Living on the Fen Edge, I look two ways. One way, towards a unique landscape, where the impact of engineering has long competed with the desire to preserve invaluable natural habitats. The other, towards the ancient university city of Cambridge and its very modern hi tech cluster, where I have worked for over 30 years. It’s a good place to reflect on the need for balance.
When I walk out onto the Fens, I find peace-and-quiet. There’s the strange beauty of big skies and a landscape that loves the low light of a bright winter’s day. There’s deer and heron, slow-flowing waterways, armies of small birds. And there’s mud. Lots of it. But all of this ‘nature’ is, of course, powerfully shaped by humans. It was transformed by the Dutch engineers of the seventeenth century and their successors, who drained impenetrable marshland, tamed it, and made it productive. And many of the loveliest spots in which I walk are former quarry pits, reclaimed after being stripped of their gravel to build the roads and buildings of twentieth and twenty-first century Britain.
When I go to work or play in the city where I have lived for over thirty years, I am surrounded by the Gothic turrets and archaic traditions of a university founded by monks and famous for its philosophers, poets, and writers. But I’m also in a place at the bleeding edge of biotechnology, nanotech, and artificial intelligence.
This place is all about balance, and a little bit of that has crept through into my career. ‘Marketing’ can feel like such a cheapened, nasty word. Too often, it over-simplifies and reduces complicated ideas to banalities. But, in the context of the hi tech businesses where I work, whose customers are typically R&D scientists, it’s a fascinating and challenging task. To understand the needs of these clients, recognise how they can be met by an emerging technology, and then explain the ‘how’ in way that is compelling for all concerned requires a rare blend of the humanities, arts, and science. Precisely what a university is all about, in fact.
And, while the technology driven by those businesses can have scope to do harm, science is also essential for sustainability. Meeting global net zero goals, for example, requires behavioural changes from us all – but it also won’t happen without product and process innovations informed and driven by technology. As in the story of the Fens, there is a need to keep technological progress, human needs, and the environment in harmony.
I’m interested in these balancing acts. Should we talk?
Yes, if you need a little marketing support that blends scientific understanding and communications skills.
Yes, if you’re a thoughtful tech business that values its people and cares about the impact of its products on sustainability.
Yes, in short, if you’ve read this far.
Edgeways Communications 