Always assume you will be successful. This is one of the maxims Stan Boland carries in his head as a result of his broad span of business experience. It is a tenet that has proved useful over the past eight years while establishing a technology company that he hopes will make it big on the back of the new wave of smartphones.

Mr Boland, 50, is chief executive and co-founder of Icera, a UK company backed by $250m in venture capital that is trying to achieve what might seem an impossible dream: to mount a coup against the dominance in a specialised field of semiconductor technology of Qualcomm, the Californian microchip company.

“It’s scary how good they are,” Mr Boland says of his big US rival. “But they take a conventional approach [to chip design], while we are doing something completely different.”