Bernard Ginns: Would the Government support a Tech City in Yorkshire?

One evening, they took me to Stanford Theatre, a beautifully preserved 1920s cinema dedicated to showing classics from the golden age of Hollywood.

It was showing a season of Audrey Hepburn films to celebrate the life of the waif-like actress who had passed away earlier in 1993.

We watched War and Peace, the epic retelling of Tolstoy’s story about the French invasion of Russia and its dramatic impact on Tsarist society.

A pianist entertained us on stage before the show, disappearing into the pit as the curtain went up. After the film, we emerged on to the streets of Stanford. It was buzzing with smart young students from the nearby university.

I remember my hosts telling me about this prestigious institution. But two decades on, I don’t think any of us could have predicted how Stanford would play such a central role in developing the new technologies that today rule our world.

Look at the alumni: Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the founders of Google, Sandra Lerner and Leonard Bosack, the founders of Cisco Systems, Jerry Yang and David Filo, the founders of Yahoo!, Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, the founders of PayPal, and William Hewlett and David Packard, the founders of Hewlett-Packard.

Fittingly, the Stanford Theatre was restored by the David and Lucile Packard Foundation.

Why am I telling you all this? Because Stanford has to be seen as exemplar for the university at the centre of economic development in Yorkshire. We need our academic institutions to step up.

Steve Almond, the global chairman of Deloitte, picked up this theme during a visit to Leeds last week.

He told me: “At the heart of Silicon Valley’s success is Stanford and it is just absolutely accepted at Stanford that if you are a university professor there you are also likely to be on one or two boards or engaged in one or two ventures because you are trying to monetise the benefits of the research.