The founder of a citywide business festival to celebrate Birmingham's tech and digital sector says it will return later this year bigger and better after a successful inaugural run in 2019.
Yiannis Maos told BusinessLive that Birmingham Tech Week would come back stronger and with a fresh focus for 2020 as he begins the gruelling process of organising the week-long event.
The inaugural tech week took place last October and saw almost 70 events held 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 didn't really have a tech scene, or at least 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."
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Among the subjects covered during Birmingham Tech Week were filling the skills gap, SME finance and digital marketing.
Mr Maos said that, as with all events of this nature, 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.
"We have received phenomenal feedback about the week but I'm my own worst critic and I feel it needed more structure.
"For example, if we're going to do something around artificial intelligence, instead of having six events which are all fragmented, why not bring it all together and do something really focused?
"It's making sure the quality is enhanced when we're bringing things together and then looking at what emerges in 2020 as the hot topics around tech.
"There are some amazing people in this city already doing some great things around tech so it's about giving them the resources to go and do more."
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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.
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"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.
"We had an event which was all around health innovation and what that could do for the school children.
"At the end of the day, the children had to write down feedback and there was a young girl, about ten years old, who said she had been so inspired she planned to seek out a career in software development.
"We wanted to make it accessible as possible to all ages and next year we want to do more of that."
Reach Midlands, publisher of BusinessLive and our sister website BirminghamLive, is working in partnership with on the event and our Birmingham Tech Week runs from October 12 to 18