The big, exciting news is that TECH SY is bringing back a Tech Summit to South Yorkshire on Monday 10th March 2025! We’re leading this year’s summit with a theme of: Money, Markets, and Mainstreaming Tech. However, for this next article, I thought it would be fun to reflect back on the 2022 Tech Summit which we hosted at the brand-new Barnsley Cineworld, in front of the IMAX screen. Helpfully, Mel Kanarek, co-founder and director of Sheffield Digital Limited, provided a great review of the event at the time… which has given me a few prompts to be able to look back on and answer the 'what next' questions that Mel put forward at the time.
The first point to raise is that the 2022 Tech Summit certainly set the bar incredibly high for the TECH SY team in 2025. The last Tech Summit was hosted by the team behind the DMC, and the SEAM – Barnsley’s Digital Campus, and backed by South Yorkshire Mayoral Combined Authority (SYMCA). Tracey Johnson and I were very much behind the planning of the event, and thankfully, it’s given us a great starting point from the lessons we learnt. Check out this little video, which gives a flavour of the 2022 summit.
In 2022, as Mel highlights, Mayor of South Yorkshire Oliver Coppard opened the event with a speech where he said: “This is South Yorkshire’s first Tech Summit but it will not be our last. If we get it right today, our city region can lead the next revolution as it did the ones that came before.”
The good news is, that the Mayor was right. It wouldn’t be our last, and neither will the 2025 Tech Summit, as TECH SY is committed to bringing two Tech Summits during our project lifecycle. However, as Mel alludes to in her review at the time. It would have been wrong to assume that the ‘what comes next’ for South Yorkshire, following the success of TEAM SY and the positive investment figures from the Tech 100 Report being celebrated at the 2022 summit would be straightforward to build upon. It took longer than anyone wanted to bring TECH SY to fruition but we're here now, and the content we will look at in March, will allow us to build on the content and ambition delivered from the 2022 Summit.
The 2022 summit had a strong theme of diversity - the importance of which should never be underestimated. An all-female fireside chat delved into the importance of improving inclusivity and diversity in tech entrepreneurship. This was followed by a panel of six, which refreshingly only contained one male. The panel focussed on the regional startup ecosystem, giving different perspectives on what makes an ecosystem successful, the situation in South Yorkshire and what else was needed. We'll be working hard to make sure the 2025 Summit has inclusivity weaved throughout.
What followed on the 2022 agenda was the launch of the Tech Welcome Grant. It was originally hoped that this grant, which went on to support tech startups relocating to the area and local tech founders to get their very first office space, would run alongside TEAM SY. The idea of supporting the region’s accelerator programmes to give added value for businesses to relocate to the region, striking whilst the iron was hot. to This didn’t materialise, with only a short bit of overlap between the two projects, however, this didn’t stop the £300K Tech Welcome Grant from supporting 40 businesses get office space here, bringing in 170 jobs to the region. The evaluation of the project showed a net economic return of £6.32 for every £1 invested in the project. The unit cost per net job created is also very low at £7,177.
We hope TECH SY will be able to bring the Tech Welcome Grant back. We’re working on it.
Much of the 2022 Tech Summit revolved around the vital work of the TEAM SY programme, and that was reflected with the release of the South Yorkshire Tech 100 report, followed by a series of interviews with those involved in the TEAM SY programmes.
At the time, the report showed that the region’s tech start-ups secured equity funding totalling more than £52.6m in the first ten months of 2022. This was 42 percent more than in all of 2021 (£37m) and 129 percent up on the £23m recorded in 2019. The talk on investment continued with keynote speaker Gary Stewart, managing director of Techstars NYC powered by J.P. Morgan. The provocative talk ultimately realised that If initiatives and programmes aren’t backed up by investment, they won’t work – the most important thing for tech entrepreneurs is funding.
But what happened next?
In her review of the summit, Mel had some valid points to raise in the aftermath. The main point being what was coming next. After the TEAM SY funding, who would be picking up the baton? “Who will make sure that the startups who come here continue to be supported and therefore want to stay? It is not just the entrepreneurs who need investment; the ecosystem does too.”
It took longer than maybe anyone would have hoped for, but dedicated support to the South Yorkshire ecosystem is now here. Due to macroeconomic factors, investment into the region, like most places, has slowed. But we’re optimistic about the South Yorkshire future. The next summit will have similar features to what the last one had. We want to take that hard review of the landscape and take it as an opportunity to reflect and move forward.
Looking to the 2025 Tech Summit!
We’ll be at Cast, a brilliant venue to match that of 2022, in March to ask 'what next for South Yorkshire?'. We chose Doncaster as the venue, to support their exciting plans of opening a flagship digital tech hub, as well as their ambitions to make Doncaster a centre of excellence for AI.
The event is for everyone involved within the tech ecosystem. We want to bring together the founders, investors, enablers and those in the public sector. We also want to bring in an audience from outside the region. We have plans to get under the skin of the northern tech landscape, with a spotlight on South Yorkshire, so we want people from across the UK to add to that.
Other topics we hope to explore at the summit are: can South Yorkshire be the convener of the north when it comes to ecosystems? What will the data show us? How do we address the barriers to scale? And how do we support our startups to lean into the region's market strengths?
Just to tease...we do have a very exciting Keynote speaker confirmed and we hope to be able to announce them before Christmas (or very shortly after), as well as more revelations about the Summit to come in the new year, so keep an eye out for our updates!
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