Hot on the heels of the UK’s R&D Scoreboard, actually a few days before it, comes the annual survey of Germany’s R&D spending from the Centre for European Economic Research (ZEW) in Mannheim. The survey, conducted last summer, asked companies about their investment in innovation. The answers show that they expected “innovation expenditures” to decline by 10 per cent in 2009, from a record high of 128.1 billion euro in 2008. This decline was, though, less than the 18 per cent fall in company profits.

The good news, as ZEW sees it, is that “firms have largely spared the investments for [R&D]“. “In 2009, firms plan to spend only 114.5 billion [euro] for innovation projects. This is a decrease of 11 per cent compared to 2008. The innovation expenditures therefore drop below the level of 2006.”

ZEW reports that the decline in investment in innovation was less than the fall in corporate profits. It also says that expenditures on R&D “probably will stay the same in 2009 because they are important for the long-term competitiveness”.

The picture differs depending on the size of the company. “The decline of the innovation budget has been considerably large for small and medium-sized firms with less than 500 employees.” SMEs “plan to lower their innovation expenditures by 21 per cent from 33.4 billion euro in 2008 to only 26.5 billion euro in 2010″.

The survey offers several interesting snippets on the effect of innovation spending on corporate performance:

• “16.8 per cent of all firms’ turnovers in Germany were earned with newly introduced products” (16.3 per cent in 2007)
• “In the research-intensive sector, 38 per cent of turnovers were made with new products (39 per cent in 2007)”
• “In 2008, the German economy was able to save costs of about 3.9 per cent per piece by means of process innovations.”

As in the UK, 2008 was a good year for R&D spending in Germany. But the growth was limited to “research-intensive industry … especially vehicle construction, mechanical engineering, and the electric industry”. Innovation expenditures in the research-intensive industry rose by 6.5 billion euro, an increase of nine per cent. Other sectors “could only increase their innovation expenditures slightly by 0.4 per cent”. Especially hard hit were “finance services, wholesale and transport” where “innovation expenditures decreased considerably”.

The annual bean count of R&D spending in the UK offers the usual opportunities to pick the data that suits whatever argument you want to make. Lord Paul Drayson, Minister of State for Science and Innovation, uses The 2009 R&D Scoreboard to point out that the year in question, 2008, “saw an encouraging increase of 9.2% in UK investment against the previous year – and strong comparative growth in R&D, second only to Switzerland”.

Drayson is too bright to ignore the fact that this impressive increase predated what he admits has been “the worst of the global economic downturn”. Next year’s statistical exercise could be a much grimmer affair if many companies indulged in the knee jerk response of previous recessions and shouted “cut the R&D budget”. There have certainly been some signs of that, with more than one pharmaceuticals company pulling the plug on a lab in the UK.

As Science|Business has already pointed out, one value of the scoreboard is that this exercise has been going on for a long time, this is the 19^th edition, and has been a great source of numbers to crunch over the years.

This year’s report offers its own set of key points:

• the top 1000 UK companies in the R&D league spent £26.6 billion in 2008
• just 100 companies did 81% of that R&D
• globally, the top 1000 companies invested £396 billion on R&D in 2008, “an increase of 7% on the previous year”
• 80% of that spending happened in five countries: the US, Japan, Germany, France and the UK

The biggest R&D spender continues to be the “global pharmaceuticals and biotechnology sector”. But with a year on year increase of 7.6% it was behind “software and computer services” which, with 9.3% growth, increased investment most.

It may have slowed its growth but pharmaceuticals and biotechnology accounted for 36% of the UK1000 total, “six times as much as the next biggest sector”. This is down to the sheer size and number of the sector. “There are 134 pharmaceuticals and biotechnology firms in the UK1000 and 116 in the G1000.” The G1000 is a list of the “1000 most R&D active companies globally”.

Further analysis of what went on in particular sectors shows that the companies in the UK’s top 1000 that are also in the G1000 increased their R&D investment “more quickly than their global peers in the banking, aerospace and defence, and software and computer services sectors, but increased their R&D more slowly in the oil and gas producing and the technology hardware and equipment sectors”.

