Finance & Investment
The issues identified are:
• Actions must be of scale
• Emphasis on value creation
–growth does not equal employee growth
–distributed companies
• Developing winners
• Retention of IP
• Differentiation between seed & VC
• Need for web 2.0 strategy?
• Convergence of content & technology
The priorities identified are:
1. Competition fund
2. Creation of ongoing matching fund & better access to funding
3. Anchor client / research centre
Please add your comments on the above...
Please indicate if you would be interested in joining a special interest group on this topic.
4 comments:
Darryl Collins
Banjax
The idea of a "competition" fund fills me with dread. What's wrong with creating a proper digital media investment fund - by definition all projects seeking investment will be competing for available resources. IMHO competitons skew the market by giving arbitrary deadlines, generally creating more hype than substance and are often time limited. NI is so far behind other parts of the world in support of content companies that the last thing it needs is competition! It needs real sustained repeated investment.
I agree with the previous comment - there is enough competition for work. What we need is a more equable distribution of the funding that already exists, the mainstreaming of future funding and to open the way for the generation of independent creative development.
Colin Williams, Inferno says:
The biggest problem we have in NI is that most digital media companies feel that the world ends either at the border, or the coast. So many people fighting over so few worthy projects means that the industry is in serious danger of killing itself with prices being forced so low, it's not possible to create quality.
Competition? Yeah. Let's take on London.
That's competition.
Hi Darryl, Collette,
I understand where you're coming from but would take a slightly different view.
I think that you're assuming that this is a zero-sum game ie by investing in a competition fund there is overall less money available for an ongoing fund. I don't believe this is the case - ie, a competition fund is likely to be additional money available - and think that we should welcome multiple sources of funding.
On the point about skewing the market, you are entirely correct. A competition (or indeed any) fund will cause people to behave differently. Surely, as long as the behaviour this encourages is consistent with the good of the industry as a whole, then this is what we want?
If we do want to encourage the sector's large number of small, indigenous, service based companies to seek their fame and fortune on a much higher risk IP model, then this is one way to do that.
I also agree that we need real, sustained investment (and a more equitable balance for indigenous companies vs FDI) but this really comes down to scale - any funding initiative such as an ongoing matching fund needs to be sufficiently large, with additional money earmarked for support services, for it to have any noticeable impact.
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