In the UK, there is a constant refrain about “fat cats” in the southeast of the country. The truth is that the bit of England between London and the south coast also has some run down areas, where unemployment is high and investment low. But the myth is so well engrained that policy rarely shines on these pockets of relative poverty with development money.

So while the Regional Development Administrations (RDAs) in the northern parts of the country are awash with money, sometimes backed up with regional support from the EU, for new ventures and even to support R&D, the southeast has limited access to such funds. (Unlike the recent decision on Scotland, the EU isn’t likely to agree to state aid for broadband in the southeast.) With so many people commuting to London, and old those clusters of high-tech businesses – think Reading, Ashford or Crawley – perhaps the view is that the southeast is devoid of anything that smacks of “rural”.

Not everyone sees things like that, which is why we now have the Rural Research and Strategy Partnership (RRSP). According to their press release, RRSP brings together “five of the region’s leading research institutions to help find ways to solve its most pressing rural problems”.

The idea is to support that well worn concept “multi-disciplinary research collaborations” and to bring together “research teams and key regional policymakers and rural stakeholder groups” to “encourage the generation and use of new research evidence to provide practical and innovative solutions to rural issues”.

Why bother? There may be a lot of people living in the southeast – please move to another part of the country if you can – but “more than 80% of its land area is classified as rural. One third of its countryside is protected for its landscape quality, and it holds 10% of the UK’s farms.”

Peter Bunyan of the University of Surrey sums up the issue “The South East is the economic powerhouse of the UK, and our rural heritage and assets play an important role in that. But one of our big problems is in understanding how we can maintain and improve rural sustainability alongside the demands of economic progress. The South East is a local exemplar of this global paradox.”

The cash to run the show comes at first from the local RDA, SEEDA, the South East England Development Agency. But the research community shouldn’t hold out too much hope of seeing a flood of new money. The RRSP’s web site warns that “Funding for research projects formed as a result of RRSP researcher workshops - and for other Partnership activities - will be secured from the normal research funding sources.”

You might think that the world has enough “social networks” to keep it going. After all, Science|Business seems to have many “contacts” on LinkedIn. Some of us even hang out on Plaxo, although not being of that generation we can’t confirm rumours of sightings on MySpace or Facebook.

Do we really need another network? When it concentrates on “innovation and business development” the answer is “probably”. That’s why people are signing up for the Global Innovation Network.

GINNN, we don’t know what the extra Ns stand for, if anything, describes itself as an “Online platform for Innovation Networking”. It has links with, but goes beyond, the folks in the Institute of Knowledge Transfer, where you can reed the Science|Business newsfeed, and AURIL, Association for University Research and Industry Links.

GINNN is still “work in progress”. It lacks some of the bells and whistles of the social networks that have wheeled shed loads of loot out of the pockets of venture capitalists, but as the “strapline” says “The more you put into this community the more you will get out”.

At last count, 2346 people had signed up for GINNN. One reason for signing up is that it has a stream of job openings in the sector. Members of the network can also feed in news of their own activities and events.

There is an interesting wrinkle to a recent piece in the New York Times, How Scientific Gains Abroad Pay Off in the U.S.. For years, the refrain in the UK has been that we are great at coming up with ideas, but rubbish at turning them into loot. Given their even later arrival on the route towards commercialisation of science, it is a fair bet that they say the same thing in most European countries.

Too many ideas, the perceived wisdom continues, started here in the UK and ended up making money in the USA and Japan. (That was before China and India “took off”.) Now the New York Times reports that the USA could become even more aggressive at Hoovering up foreign know how.

“By tapping relatively low-cost scientists around the world, American innovators may actually strengthen their market positions.”

This is yet another sign of the continuing “generations” of R&D. (The book, “Third Generation R&D,” may be from 1991, but it is still essential reading.) As the NYT continues:

“Industry … is adapting to a world where scientific goods can come from anywhere — and fewer scientists work on abstract problems unrelated to the market. “It is no accident that many corporate labs have fallen apart,” Sean M. Maloney, executive vice president of Intel, says. “They were science farms looking for problems.”

It is bad enough when knowledge drains out of Europe by “accident”. How much worse will it get when the USA finally wakes up to the fact that it isn’t the source of all great science and starts to mine the world’s R&D systematically?

