t to last as a
hundred years later it had gone however
by that time a vibrant and successful
trading community had emerged and the
city that we now know had started to
take shape aided by its central access
Coventry continued to grow and prosper
and over the next few hundred years we
saw glass making agriculture timber
harvesting textile manufacture and other
things all generating wealth and
actually making Coventry into a
prosperous City by the time of the
peasants revolt in the 14th century
Coventry was one of the largest cities
in England it had its own town walls it
protected to protect its houses it shops
and its marketplaces and it had its own
mint where it produced its own currency
this was clearly a sophisticated and
vibrant society and one that was the
leading light in in both England and
Europe moving forward then to children
Stuart’s times things started to go
backwards a little bit from what much of
this time Coventry stagnated and growth
slowed this was arguably caused by
strong guilds restrictive practices
being ability to expand be behind the
city walls that were there to protect
the people but in reality the challenges
were much deeper as seafarers opened up
new worlds creating new markets new
opportunities and new competition both
at home and overseas political
instability was caused by Henry the
eighth and the dissolution of the
monasteries and of course after that the
English Civil War which ended in the
beheading of Charles the first and the
end of monarchical rule reflecting
breaks it isn’t really that much of a
challenge
sometimes the legacy of success is
complacency and those with vested
interests don’t want to change and they
often resist that change and I think
that there was some ingredients of that
taking place too however by the mid 17th
century the home-based silk ribbon
weaving industry began to flourish and
grow and over the next 200 years this
became the bedrock of the economy and
the major employer of the city later
factories were developed with larger
machines in some of which could be seen
in the museum now which was sold and
products were sold globally eventually
though cheaper imports again began to
come in and this industry began to
decline but already a new technological
sector had begun to appear and that was
the English clock and watchmaking
industry which was based in Coventry and
I remember going around Hill Fields in
the 1970s and looking up at the
watchmakers houses before they were
knocked down and seeing the big workshop
windows that were needed to provide the
natural light to perform intricate tasks
of making watches and cloths this was a
fragmented home-based industry with
brilliant craftsmen engineers
technicians and salesmen they sold their
products internationally and Coventry
proceeded Switzerland as the world
leader in watchmaking but by the early
20th century this industry too went into
decline as new competition came but
again another generation of industries
have begun to emerge and that was in the
transport sector a sector that was to
make Coventry the envy of Europe by the
end of World War one Coventry had to do
had created the largest cycle industry
in the world and the expertise gained in
mass production led easily to the
manufacture of motorcycles cars and
tractors throughout the 20th century and
of course these skills and prepper and
knowledge were used to support the war
preparations in the late 1930s a
consequence of which the city was
carpet-bombed in 1941 overnight the
grand old city was zeroed leaving little
that didn’t need rebuilding there the
remains of the old cthey
of course could be seen today so after
1945 the city had to be totally
redesigned and rebuilt and
simultaneously reshaped and rebooted it
soon became one of the biggest and most
modern car manufacturing cities in the
world making it the Detroit of the UK
however again this success was not to
last forever as global competition
struck newly developing nations were
able to design better cars
cheaper and more efficiently the
engineering expertise and skilled
workforce that had so long provided
competitive advantage to Coventry began
to be less important as was the
innovation in manufacturing processes
that started to look dated and for the
ensuring forty years
Coventry has been relatively in the
doldrums but as we’ve seen it’s happened
before and it’s always been able to pick
itself up and it can do that again so in
a few moments we’ve seen that Coventry
has a long history of change based and
change based on the twin forces of
success and failure but it’s always been
able to move on the keys to this were
innovation inventiveness ingenuity
imagination and investment built into
the culture and psychology of the people
it’s always the people that eventually
rise to the challenges and come up with
the solutions to to the situation of the
day and as King Canute found it’s
impossible to resist the force of the
tide the ability to adapt to adopt both
physically and mentally are critical to
surviving and thriving this infers
working in new and different ways and
this can be tricky of challenging and it
creates winners and losers and the key
to success is to provide sustainable
advantage through nurturing and
harvesting the talents of the people
history demonstrates that in to survive
in difficult times
imaginative civic and political
leadership are critical to navigating
the unknown one of the major challenges
that we now face is that the region’s
often
fewer large anchor organizations with
which to make decisions
this quote consequently reduces the
capacity and capability to provide the
consistent visionary leadership that we
need we often talk about knowledge-based
economies and economists of knowledge
perhaps implying that the modern era is
the first to think in this way yet we
know from history but Minoan Roman Greek
Egyptian Aztec and many other
civilizations have been fantastic at
creating and applying new knowledge to
add value to their societies and
cultures but what has changed is the
speed of change what used to take a
decade century or millennium can now
happen in days months and years and that
creates a huge new challenge in the way
that we do things and design solutions
too often our procedures and systems are
over engineered and outlived their
usefulness a quick digression to
dinosaurs or rather their extinction
their strength eventually became their
weakness their end was fast
ugly and uncompromising they became
extinct because they were in agile
unadaptable and inflexible put simply
they became unfit for purpose as their
living environment changed the for
dinosaurs today potentially think of our
large ankle organizations and businesses
of tomorrow and that includes our
universities arguably they should adapt
