I read with great interest Clive Cookson’s article on science investment (FT, 7 April p5) and the proposed £2bn in funding to support the commercialisation/exploitation of science, keeping the country’s brightest innovators and ideas in the UK and not ‘brain draining’ to the US.
UKBI has long argued that investment in support science and engineering will provide the country with a platform to compete globally, creating and securing high value businesses and jobs that will continue to pay dividends for decades to come. However, this ‘new package’ should support existing commercialisation programmes that are proven to work and make significant returns.
The established nationwide network of business incubation environments are already in place to support the start-ups which will grow us out of recession and could do so much more with the right type of financial and political support. These business incubation environments bring together complementary innovators and technologies, providing them with access to the finance and expert advice they need to grow their ideas into sustainable businesses.
This quiet ‘revolution’ has taken place in the UK over 20 years, with little publicity or flag waving – yet they continue to provide a key element in the nurturing environment for the scientists whom this new £2b package is seeking to encourage.
The recently released Manchester Independent Economic Review states that funding for business incubation has been targeted at regenerating brownfield sites, rather than providing business incubation environments in places where high technology businesses want and need to be based.
UKBI has long argued that public funding for business incubation is too focussed on the property rather than the people and added value processes – business incubation is a tool for stimulating enterprise and innovation and then supporting it as it flourishes, not purely as a way to regenerate land that the private sector will not touch.
High-technology business incubation environments sit at the interface between the academic lab and industry, bringing the scientists, the financiers, the commercialisation experts and business people together to create successful and sustainable enterprises out of innovations – the virtuous circle which President Obama hopes to encourage by introducing an annual funding package to support business incubators in USA.
If the UK is going to compete in scientific research and exploitation for the next 10 years, let us not reinvent the wheel. Let us fund the proven mechanisms for getting ideas out of the labs and into the boardroom, namely the business incubation environments that are already supporting the scientific innovations that will compete with the US for years to come.
Graham Ross Russell
Chairman, UKBI