This week sees the start of another of those green initiatives that set out to meet the environmentalists’ demands to “do something about climate change”. As from today, under something called the Renewable Transport Fuel Obligation (RTFO), transport fuels sold in the UK have to contain 2.5 per cent biofuel.

Just two weeks before it was due to come into effect, and after companies had committed themselves to spending billions to meet the RTFO, Greenpeace, aroused by reports of shippers wanting to grab at US subsidies by shipping biofuels to and fro across the Atlantic, suddenly decided that it didn’t like the idea.

Don’t worry, we aren’t going to dive into the green debate. There really is a business story in here and one that concerns high-tech startups. Well high-ish tech.

Sustainable energy is a hot area for investors these days. The Carlyle Group, for example, has invested in a bunch of businesses including Ensus. This startup company, with both a chairman and CEO who spent years developing their engineering skills in ICI, before that bastion of the chemical sector evaporated, is spending £250 million building a plant on Teesside to turn wheat into bioethanol.

What can they be thinking of? Wheat? Should that be going into loaves of bread?

Not really, most of Europe’s wheat goes to feed animals so that we can eat beef. Even so, spare a thought for all those cattle. Don’t worry, they will still get their square meals.

If you believe Ensus’s pitch, and the company has had it peer reviewed, “biofuel from wheat is almost for free”.

That is how the CEO, Alwyn Hughes, describes the process, which he also likens to a giant whisky distillery. (That is why the new plant, due to start up in a bout a year’s time, doesn’t really qualify as being seriously high tech.) Ensus achieves this feat by creating two products, biofuel and animal food.

In another wrinkle, Ensus reckons that its animal food is so much better than the raw product that farmers don’t have to top it up with extra protein. So, in one fell swoop, Europe can cut down on its oil imports and on imports of protein for animal food.

The point of the story is that Ensus has backed up its sales pitch, and the all important business plan, with a detailed sustainability analysis, and one that it has thrown to the wolves, in the shape of a bunch of expert scientists.

It all comes down to the carbon footprint of the full fuel cycle. Not all biofuels are equal on that front, certainly not those created by ripping up rainforests to make way to crown palm oil, or even those created by plonking big processing plants down in the middle of American prairie country.

As Hughes puts it: “The question is not about whether biofuels are good or bad – it is about differentiating between good and bad biofuels.”

It is for someone else to tell if Ensus really does have a strong case. The point is that it is irresponsible of groups like Greenpeace to flail around indiscriminately knocking a whole industry. If the EU had heeded the organisation’s warnings, then a bunch of investors could have kissed goodbye to their money.

Companies cannot turn investment strategies on and off just because a bunch of greenies have had second thoughts. After all, they were the ones pushing for transport to do its bit for climate change. Let’s hope that they don’t put off too many investors. More important, let’s hope that Brussels ignores their shrill screams. The first wave of biofuels may not be perfect, but, as Alwyn Hughes says, you cannot have a more efficient second generation process without building a first generation.

There’s a coincidence. Just when the news broke that Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd (SSTL) has changed hands, we learn that the company’s chairman, Professor Sir Martin Sweeting, has won the 2008 Sir Arthur Clarke Lifetime Achievement Award.

Also known as the “Arthurs,” they like to describe these gong as “the space industry’s Oscar”. It may have been a “black-tie dinner” but we have seen no reports of the jewellery, or frocks, worn at the event.

The other coincidence is, of course, that Sir Arthur died on 18 March at the age of 90. It is hard to appreciate quite how much the sage of geostationary satellites did for science in the UK. Someone else would have come up with the idea of a satellite “hovering” over the same bit of the planet, but how many could turn that science into stories that grabbed a generation?

Sir Martin sums it up in his own comments on receiving this going. “As a teenager, I was captivated by Sir Arthur’s books and particularly the film ‘2001: A space odyssey’ which inspired me to strive for a career in space.”

Forget about all those well meaning attempts to persuade young people to study science and technology. Just bribe J. K. Rowling to move on from churning out Harry Potter’s witchcraft to writing about some real science.

