Another year, another department, another Innovate ‘0X

Government departments come and go in the UK, but the Technology Strategy Board survives. DTI, BERR and now BIS, all have sheltered the TSB and shelled out for its annual ‘Innovate’ shindig.

This year Innovate ’09, on Tuesday 13^th October, is back in its original home, the Business Design Centre in London’s fashionable Islington. This is the venue the TSB used before it mutated from being, as the name suggests, an advisory board, lobbing ideas on innovation into the government machine, into a “research council in waiting,” spending as much money as some RCs but without all the cumbersome formalised peer review and academic interference that goes with those other launderers of public cash.

The real Research Councils may have had qualms about this upstart, but they are already lining up announcements to show their adherence to the TSB’s message, that research should feed through into innovation. The Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) has flagged up that Innovate ’09 will be its launch pad for its “Third Call for Applications for Innovation and Knowledge Centres”.

The IKCs, says EPSRC’s press release, “will develop the knowledge transfer interface with business and provide professional relationship management as well as collaborative research and postgraduate training to increase future capability in these key areas”.

There are already a bunch of IKCs, but more are in the pipeline.

“Each new IKC, expected to be announced in autumn 2010, will receive up to £9.45m in addition to funding from other sources. £6.95m will come from EPSRC and BBSRC (where the research falls within the biotechnology and biological science remit) and a further £2.5m from the Technology Strategy Board over a period of five years.”

No news yet on the subjects these planned IKCs will cover. But they desperately want the business world to join in the fun:

“The overall aim of the IKC initiative is to provide a centre of excellence where the best research and business innovation can work together to maximise the economic impact of EPSRC research and postgraduate training.”

Anyone going to Innovate ’09 can dig around on the IKC stand at Innovate ’09. Maybe they will say something about the subjects the call hopes to back.