Leader: Boom and bust - here we go again...?

One of the neatest descriptions of the dot-com boom and bust phenomenon we've heard in a while was courtesy of a speaker at the Innovation Summit in London this week.

Tom Black, CEO of Detica, said: "In a hurricane, even turkeys can fly."

And let's face it, there were more than a few turkeys who enjoyed plenty of airtime during the windier days of the late 1990s' tech explosion.

But those who flew highest tended to be those who landed with the biggest thump.

Take uber-turkey boo.com, for example - which really plucked things up for its investors when it burned through £100m of funding in little more than 18 months.

But rather than thinking that kind of high-profile failure should ward us off ever going down a similar route, attendees at the Innovation Summit in London have instead been looking at what we can learn and how we can once again enjoy a technology 'gold rush', without the lemming-like tumbling into the pitfalls which typified the last feeding frenzy at the VC trough.

Everybody is very confident and full of advice on how to make this gold rush profitable for all. But will it work?

You'll need a strong management team, not prone to short-termism. You'll need the courage to stick to your guns and not be tempted by the get-rich-quick thinking that saw once strong businesses undermine themselves with overly-hasty IPOs. A little bit of a tunnel vision will go a long way - so while your competitors are getting distracted by valuations and turning five-year plans into two or three-year plans, stick to your guns.

Basically you'll need to be able to keep your head while all around you are losing theirs.

But as Rudyard Kipling himself realised when writing that oft-used line, that's a pretty big 'If'.

The mood in the twinned camps of the investment and start-up communities is one of cautious optimism but we shouldn't allow ourselves to think simply ticking check boxes next to a list of 'must not repeat' mistakes is enough to make a success.

The nature of business will always be that some succeed because others fail. We shouldn't pretend technology is any different to other sectors and will inevitably too succumb to this fact of life.

If there is a gold rush then it's inevitable some people will fall down a mine shaft. Or drown in a river diving for an unreachable nugget.

The trick then will be two-fold. First, we should hope those on the front line really have learned from their mistakes and the costs are smaller and the losses kept to a minimum.

Second, we should all promise not to start running around waving our hands in the air screaming 'crisis' the first time a start-up goes to the wall or the first time a recent IPO heads south of its float price. It will happen. But it needn't be a sign of worse to come.