A hi-tech future for Britain

The Old Street Roundabout was never a place you’d go out of your way to visit. It was rundown and served only as a Tube station on the Northern Line. All that changed a few years ago when fashionable internet types moved in and Silicon Roundabout was born. It's now Tech City and home to hundreds of digital start-ups. It's a similar story across the country. And while many will not make the bigtime, it demonstrates perfectly the UK's entrepreneurial spirit and ability to lead the world in technological advancement.

Small is beautiful, but there are plenty of technology companies that are the product of previous waves of innovation and which act as beacons for the new breed. They were tiny businesses once themselves and aspired to be something bigger. Given time, they have grown into some of the country's largest companies.

If we look back just five years [see chart], we can see how fast the technology sector has bounced back both from its post Credit Crunch lows and the dotcom boom and bust. In fact, it has outperformed the FTSE All-Share index by sevenfold since late 2009.

ARM Holdings sticks out. It is now one of the world’s most important semiconductor companies, designing computer chips for Apple's iPhone and Samsung. But it was once a tiny company called Acorn, building BBC Micro computer's in Cambridge for secondary schools across the country.

Britain has a thriving industry supplying universities and colleges around the world with the latest microscope technology and scientific instruments. Oxford Instruments, which invented the world's first superconducting magnet in the early 1960s is one. It's now worth over £650 million. Judges Scientific and Spectris are in the same line of work and are among the best at what they do.

It's in these seats of learning that new products and even new materials that will eventually become commonplace are being devised. And, of course, there's Formula 1. Most of the development is done in the UK and the industry is in the unique position of being able to track test technology that we might all one day be using in our road cars.

Further improvements in both hardware and software and across industries are inevitable throughout 2015. The future is bright.