Anyone planning to clamber aboard the investment bandwagon on renewable energy might like to heed a warning handed out at the 235th national meeting of the American Chemical Society (ACS). The title of the press release says it all Expert Foresees 10 More Years of R&D to Make Solar Energy Competitive.

The expert in this case is Harry Gray, PhD, Arnold O. Beckman Professor of Chemistry and Founding Director of the Beckman Institute at the California Institute of Technology. The press release tells us:

“The single biggest challenge, Gray said, is reducing costs so that a large-scale shift away from coal, natural gas and other non-renewable sources of electricity makes economic sense. Gray estimated the average cost of photovoltaic energy at 35 to 50 cents per kilowatt-hour. By comparison, other sources are considerably less expensive, with coal and natural gas hovering around 5-6 cents per kilowatt-hour.”

Anyone old enough to have lived through the energy crises of the mid 1970s may consider Gray’s timetable to be optimistic. Way back then there were plenty of demonstration projects to impress visiting journalists. Investors weren’t among the folks you needed to persuade way back then, with so much government loot sloshing around.

Ventures in Italy and the USA stand out, partly because they were in nice places. I wonder what became of them.

There is a difference between the current rush to go green and earlier episodes. Back then there was, thanks partly to that government money and the public ownership of many energy utilities, little private interest in investing in solar energy, for example, or much of any technology come to that.

Governments did all the spending on energy R&D, often through surrogate agencies such as state owned electricity companies, which really didn’t want any truck with flaky ideas that got in the way of their plans to build nuclear power stations.

Of course, had those electricity companies achieved their nuclear ambitions back then, we might not need solar power. But that is another issue.

Stanford, the university that has, if you believe the hyperbole, single handedly kept the American economy thriving through the work of its undergraduates, many of them dropouts who made millions rather than finish their education, has started to formalise, and fund, the process. It seems that Stanford Student Enterprises, “the newest and largest entrepreneurial funding source for students on the Stanford campus,” hopes to further stoke the phenomenon.

In their rush to learn lessons from places like Stanford, universities in the UK have set out to formalise what has been a random process over the pond. Nice to see Stanford clambering aboard a train that looks like being crowded with passengers from universities in the UK.

The UK’s Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) has, over recent years, quietly added to its portfolio of “interdisciplinary” research topics. Perhaps more surprising, the Wellcome Trust, previously focussed on infectious diseases, is climbing aboard the bandwagon.

The latest manifestation of this phenomenon comes in the latest joint announcement from the two organisations, £45 million ‘Engine for Healthcare Innovation’ to Boost UK Medical Engineering. This tells us that:

The initiative will provide funding for a number of multidisciplinary centres of excellence within the UK, bringing together experts in the fields of the physical and engineering sciences with those in the clinical and life sciences with the aim of developing innovative solutions for healthcare.

These are two of the UK’s largest researcher funders. Each year they hand out a total of £1.4 billion for research and related activities.

The key bit about the new initiative is summed up in this bit of the announcement:

The Medical Engineering initiative will provide funding to enable academic institutions to engage in applied research for healthcare. It will also improve the integration of expertise in the public and private sectors so that innovations arising in academia are harnessed effectively by the healthcare industry and aided through the process of regulation, commercialisation and distribution for patient benefit.

This initiative could be good news for the innovation community. The UK has excellent medical research and an NHS system that, in theory, but only in theory, is a great test-bed for new techniques and instruments. An initiative like this might just help to wake up the NHS.

The real challenge will come when the time is ripe for the commercialisation of this sort of work. Medical technologies still have to go through clinical trials and regulatory hoops, but the barriers are a lot lower than they are for drugs development. It doesn’t have to take a decade and cost a billion €uros before the profits can flow.

Countries in “old Europe” like to think that they can show the Americans a thing or two about doing research. Some of the newer kids on the European block, the so-called accession states, also have ambitions to teach the rest of us something.

Romania’s Prime Minister, Calin Popescu Tariceanu, has produced one of those worthy articles that appear in the likes of sponsored sections in business magazines. This time, though, he has written for something called Public Service Review: European Union.

In a piece with the title The Romanian research revolution, Tariceanu tells us that the country’s R&D budget is set to rise

“From a mere 0.22% GDP invested in 2005 for the R&D domain, we reached 0.5% GDP in 2007, and the 2008 R&D budget is 0.75% of GDP. Further, public expenditures for R&D will register a significantly high growth rate. Our goal is that Romania reaches an amount of 1% GDP investments in R&D by 2011.”

