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Stuart Nathan
Features editor
It came from the skies
Yesterday’s announcement of the government’s Innovation and Research Growth Strategy served as a great example of the difficulties of making imaginative policy when you haven’t got any money to do it with. It’s pretty tricky to turn an extra £75m into a major announcement, since that’s roughly the cost of a dozen decent long-term research projects these days. Presenting the policy to an audience of science and technology correspondents, Vince Cable and David Willetts had the air of a double act — Grumpy and Brains, perhaps — who knew they had to pull out something eye-catching.
The renaming of the Technology and Innovation Centres probably wasn’t it. TIC might be a bit clumsy but it has the advantages of those old adverts for Ronseal — it does exactly what it says on the tin. Herman Hauser’s suggestion that they be named after a prominent British scientist (he suggested Clark-Maxwell Centres) seemed like a good option, but Cable seemed keen to downplay any similarity between the TICs and Germany’s Fraunhofer Centres. Could this be why the name-it-after-someone idea was dropped?
Leaving aside the question of why you wouldn’t want to emulate something highly successful, known worldwide, and widely seen as a mark of quality, it’s not entirely clear why they chose to call them Catapult Centres. Willetts mentioned that it’s both a verb and a noun and shows the aspiration behind the concept — to catapult (ahhh, see?) ideas from research into commercialisation. However, any idea which leads to a spate of jokes on Twitter is probably not a great one. The Space Catapult sounds a bit primitive; rockets are generally preferred these days. The Defence Catapult does rather imply that BAE Systems will be developing a brand-new, laser-guided trebuchet. And the Cell Therapy Catapult just sounds like something that’ll go splat. On the other hand, advanced composites are at least pretty good materials for building catapults. Maybe BAE Systems can use them to build their trebuchet.
The revival of Smart awards, the idea of X-Prize-like awards, and the publication of publically-funded research in open access journals, are all intriguing; the last of these, in particular, makes very good sense. But the best idea of the day, it seemed to us at Engineer Towers, came from Imran Khan, the director of the Campaign for Science and Engineering. Set aside the proceeds of the upcoming auction for the 4G mobile spectrum to be reinvested in science, engineering and innovation, Khan suggested.
That seems very fitting — money raised by technology going back into technology. However, seeing as the 3G auction, back in 2000, brought in £22.5bn, it’s unlikely that the government would reserve such a windfall purely for science and technology. But think about what could happen if it did. Now that really would be imaginative.
Readers' comments (2)
Carolynne Knight | 9 Dec 2011 1:22 pm
Oh, one has to shudder a little bit when the career poitician/lawyers that make up our government, start messing with engineering and technology. More often than not they end up spending on white elephants. At least they're making an effort, however small.
When one looks at the Technology Strategy Board, it is run by, and its structures are populated by, folk from big industry, who tend either to misunderstand the needs of SMEs, or just to be using the set-up to make sure most of the available money goes to the big boys.
We all know that the vast majority of job-creation comes from SMEs, so we must be sceptical that the present structure will lead to any significant growth within the sector.
One recent 'competion', aimed at SMEs in the space sector, placed so many burdens and abstacles on the applicant that no sensible SME would take the unrealistic risk involved in complying with standards that only big companies could meet.
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Anonymous | 9 Dec 2011 4:40 pm
…"Politicians are unlikely to drive this forward because of their short term ballot-box vision."
Applies to many, as when I worked a while in Agriculture, we concluded the Government would like "elastic pigs" - here today, gone tomorrow or vice versa.
The latest is Music Education - there are no limits for politicians - Mr Gove bragging on Radio 3 about his proposed "hubs” - but he or his minions have recently scotched, or tried to, a whole lot of well run County Music Schools & offshoots.
Five decades ago, many young musicians benefited from the initiative of Muir Matheson, an actual musician, whose name you can see on many old British films as directing the Music. And much more since on that foundation.
Re-inventing the wheel without putting in any new money is a fairly standard political ploy, why do we pay them so much to do it?
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