The challenge for BBC North comes in 2016

BBC North’s challenge in 2016

Tuesday saw the Future Media seminar take place, hosted by Saffrey Champness. It was a relatively low key affair (no hashtags or ostentatious liveblogging at this one) but the content was of a very high quality.

The headline speaker was Andy Davy who heads the BBC’s Future Media and Technology Group and he was followed by Liz Gallagher of the Sharp Project. Finally there was Liz Molyneux, partnership lead for BBC North.

Andy’s presentation was worth a blog of its own, being a confident run through of viewing data which gives lie to the idea that TV is being kicked all round the park by other media platforms. If I can get hold of the presentation I will return to the subject.

Inevitably he also went into some depth about MediaCity and his themes of collaboration with the Northern creative sector were picked up in more depth by Liz.

Sandwiched in between Liz Gallagher described the vision and progress of the Sharp Project.

As you probably know, the Sharp Project is a major business centre for digital and creative businesses that deliberately sets out to enable small businesses to collaborate in pursuit of projects that working alone, might be beyond their reach.

Listening to the vision for the BBC at MediaCity I recalled being shown around the place about two years ago by its then director Brian Greasley.

He confidently told me of the vision to create “a new Silicon Valley” where world class technology and creative companies would gather.

Now I would never bet against MediaCity’s owners, Peel, for pulling off something that seems incredibly ambitious and having worked closely with Peel in the past, I am more aware than most that unlike virtually any other developer, their planning horizon is often set about 20 years out.

But as far as I’m aware, there are no other world class employers heading to Salford and on the Silicon Valley comparison and with respect to Salford University, it ain’t Stanford (currently number four in the Time HES world rankings).

The fact is that what we look like having in the BBC’s critical first years at Media City is asymmetric; a world class supergiant and clusters of very small businesses down the road at the Sharp Project and on the edge of MediaCity itself.

This is terrific news, at least on the surface, for those small businesses but it’s the BBC that faces the challenge and therefore inevitably, the long term future of the feeder pool.

In 2012 when the BBC North project is in full swing this won’t matter, or at least it won’t be visible, but after a couple of years when the natural cycle of employment kicks in and the BBC needs to replace people who move on, they will most likely be the only hirer of their kind in the region.

This is not suggest that there isn’t talent in the North and I am delighted to see Manchester rank so highly this week as a place to do business, but those skills are distributed across a large area and exists largely in organisations and cultures that in organisational terms alone are very different to the BBC.

This begs the question, will the native talent conform to the BBC or will the BBC’s culture change to reflect the talent that walks through its Salford doors?

So I suspect that crunch year for the BBC, MediaCity and to a degree the creative sector supplying it will be 2016.

What do you think?