One interesting bit of the article is his reference to inward investment. We all know about big companies moving to India and China to do R&D. Now it seems that Romania is in their sights.

It may help that “the Government I lead introduced several fiscal advantages for those private companies who perform in the field of R&D in Romania”.

These inducements may already be paying off:

“We have already some important examples of centres of excellence, such as the ones created by Renault, Microsoft or Ericsson, and I do hope that such centres will grow to be top hubs of R&D infrastructure in Europe.”

Perhaps this is a part of the country’s revenge for those EU members that did not open their doors to the free movement of Romanian workers.

Everyone hears about the roaring successes in R&D, but the duds can end up quietly swept under the carpet. Who will remember these excursions up blind alleys when someone next comes up with the same brilliant idea?

Talk to R&D managers in many industries and they will tell you that they work hard to ensure that everyone in the business has access to the collective wisdom that comes through many years of failed projects and experiments. Some companies address this issue with IT systems that set out to capture that experience, but the open literature, where you don’t get brownie points for failed experiments, isn’t stuffed with such accounts.

Biomedcentral (BMC) is doing something about this in some areas of science. It has launched BMC Research Notes.

“BMC Research Notes is an open access journal publishing scientifically sound research across all fields of biology and medicine, enabling authors to publish updates to previous research, software tools and databases, data sets, small-scale clinical studies, and reports of confirmatory or ‘negative’ results.”

As yet, the venture is limited to the life sciences, which means that some of us can’t even understand the titles of the papers. But many an idea has started there and found its way into the wider worlds of science.

They say that:

“The aim of BMC Research Notes is to reduce the loss suffered by the research community when results remain unpublished because they do not form a sufficiently complete story to justify the publication of a full research article.”

It seems most unlikely that physics and chemistry, for example, are immune to this phenomenon.

It is always worth listening to Andy Hopper, one of those Cambridge professors who successfully straddles the academic and business worlds. His latest pronouncement fits in well with the rise of interest in renewable energy technologies.

The Guardian has picked up on Andy’s recent comments at the Royal Society where he talked about the rising energy consumption of all those computers that increasingly flood the planet, perhaps in more ways than one. The resulting article, Wind power urged for computers, quotes Andy, who professes communications engineering at Cambridge, as saying “Computing power can be moved around the world and can be done anywhere in the world where the energy is available.”

It makes more sense than putting a windmill on top of every PC.

If it wasn’t a cliché, you could say that a fair head of steam is building up around clean energy businesses. The report Clean-Energy Trends 2008 from Clean Edge is just the latest to proclaim this as the sector to watch.

As the introduction to the report (available as a PDF file) puts it “2007 was another banner year for clean energy, with no signs of a slowdown in 2008. Solar, wind, biofuels, geothermal, energy intelligence, hybrid- and all-electric vehicles, advanced batteries, green buildings, and other clean-energy-related technologies and markets provided bright spots in an otherwise sluggish economy.”

By coincidence, Jeff Skinner, Director of Corporate Affairs at UCL, was similarly upbeat on energy technologies in a throwaway remarks last night at an R&D Society meeting on knowledge transfer from the university sector. Jeff’s point was that the UK seems to have a critical mass in this area.

UCL Advances, which, according to its mission statement, “stimulates collaboration among researchers, business and investors driving innovations that benefit society and the economy, is doing its bit to throw fuel into the debate. In 28 June its holds second Technology Innovation Forum on The Future of Energy and Sustainability. The event “will focus on the variety of ways in which industry, academia and government can work together to meet the challenge of climate change”.

The Clean Edge analysis reveals the extent of the interest in clean energy.

“U.S.-based venture capital investments in energy technologies more than quadrupled from $599 million in 2000 to $2.7 billion in 2007, according to New Energy Finance (with supporting data from Clean Edge and Nth Power). As a percent of total VC investments, energy tech increased from .6 percent in 2000 to 9.1 percent in 2007. Between 2006 and 2007, venture investments in the U.S. clean-energy sector increased by more than 70 percent.”

