© Justin Marshall
I have a dread-tinged suspicion that by the time you read this post my life will have been changed forever.
Unless something goes awry in the next 72 hours I will board the 12 hour Virgin VS206 at 2230 from London Heathrow to Hong Kong. I will swap to a 45 minute MTR train from East Tsim Sha Tsui to Lok Ma Chau and I will cross the border into one of the most exciting, innovative and some might argue, terrifying, cities on the planet.
My destination is now double the size of London and yet when I was 14 years old, listening in awe to the Jam’s Going Underground, this city was a little known Pearl River Delta fishing village.
In just 36 years its population has grown from 30,000 to 18 million.
A city both celebrated and reviled for the mind-boggling production of toys, gadgets and electronic stuff it belches out all day and all night, 365 days a year. A city which added on average a high rise building every day, throughout the 90’s. A city as famed for historic annual GDP growth rates of over 20%.
That city is Shenzhen, in the province of Guangdong. And if some are to be believed Shenzhen has come to symbolise the very best and the worst of all that humankind is capable.
The best in that the extraordinary growth of this city alone has hauled scores of millions of unemployed agricultural workers out of destitution. It has given the children of that generation an education and professional choices that would once have been an impossible dream. And it has produced countless billions of handheld devices without which the world could now barely function.
And yet Shenzhen is demonised too. An electronics bootleggers’ paradise, where workers are exploited and rapacious growth grinds down all prospect of environmental sustainability and scatters into a smog-heavy wind.
So what does that have to do with me?
I am in the fortunate position of being part of a British Council research initiative set up to explore a particular part of the Chinese creative and industrial scene.
I am part of a group of academics and 'makers' being sent to explore what life is like in Shenzhen's burgeoning ‘maker’ community. We're a selection of academics - from design and craft historians, smart textile and materials researchers to some of the leaders and leading thinkers of the UK’s hardware hacker scene. Oh and me, the odd one out.
Why odd man out? Unlike my wildly impressive companions I know nothing about the history of Italian design and craft, nor have I unpicked the optical properties of reflective textiles, nor founded and run a brilliant maker space outside Manchester (Madlab in case you’re wondering) nor have I been chronicling London’s own making movers and shakers.
I am a common-or-garden 49-year-old creative industry entrepreneur.
Like so many of the creative industry businesses in the UK - with a combined estimated value of £70 billion to the UK – I founded my business on the first wave of the internet. The one that happened last century.
In 1999 just as the internet was becoming a reality for businesses it seemed likely to me that writing could only get more important in a world in which the first 10 words on a website might win or lose you a customer forever. So I set up The Writer.
That’s what I’ve been doing for most of the last 15 years. And like the UK’s creative sector as a whole The Writer has grown consistently, like Shenzhen, at more or less 20% per year. It started as me in my living room and The Writer is now a multinational consultancy with current sales of around £5 million and bases in London and New York.
But The Writer isn’t why I’m on this trip.
Just as the impact of the internet was obvious to smarter people than me 15 years ago, there is a familiarly unstoppable momentum tilting us all into a new age of the internet of things – IoT for short.
If the IoT evangelists are to be believed the commercial potential of the networkable world of objects will dwarf anything we’ve seen so far in the online space.
So four years ago I started to look at this opportunity seriously. And the conclusion I came to is that if the UK is really going to prepare our children for a future world of connected hardware then we need to change the way our children interact with technology.
We’re going to need technology makers not just tech consumers.
So I set up Machido as an Education Technology company - EdTech to the venture capital cognoscenti – to do exactly that. Our commercial premise is that we don’t want children’s coding education to lead them just to making video games. We want them to aspire to more than turning screen pixels on and of.
Machido exists to show children how programmable electronics can change the world around them. We want to them to make and program stuff that moves, bleeps, blinks – and thinks.
We started trading this year. And I now know from our own lonely struggle with tech how hard it is to design, source and manufacture reliable electronics on your own. I have learned that unlike The Writer all those years ago, an electronics hardware company is not best set up from a living room.
But all that changed earlier in 2015 when Machido signed up as a member of the stunningly brilliant maker space in Somerset House known as Makerversity.org.
Suddenly we had access not just to fabulous equipment – from 3D printers and laser cutters to industrial sewing machines and fabric printers – but even more importantly to a network of brilliant, committed but above all amazingly helpful technologists and makers.
People motivated not just by the desire to get their product out of the door or to hit their VC backers’ investment milestones but also to do what they can, as far as they can, to make our world just that little better.
It’s fair to say that I have overnight become a feverish devotee of Makerversity and their mission but also of the potential that maker spaces hold for all of us.
Which brings us back to why you’re reading these words right now.
I am the ‘maker’ entrepreneur on this journey – slouching along at the back of our group to see if my own commercial needs are a fit for Shenzhen’s ravenous global production capacity.
Some of the most pressing questions I will be trying to answer in the next 14 days are these: how small can a company be and still benefit from the bewildering Shenzhen supply-chain? How fast can we get our ideas from table napkin to package and production? How safe are our ideas from the city’s infamous Shanzhai bootleg production model? How much does it cost to get something made? Will there still be any kind of profit margin left for us? Will Chinese manufacturing suppliers even have any interests and values compatible with ours? Will I meet anyone I want to do business with?
But, perhaps most pertinently, will any Chinese manufacturer want to do business with us?
These may be small questions but to a maker-led start-up like Machido they are a matter of survival – and I’d hazard a guess that some of them might be resonate for other creative led businesses in the UK too. The designers, marketing and events agencies whose founders are perhaps also wondering if the much vaunted IoT world has commercial potential for them too.
But here’s the real reason my professional life hangs in the balance over the next two weeks.
This extraordinary opportunity of a trip to China is my chance to answer a pressing personal and professional question of my own: can any creative entrepreneur dive into China and build a technology company from scratch?
Or is my new EdTech start-up fatally ill-thought-out? A vanity project conceived by a resolutely analogue middle-aged entrepreneur doomed to failure from the start?
Gulp. No pressure there then. I will keep you posted.
Martin is a former journalist turned tech entrepreneur. He is also a lifelong maker and founder of educational technology company Machido.