Something shifted in the room at SmartBase yesterday morning. Around 8:30am, a full house gathered at Bournemouth Aviation Park for Silicon South’s Refocus event, and what could have been a fairly standard networking breakfast turned into something more deliberate than that.
Full disclosure: I’m on the Silicon South board, so I’m not a neutral observer here. But I think that actually puts me in a decent position to explain what this morning was really about, and why I think it matters for anyone working in digital, creative or tech across BCP.
Twelve months of quiet work
Silicon South has been rebuilding behind the scenes for about a year. Not reinventing, not pivoting, but doing the structural work that tends to happen before a community organisation can grow into something more significant. Yesterday was the public moment for all of that to surface.
The headline news was Anthony Story stepping back from the MD role after 11 years leading the organisation. Eleven years is a long time in any context. Anthony built Silicon South into the backbone of Dorset’s digital, creative and tech sector, and watching the room acknowledge that felt like the right kind of ceremony for it. He moves into a board position going forward, so the knowledge stays in the organisation, just with more support around it.
A new board, a new programme
Alongside the change in leadership, Thursday’s event formally introduced the new board. It is a strong group, and it was good to be in the room when it was announced properly for the first time.
Andrew Radcliffe, founder and CEO of Spyrosoft, made the case for why his company has committed to sponsoring Silicon South as part of the new Future Shapers programme. He spoke about what he sees in BCP as a region: the talent is here, the educational institutions are here, the founders are here. What has been missing is the infrastructure to connect them properly. Spyrosoft putting their weight behind that case matters.
Dan Ware, who runs The Spark Hub, also joined the board. Some people have asked him why he would join what might look like a competing organisation. His reasoning was simple: community is not about competition. It is about communication, collaboration and creating opportunities for people to succeed. When organisations in a region work together rather than protect their own patch, the whole conurbation benefits. That kind of thinking is what makes a tech community actually function, and it is rare enough to be worth noting.
Matt Thomas introduced the Future Shapers Conference, planned for October this year. Details are still forming, but the ambition is clear. This is meant to be a proper regional conference, not just another networking event with a bigger room. Watch that space.
Why it matters for BCP
There is a version of BCP that undersells itself. Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole has a genuine concentration of digital and tech businesses, strong university programmes and real creative talent. What it has not always had is the kind of connected ecosystem that turns individual businesses into a collective force.
Silicon South has always been the organisation trying to build that. Yesterday felt like a more serious attempt at it than I have seen in a while.
Why I am on the board
I joined the board about a year ago, roughly when this internal rebuilding phase started. And I will be honest about the role I think I play.
Look across the board and you will see a lot of people who have built and sold agencies, who now operate in advisory, education or non-exec capacities. That experience is genuinely valuable. But it is a different vantage point from someone still actively running and growing a business.
Agitate Digital is not a post-exit story. We are a growing web development agency, still doing the work, still winning clients, still figuring out how to scale without losing what makes us good. The challenges Silicon South is trying to address, building a better ecosystem, connecting talent to opportunity, making BCP a place where ambitious digital businesses want to put down roots, are live questions for us, not historical ones.
That is the perspective I try to bring. Not “here is what worked when I built my last agency” but “here is what it actually looks like to be building one right now.” I think that is worth having on the board, and I think Silicon South’s new direction makes more space for it than the old one did.
If you run a digital, creative or tech business in BCP and you have felt like the organisations supposedly supporting the sector were not quite speaking your language, keep an eye on what comes next. And if the Future Shapers Conference lands in October the way it is being described, it will be worth your time.
Curtis Williams
Managing Director, Agitate Digital
Curtis' Bio:
I'm the MD of Agitate Digital, a performance-obsessed web and software agency based in Bournemouth. With a background leading marketing teams, I built Agitate to be the technical partner I wished I'd had — one that thinks in business outcomes, not just deliverables. I specialise in high-performance WordPress and Laravel builds, and I'm increasingly focused on how AI is changing what's possible for growing businesses online.