Whether it is a good thing that, according to the report, production of biofuels rose from 7 billion gallons in 2003 to 15.6 billion last year is another matter.

The beginning of the year is usually the time when businesses try to show how innovative they are by drawing attention to their position in the patent league tables. There have been some of those. Xerox, for example, issued a press release earlier this week telling us that it was awarded 584 new patents in 2007, “up 31 percent from 2005″ as the company said in its release, Xerox Fuels Innovation Engine with 584 New Patents in 2007.

We’ll leave others to explain the difference between Xerox’s numbers and those put out by IFI Patent Intelligence which, on the same day, “announced its annual compilation of the world’s top-ranked U.S. patent winners”. IFI’s league table shows that Xerox Corp was in 33rd place, along with Renesas Technology Corp of Japan.

As usual, IT businesses were the top of the pops. IBM headed the table, ahead of Samsung, Canon and Matsushita Intel and Microsoft, in that order.

IBM decided that it really didn’t need to boast about its filing system. After all, it has been number 1 for 15 years. Instead, it spiked the guns of the number crunchers by unveiling a patent giveaway.

On the same day as these other patently interesting announcements, IBM issued a press release on another patent story, a community effort to “help the environment, unleashing dozens of innovative, environmentally responsible patents to the public domain”.

The press release, Corporations Go Public With Eco-Friendly Patents, says that IBM has come together with Nokia, Pitney Bowes and Sony to support something they call the ” Eco-Patent Commons”.

The initiative, launched by IBM and the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD), comes with its own web site. This has a more detailed brochure, a PDF file, describing the initiative.

As you would expect of something involving legal bits of paper, this seems to be a complicated piece of work. Fortunately, there are some explanations of the motives of the participants and how the process will work.

It isn’t, it seems, just an attempt to give everyone involved a warm glow. Don’t expect IBM to hand out the family jewels. As the web site puts it “leading businesses may hold some patents that provide environmental benefit and do not represent an essential source of business advantage for them. Though these patents may provide nominal license or exclusivity potential for companies, they may provide greater value in a public commons.”

What can we expect? They talk off patented inventions that might deliver:

It seems that you don’t even have to be a megacorp to join in. “Contributing even one patent is sufficient for participation and can make a significant difference in helping to further sustainable development.” It is a good thing that patent offices around the world try to squelch the scientifically impossible. Don’t turn up, then, looking for perpetual motion machines.

Newspapers provide helpful advice to readers trying to negotiate their way through the tax system. The Financial Times does better than most every Saturday in its useful Money section. The latest edition deals with an interesting reader’s question Do we qualify for R&D tax breaks?

The answer is sound advice for any small business in the world of R&D. It does, though, skirt around the “science”.

Natural enough, perhaps. These are financial advisers after all. In this case the answer come from Alysoun Stewart “head of the strategic services group at Grant Thornton, the accountancy firm”. You would normally have to pay for information from such a source. In this case we get a useful potted digest of R&D tax credits.

The real question, though, is does the company’s homoeopathy business qualify as “science”?

Practitioners like to think so, of course. But most chemists and medics will tell you that diluting something a squillionfold and claiming that the result will have a medical effect is just plain bonkers. When the original molecules are also of dubious pharmacological value, credibility plummets.

The company seeking the FT’s advice is also in the business of “developing ancient remedies in a modern context”. This is not what many people would see as homoeopathy. There is some genuine medicine to be had from understanding ancient remedies. Perhaps that is why the response did not go into the acceptability of the science.

The expert’s advice says that, when it comes to tax credits, HM Revenue & Customs “defines the R&D that qualifies for tax relief as directly contributing to achieving an advance in science or technology through the resolution of scientific or technological uncertainty. Therefore R&D can’t be seen as solely benefiting your business; it must be proven to be breaking new ground.”

There is not much uncertainty about homoeopathy in the minds of most scientists. It is “snake oil” through and through. This does not, though, prevent some universities from climbing aboard the “alternative therapy” bandwagon, much to the chagrin of many researchers who should know what they are talking about.

Maybe HM Revenue & Customs has its own peer review panel to sort out the real from the fake. If not, perhaps I can get tax relief for my work on perpetual motion.

