Quantum people and skills will be the key to scaling quantum
An important aspect of the Quantum commercialisation and development are the people and skills required in Quantum has been highlighted as an important factor in the development of the technology and the business models. This is broader than having quantum scientists. With the sector exponential growth Ilana Wisby of Oxford Quantum Circuits highlighted that skills are a major issue for ventures which are scaling up.
Ilana Wisby, CEO of Oxford Quantum Circuits (OQC), is a deep tech entrepreneur and OQC was a spin out from Oxford University in 2017. Ilana shared her insights and perspectives at the Quantum Future programme. OQC is the Quantum Computing hardware solution from the Qubit and process infrastructure through to providing Quantum Computing as a cloud service. The business has gone from being an academic founded venture to a private cloud Quantum Computing solution which is being driven by a team of over 30 people. OQC has received £10million of seed and VC investment plus £1.8 million of non-diluting government funding. This is another prime example of a scaling venture.
The approaches for people have ranged from summer schools for coding, like supported those by IBM programmes, internships, internal programmes and attracting people with broader skills.
When I visited Oxford Quantum Circuits on the Thames Valley Science Park campus I met some of the thirty plus team and they ranged from the couple of quantum scientists in with the Quantum Computer to the electronic engineers, network engineers, computer programmers, sales & marketing people, operations and finance people.
It is also important to ensure diversity in people and thinking as we develop this new technology which will impact the use of big data and AI as well as many industries. The diversity will need different technical reviews, neural diversity and different representatives of society as there will be new skills and ethical issues to address.
A good perspective that has been raised is that we have to be careful to not put people off by just labelling the sector as Quantum. Ventures and the sector need to understand the majority of people do not need specialist quantum science understanding, and they need to develop broader computing and business capabilities to scale.
Rory Daniels
Rory joined techUK in June 2023 after three years in the Civil Service on its Fast Stream leadership development programme.
Laura Foster
Laura is techUK’s Associate Director for Technology and Innovation.
Elis Thomas
Elis joined techUK in December 2023 as a Programme Manager for Tech and Innovation, focusing on Semiconductors and Digital ID.