BRISTOL TECHNOLOGY FESTIVAL

Bristol Technology Festival returns

As Bristol Technology Festival prepares to get underway at Engine Shed this month, we chat to the hosts, TechSPARK, along with the festival partners SETSquared Bristol and GreenTech South West to discover more about our beloved Silicon Gorge...

Bristol Technology Festival is back once again, bringing an array of events across the city delivered for and by Bristol’s tech community. This year, TechSPARK, based in Redcliffe – a not-for-profit network dedicated to connecting, educating and strengthening the digi-tech cluster in the West – will be running the festival, showcasing the incredible feats of technological innovation, talent and sense of community that the city is proudly home to.

Bristol Technology Festival was first launched in 2019 by a small group of tech enablers, movers and shakers, with the ambition to collate a series of events in the space of a week. It was a huge hit, attracting an audience from across the country, putting Bristol’s tech scene on a pedestal, and paving way for an annual event.

From 10 – 14 October, Bristol will host a series of over 50 social events encouraging everyone to participate through interactive seminars, workshops and activity spread across the city. Open to everyone including people in the tech sector, business leaders from across sectors and anyone wanting to know more about the city’s digital industries, the festival will focus on a different theme each day: Purpose, Protect, People, Play, Pioneer. The themes will span the depth and breadth of what Bristol’s tech and digital cluster has to offer, encompassing everything from Green Tech companies innovatively tackling the climate crisis, to smart AI solutions to truly demonstrate the vibrancy of the local sector.

Ahead of the festival this month, we caught up with Abby Frear, Director at TechSPARK, Kim Brook, Programme Manager at SETsquared Bristol and the team at Green Tech South West to find out why the festival is so important to them and, most importantly, to the city we call home.

TBM: Why is it so important to TechSPARK to run the festival?

Abby Frear: At the heart of what TechSPARK does is community. If it wasn’t for all the fantastic tech and digital organisations running in Bristol and the wider South West and their unfaltering attitude towards collaboration, we wouldn’t be able to do what we do. Having been involved with BTF since its inception, we know how valuable it has been to the community. After a couple of disruptive years for in person events, we’re doing all we can to keep the momentum for meet-ups alive. The buzz that something like BTF brings to the city really illustrates events are so invaluable to the tech sector - the knowledge shared and connections made could pave way to the creation of the next accelerator, or initiate investment into a groundbreaking piece of innovation. We want to see our community flourish, and running BTF is one way of ensuring this happens.

Kim Brook: SETsquared Bristol has been involved with the festival from its start in 2019. We're based at Engine Shed, the enterprise hub by Temple Meads station, which is one of the founding partners of the festival. Bristol is home to some of the most exciting tech businesses and projects currently happening in Europe and as a tech incubator in the region, we want to engage with people from across the city about the opportunities available in the tech sector and to profile our fantastic member companies to attract inward investment in the region. The festival is a fantastic platform to showcase this.

GreenTech South West: GreenTech South West was part of the festival last year where we showcased three of the most exciting female Green Tech pioneers in the city and it was a very positive experience for us. We managed to reach a wider audience of people interested in sustainability and the use of technology for climate action, many of which have stayed with us as we head towards our 30th event. It's encouraging to see more talks this year surrounding sustainable software engineering and innovative use of tech to make a difference and we're very happy to be able to bring three amazing masters in their field regarding design for sustainability.

Abby Frear, Director at TechSPARK

How does the festival help the tech community in Bristol?

AF: The Bristol Tech Festival is all about getting people together, allowing them to collaborate, network and see some of the awesome and amazing things that are happening in our community, all while

reaching new and different people. It strengthens connections here in the South West, paving the way for new ideas and innovations. It also highlights the problems the tech community faces here in Bristol. Whether that’s technical barriers to building the most seamless solutions, or the issues we’re encountering around ensuring the tech sector is a diverse and inclusive place to work, the festival is a place where organisations and individuals can discuss these issues and search for solutions.

The festival is also a great demonstration of the array of talent in Bristol. It showcases the wealth of knowledge here, which in turn attracts more tech startups, scale-ups and international companies to the region, as well as illustrating the city’s potential to investors. All of these factors contribute to the growth of the South West’s tech sector, which is the underlying ambition for everything we do at TechSPARK.