Anyone wanting to search “over 3.5 million US patents going back to the late 1960s” can scuttle on over to a new web site, SparkIP, which describes itself as “an intellectual property exchange improving the pace of innovation by connecting the scientific community and the information critical to them”.

Only time will tell if the new venture, with some heavyweight founders from Johns Hopkins and Duke University, will carve out for itself a sustainable niche on an increasingly crowded Internet. But the concept of a “fully-searchable innovation landscape” certainly has its appeal.

The idea seems to be to do something a little more intelligent than many a search engines. They reckon to have developed “algorithms that group and name related intellectual property into discrete clusters”. It will be interesting to see if those algorithms can make those quirky off-the-wall connections that can turn out to make a packet.

They throw out the invitation “If you are a university, a corporation, or a research lab interested in posting licensable technologies on SparkIP.com, please contact us to learn more. We will also soon allow anyone to post technologies directly to SparkIP.com.”

Unfortunately, the search fell over when we tried it in Firefox. It worked fine in Internet Explorer. A search for “plastic electronics” threw up an interesting patent for a “Tactilely enhanced visual image display”. Certainly qualifies as an odd idea, but do I really want to feel my screen?

At a time when the world’s leaders are huddled together worrying about climate change, even George W Bush now seems to accept that it is real, it is instructive to see how others are responding to the issue. Naturally enough, some see carbon reduction as a great PR opportunity. Look no further than yet another attempt to sell the idea of a paper-free office. (Haven’t we heard that one before?)

Who knows how much the environment will benefit? But you have to admire the folks who put out the press release Processing at Record Speed and Reducing Carbon Footprints. It is something to do with the aftermath of car crashes.

My scientific training kicks in when I see this sort of thing. I need to see numbers to prove that such things really will save carbon.

With luck the people trying to sell genuine carbon friendly technology won’t get lost in the marketing noise.

Rolls-Royce may not have invented the academic research centre, with a research programme linked very closely to the company’s own technology needs, but in its University Technology Centres (UTCs), the company has certainly been more vigorous than most in forging such links. The latest such venture continues the company’s globalisation of the concept.

Its newest UTC is at Karlsruhe University in Germany. This time the idea is to “research cooling in gas turbine combustors and turbines and related technologies required to improve the fuel efficiency and environmental performance of future aero engines”.

The new UTC joins 28 others set up since 1990, in the US, Norway, Sweden, Italy, and Germany as well as the UK, where the idea got off the ground. Perhaps the most surprising feature of the UTCs is that Rolls-Royce has managed to do deals in such disparate academic regimes.

Talking to one of the UK’s most famous technology investors the other day, the subject of investing on “green” stuff came up. He immediately began to wax lyrical about a neat idea for electric cars. Now we have further evidence that there are people out there keen to put money into transport technology that reduces our carbon footprint on the planet. Google.org has put out a Request for Investment Proposals through RechargeIT.org.

The $10 million RFP says:

“We plan to invest amounts ranging from $500,000 to $2,000,000 in selected for-profit companies whose innovative approach, team and technologies will enable widespread commercialization of plug-in hybrid electric vehicles, electric vehicles and/or vehicle-to-grid solutions. This RFP is global in scope, and we encourage responses from companies anywhere in the world.”

The sort of things they are looking for include plug-in hybrid electric vehicles, electric vehicles and something called “vehicle-to-grid solutions”.

Anyone else thing that they will get trampled to death in the stampede to bid for cash?

There is no shortage of advice for academics who want to spin their research out into a new business. A lot of that wisdom is based on experience and conventional wisdom rather than detailed studies of the process. Nothing wrong with that, but it helps to have some numbers to support the current enthusiasm, in the UK at least, for university spinouts. That’s why it is interesting to read the latest issue of the journal R&D Management.

In their paper “Commercial exploitation of new technologies arising from university research: start-ups and markets for technology” R & D Management , Volume 37 Issue 4 Page 319-328, September 2007, Fred Pries and Paul Guild report on a study of 57 “public start-up firms created to commercialize the results of university research”. The reason why this paper is particularly interesting is that the researchers have compared start-ups built around products with those that set out to commercialise a technology.

