TechWeek will bang the city’s drum even louder
A BIRMINGHAM business festival celebrating the city’s tech and digital sector will return bigger and better in its second year, says its organiser.
Yiannis Maos told the Post that Birmingham Tech Week would come back stronger and with a fresh focus for 2020.
The inaugural tech week took place in October and involved almost 70 events at locations across Birmingham including talks, seminars and workshops.
Mr Maos said: “We want to grow the event after our first-ever tech week. The idea for it popped into my head last summer as I saw an opportunity borne out of the frustration that Birmingham’s tech scene was not one that collaborated very much.
“I guess we weren’t really banging the drum about some of the successes Birmingham had seen in regards to tech. We started it with the view that, if we could put on five or ten events, it would be a great start but we put on 68 in more than 40 different locations across the city which 5,000 people attended.”
Among the issues covered during Birmingham Tech Week were filling the skills gap, SME finance and digital marketing.
Mr Maos said there were plenty of lessons to learn which he and the organising team would now be spending the next eight months putting into place.
“It’s about quality, not quantity necessarily – we want to make sure we maintain the quality when it comes to all the events but also the collaboration that happens,” he said. Partnerships could be a key theme of the organisation behind the 2020 event, with the Festival of Enterprise taking place at the NEC to coincide with tech week which will also have a visible presence there.
But did the 2019 tech week leave any kind of legacy for the sector in the city and the people who took part? Mr Maos said he had seen relationships forged during tech week continue long after the event which was one of its most satisfying legacies.
“We had three key hopes including making sure that Birmingham collaborated more when it came to technology and I wholeheartedly believe we achieved that,” he said. “Another one was that we needed to celebrate more and there are good stories coming out of the tech scene in Birmingham which is phenomenal.
“The final one, for which we still have a long way to go but we have definitely started it off, was inspiring the next generation and making sure they knew everything that a tech career could offer.
“The universities helped a lot with that kind of engagement but we also engaged with schools.”
Reach Midlands, publisher of the Post, is working in partnership with Tech Week on the event and the West Midlands Tech Awards. Tech Week runs from October 12 to 18.