U.K. marketInnovators hitch a ride on drive for national security
Three U.K. companies share their experience in penetrating the U.S. homeland security market; their advice: Identify the right market, build relationships with industry leaders, talk about your programs, and prepare your family for the long hours at the office
Heddwyn Davies decided to seek a new career. After eight years at a venture capital-backed start-up, the former GEC executive decided it was time to take on something closer to home (to be precise: General Electric Company, or GEC — not to be confused with the American GE — was renamed Marconi plc in November 1999. The change to the name Marconi occurred after GEC’s defense arm Marconi Electronic Systems (MES) was spun off and sold to British Aerospace (BAe) for £7.7 billion to form a company now called BAE Systems. Six years later, in 2005, Ericsson purchased the bulk of Marconi, the remaining businesses were renamed Telent plc). In any event, Davies signed up as a mentor at the University of Southampton where he discovered a group of physicists working on cutting-edge technology which increases the sensitivity of sensors such as gamma-ray detectors. The company, Symetrica, had been set up two years before, in 2002, by David Ramsden, formerly head of physics and astronomy at the university. At that point, Symetrica was targeting the medical equipment market, Mr Davies had other ideas. “I looked at the opportunity of the [medical] market, which was great, but the timescale to get properly certified was so long I thought it would be very difficult to rely on funds the company didn’t have,” he says. “It was much clearer to me there was more money being thrown into homeland security in the United States, with a lot less restrictions regarding what you had to do in the longer term,” he adds.
The Financial Times’s Sylvia Pfeifer writes that many countries take homeland security increasingly seriously, but the United States is the largest and most lucrative market. Some estimates suggest that, since the 9/11 attacks, Washington has paid private sector contractors more than $130 billion (£66 billion). Symetrica took Davies’s advice on board and also hired him as chief executive. Persuading the academics to sign up to his vision proved relatively straightforward, he says, although he was an outsider. “There is a degree to which you have to build a certain amount of trust with them. I never tried to fib them,” he says. Davies, the man who left GEC because he has hoped to spend less time commuting, is now traveling “very frequently” to the United States.
His arrival at Symetrica coincided with the first fund-raising round: Nesta (National Endowment for Science,