The advice to most academics wanting to bring their science to market is that they should find a product that they can make. Science looking for problems is, says the conventional wisdom, unlikely to succeed. Pries and Guild found that this isn’t always the case. In their paper they distinguish between “startups that operate through product markets and start-ups that operate through markets for technology”.

There’s a clear difference between how the two sorts of businesses make their money. “When a start-up operates through product markets, it produces goods or services based on the new technology.” So it is likely to get revenue from selling products and from contracts for products or services. “When a start-up operates through markets for technology, it is expected to derive its revenue primarily from intellectual property-related sources.”

If a start-up is in the products business, then it has to be involved in technology development and production. For a technology start-up, the idea is to be involved in technology development while the businesses that plan to use the knowledge will carry out product development.

Pries and Guild decided to look at the two different types of business because they thought that too much attention had gone to the product start-up. In the event, they found in their survey of a sample of new businesses in Canada and the USA that while product oriented businesses made up about a half of new start-ups, technology firms “represent 14% of the start-ups examined and 20% of those that have emerged from development stage”.

These results, they say, “demonstrate that operating through markets for technology is a common and viable method of commercialization for start-ups”. They found big differences in the activities of the two types of firms.

Among the lessons that they draw from their results is the need for “commercialization models that reflect the existence of markets for technology”. There is a message there, then, for the ‘knowledge transfer agents’ in universities and elsewhere.

They also suggest that there should be research into the choice of “operating through product markets vs. markets for technology in commercializing the results of university research”.

The fact that there are different role models for innovative businesses should be grounds for thinking about the best way to bring ideas to the market. The automatic ‘think product’ advice may not always be valid. Are there, the paper asks, “different ways to operate through markets for technology?” For example, “It may be possible, for instance, for start-ups to retain ownership of the rights to a technology while letting established firms acquire limited rights to use the technology through, for example, non-exclusive licenses.”

After all, as they say, “University researchers forming start-ups to commercialize technologies they invent may have technology development skills but typically lack product development and business development skills.”

Pries and Guild suggest that “a strategy of operating through markets for technology is a more focused approach than a strategy of operating through product markets and may pose less risk and require fewer resources”.

There is another issue for that universities should consider. “For some early stage technologies, a viable strategy may be to use start-ups as a method of financing technology development before licensing the technology to established firms. Universities typically do not have the resources to finance technology development but use of a start-up may provide a method of accessing capital for technology development from venture capitalists or public markets.”

The paper doesn’t mention this, preferring to focus on lessons for the spinners out, but there could also be lessons here for the people who back those start-ups. Perhaps they should pay more attention to researchers who want to shift technology rather than stuff.

Yet more research into local innovation comes from the National Governors Association (NGA) in the USA. Janet Napolitano, Governor of Arizona, now chairs the NGA and has made “Innovation America” the them for her term of office.

As a part of this activity, the NGA asked the Pew Center on the States to look into the issues that states face. The result is a set of reports on aspects of innovation.

The catalyst for the activity is no surprise. “Huge new overseas competitors like China and India are competing for the same pools of cash and people as California, Indiana and the rest.”

One of the reports, Innovation America: Investing in Innovation, has some useful guidelines on how to succeed in this business:

Develop a statewide research and innovation strategy that not only puts in place all the components for innovation, but aligns them in ways that provide advantages to in-state companies;

Make investments to gain talent, build topnotch research enterprises and compete for federal dollars in those focused areas where the state can be world-class;

Encourage, even mandate, collaboration among universities, the private sector and other institutions;

Put world-class professionals, not political pals, in key positions;

Create an organization and consistent funding source that facilitates a continuity in R&D partnering and spending; and

Hold the recipients of public investments accountable for delivering on promised benefits.

Number four on the list will come as a surprise to many in Europe where we don’t talk about putting “political pals” in charge. Whether or not it happens is, of course, another issue.

The NGA’s web site also lists Recent State Initiatives to Promote Innovation. Interestingly, many states begin with initiatives in education. Others are active in creating the infrastructure needed for innovation, such as universal access to broadband telecoms.

Hawaii, home of the famous guitar, has come up with an interesting one and has “invested in its creative industry by developing a Music Enterprise Learning Experience, which will apply the successful ‘Nashville’ model from Belmont University to build the technical and business skills of native musicians”.