before they actually need to but it’s
not easy to persuade modern-day leaders
to change drastically if it’s not an
immediate imperative however the biggest
can and do fall the fastest and the
hardest remember Nokia blockbuster
Hoover VHS Enron toys-r-us
Woolworths and the list goes on they
went from hero to zero very quickly in
1851 cardinal henry newman asked a
question as the industrial revolution
was progressing what is the idea of a
university up until then the purpose of
university was to support theological
learning and the
training of clergy and priests behind
the question what he was really asking
is is there now a more important role
for our universities as the population
shifted from the countryside to the town
and as work moved from fields into
factories and as new communications
opened up new markets far away he was
asking whether universities themselves
needed rebooting fast forward 170 years
are the same questions not as pertinent
now as they were then we have moved by
periods of industrialization through
automation – digitization all with
equally profound social economic and
political effects new ways of doing
things disrupt the old and at alarming
speed and its entrepreneurs using
innovation as their primary tool that
ruthlessly exploit those moments in time
they rapidly assess the new environment
looking to provide new solutions to to
existing and old problems current
challenges including aging populations
economic and political migration social
and economic inequalities broken
Democrat and democratic processes global
warming and the consequential economic
environmental damage to name but a few
these are not only the issues of today
but very much those of tomorrow and we
need enterprising and entrepreneur
entrepreneurial people to find
successful solutions to those problems
these won’t be easy nor painless I would
argue that we need to do much more to
nurture and develop these changemakers
as Einstein commented if we do what
we’ve always done
we’ll get what we’ve always got and that
becomes a really big problem if that
doesn’t work our universities and
colleges can and do play a role in this
already challenging conventional wisdom
and orthodoxes and creating new models
but as ever there’s more they can do and
that includes new ways for identifying
encouraging developing and nurturing
those the might have an idea
where
can make a difference and it doesn’t
matter where they come from age class
culture gender and educational
attainment should pose no barriers
Coventry has two big and very successful
universities Warwick and Coventry both
are shapers influencers and leaders and
in many any complimentary ways combined
they have 70,000 students currently in
the city and they have millions of
alumni these are potentially underused
assets and both could play both direct
and indirect roles in regenerating
Coventry in their missed will be could
be entrepreneurs both social and
economic and other highly enterprising
people and there will be those have
already found success who might advise
mentor and support those that are up and
coming
somehow a modern university needs to be
available as a connector for life
building mutely supportive
intergenerational bridges the glue that
holds complex components of modern
society together we need to give local
people hope and realization that they
can influence and shape their own and
their city’s destiny and their forebears
have shown this in the past
I’ll finish my call my talk with three
calls to action these hopefully might
give lasting substance to what Coventry
rebooted really means firstly provide a
free citizens Enterprise hub which
welcomes all would be and could be
entrepreneurs and also establish a free
and ongoing ideation program there helps
to shape those ideas secondly link
entrepreneurial academics to all schools
and colleges in Coventry to provide
expertise encouragement and support
and at the same time establish a
postgraduate teacher Enterprise
Development Program that up skills our
future enterprise educators finally to
organize a citywide competition for the
big idea with significant and meaningful
prizes and to provide at least ten ten
thousand pound bursaries to support
entrepreneurial
future stars with an innovative Coventry
rebooted entrepreneurial program
actually that’s my first wish list I’m
laying down monitor ball and measurable
metrics but there’s a couple of other
things I think are really important it’s
really important that we focus on those
already in work employed or looking to
progress and this is predicated on two
core facts firstly that our population
is aging and retirement ages are rising
and secondly in terms of productivity we
are we lag behind our global competitors
we have forgotten the rhetoric of
lifelong learning and we need to get it
back part-time numbers have fallen off a
cliff in universities and that cannot be
a good thing there are many unplanned
reasons for this I think universities
need to look long and hard at how they
can deal with those reasons as we all
live and work longer in a technology
propelled environment we’re going to
need to constantly rescale and upscale
our workforce and our society this could
create vibrant new markets for
universities and something in the future
I think they will need without this we
will never achieve sustainable
improvements in our productivity we’re
going to need newly designed anytime
anyplace any pace access to learning
that’s related to work and work
experience for most employees they now
work in small businesses we need new
ways of organizing high quality training
for those small businesses as they can’t
do it on their own and finally within
our universities and colleges I would
like to see enterprise and
entrepreneurship engagement rewarded in
the same way that researchers
encouraging our academics to invest in a
clear career pathway that was so
critical to our future well-being on
reflection this starts to frame a
response to the question that Cardinal
Newman asked all of those years ago what
are our universities for the city of
culture 2020 one creates an opportunity
to reframe an agenda at for the next 20
last years it gives us the chance to
reboot the heart and soul of a grand old
city I hope that during this talk you’ve
learned something new about your city
and perhaps inspired to find something
out more by visiting the free museums or
looking around the environment about
doing so will inspire civic pride and
engagement and encourage all of you to
proudly and loudly say we’re from
Coventry and we love our city working
together we can achieve all of this and
I look forward to seeing the impact as
soon as 2020 – thank you very much
[Applause] [Music]
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