Aside from all of this, the festival provides a space for people to get together, catch up and have fun!

SETSquared Bristol is running an event on health-tech products Innovation to Implementation. Why it is so important to be talking about health tech right now?

KB: The digital health tech sector has huge potential for Bristol with the South West region seeing a 25% growth in the last three years.

It’s important to talk about health tech as the sector has significant wider market challenges, from how to navigate the NHS to a rapidly evolving international digital regulatory landscape. The product development journey is new for every health tech founder - so at Bristol Tech Festival, in collaboration with WEAHSN and Future Space, we’re bringing a panel of founders together with revolutionary and groundbreaking products to give a warts-and-all understanding of their versions of building a health tech company, their routes to market and route to investment.

Health tech is a focus for SETsquared Bristol as 25% of our member companies are in this sector, including 5 student startups or spinouts from the University of Bristol, our parent company, which provides a fantastic talent pool of startups to the region. We are also seeing strong investment raises, particularly in the areas of clinical decision support systems, screening & diagnostics, virtual care delivery and disease management. Recent SETsquared company raises include sepsis diagnostic company GenomeKey (£3.8M), breast scanning company Micrima (£4.1M), breastfeeding app LatchAid (£1M) and biotech startups Zentraxa and FerryX (£300k).

Green Tech South West is focusing on Design for Sustainability and Climate Action at this year’s festival. Why it is so important to be talking about this topic at the moment?

GTSW: Digital technology is a massive polluter and as our talks will show, simple changes can vastly reduce digital carbon footprint often without additional cost. The increasing demand for digital transformation and business sustainability is seeing designers finding their work grow in complexity, scale and impact. With the climate

Image credit: @JonCraig_Photos

crisis deepening and the clock ticking, designers and UI developers with a keen interest in sustainability are seeking out advice, techniques and resources to affect climate action through their work.

Are there any particular events/businesses you’re particularly excited to be partnering with this year?

AF: There’s going to be so many things to look forward to at the festival this year. We’re super excited to have Hippo Digital on board as a headline partner. The full-service digital consultancy has recently set up in Bristol, and we can’t wait for them to experience what our tech and digital community has to offer - and for them to hopefully make some long lasting connections! It’s also fantastic to have AND Digital, BaseKit and Newicon as our founding partners - the support from these companies is what makes it possible for the festival to exist, so we really are excited to be partnering with them all.

Sectioning the week off into different themes for each day has really brought some exciting ideas to the table. I’m particularly looking forward to Thursday’s theme ‘Play’ - the events are set to be super creative and will hopefully disrupt some traditional ways of thinking, while encouraging interactive participation from the audiences. There are also so many tech for good conversations planned for the week, which is really inspiring to see and I can’t wait to learn something new.

What makes the city so unique in your opinion?

KB: My experience of the tech community in Bristol is one of openness and collaboration. Tech founders recognise the value of Bristol’s unique connected tech and creative ecosystem and we see regular meet-ups and networking events within specific sectors and wider. In addition, many of our mentors and advisors at SETsquared are tech founders themselves and have a real ‘pay it forward’ attitude to support the next generation of tech entrepreneurs on their entrepreneurial journey. Despite its small size, Bristol has a real diversity in the types of technology sectors spanning everything from deep technology areas such as aerospace and quantum to tech for good through areas such as healthtech and fintech. This rich innovation scene means we have a wealth of things going on but contained within a small enough city to ensure everything is closely connected.

What do you predict for Bristol in the future?

GTSW: Bristol was the first city in the UK to declare a climate emergency and it feels as though there is a growing Green Tech sector emerging here. There's some really incredible companies in the Bristol area already doing amazing things, to namedrop a few, go check out Ecologi, Karshare, Spherics, Kaluza, Greener, Albotherm, Lettus Grow, Cistor and Greener Hours as a starting point. We can only see Bristol's Green Tech scene growing and thriving more as local developers and designers continue to seek out opportunities to work on climate change initiatives. We're thrilled that GreenTech South West has grown to 1500 members in under three years and look forward to showcasing, promoting and connecting people to the area's most exciting Green Tech pioneers. n • For more information, visit: techspark.co; setsquared-bristol.co.uk and greentechsouthwest.org