A load of bankers

In recent years the scoreboard has tried to count spending in sectors other than those traditional associated with R&D. So as well as the top two sectors, banking appears as one of the five, alongside aerospace and defence and automobiles and parts.

Banks certainly spend money on R&D, although quite how much they get out of it is an open question in the light of recent events. “Three banks were among the top 25 UK investors in the UK1000,” says the report. They accounted for 88% of the sector’s total spending on R&D “and over 5% of the UK1000 spend in 2008″.

Digging further down shows that only one company in “automobiles and parts”, GKN, is UK owned. So while the sector is number five in the UK, when it comes to the G1000 it is the second largest investor in R&D.

Foreign owners

The ownership of companies inevitably influences where they concentrate their R&D. One intriguing bit of evidence on this front relates to the fact that “slightly less than three quarters (74%) of R&D investment in 2008 came from UK-owned companies. And yet 43% of UK1000 companies were foreign-owned. You would have to work out the relative sizes of those businesses to work out if this really is an indicator that foreign owned businesses are less keen than indigenous companies to perform R&D in the UK.

Look no further than the report’s table of “Biggest increases in R&D expenditure in the UK1000″ for more evidence on the propensity of locals to spend more on R&D. Of the 20 firms in the table, just 25 per cent are foreign-owned firms. On the other hand, look at the 20 firms in the table for the “Biggest decreases in R&D expenditure in the UK1000 and the picture flips with 75 per cent of the companies in foreign ownership.

The report leaves it to readers to draw their own conclusions.

Talk of “technology intelligence” could conjure up thoughts of business espionage, but it also describes the attempts that companies make to stay ahead of the game and to anticipate nasty surprises that could wreck an otherwise profitable enterprise. A paper in the latest issue of the journal R&D Management describes a formalised approach to technology intelligence, or TI as they call it.

In their paper, Combining methods in the technology intelligence process: application in an aerospace manufacturing firm, Husam Arman of the University of Nottingham and James Foden of Rolls-Royce Plc put forward an approach to a “practical TI methodology” that can, they believe, help companies to cope with the “increasing speed of innovation and product life cycles, growing R&D expenditures and others” as they put it.

Arman and Foden have developed what they call the Strategic Technology Alignment Roadmapping (STAR) system. STAR, they say, “provides software-supported steps for the collection of technology-related data through to the evaluation, ranking and selection of R&D projects”.

Developing STAR involved building a knowledge base of internal and external technological information. The TI process then involves a set of defined stages, including, for example, identifying and assessing competing technologies and defining the “state-of-the-art” for each technology. The process also includes benchmark a company’s position against that state-of-the-art along with scenario analysis.

One important factor, they say, is to include “market considerations” in TI. Arman and Foden believe that this is essential because “the only indication of a disruptive threat to a company may be the ‘poaching’ of its marginal customers”.

Keep it formal

One advantage of a formalised approach to TI is that it encourages systematic recording of technological information in a process that draws on a wide range of sources, such as “information that can arise from external sources, including competitors, suppliers, trade fairs, conferences, publications and patents”. Internal information can include “sources such as R&D engineers and scientists, designers, shop floor operators, intranets, databases and company’s roadmaps”.

TI uses all this information “to identify promising technologies, to show their potential and limitations, as well to take the advantage of technological changes”.

In their paper, Arman and Foden describe the various steps and workshops that a company has to complete in a TI exercise. The processes can include workshops to identify the critical technologies that are “essential to the present and future of the company in providing competitive advantage”. It is also essential to have formal internal and external technology networks of key contacts who “are knowledgeable of a particular technological area and provide comprehensive expertise through their involvement in subsequent TI stages”.

Another step in the process is to determine the cost and performance criteria that the company will use to assess the technologies that compete against the key technology that the TI is considering. It is also important to take in details of business plans and market requirements, as well as external factors such as legislative, political, social and environmental issues.

A visual approach

Using these tools, the TI process that Arman and Foden suggest can create visual representations of competing technologies. They illustrate this with an example that shows that, when it comes to costs, the established technology of plasma arc welding is inferior to competing technologies.

The paper illustrates the TI process with a case study of “a world-leading provider of power systems and services for use on land, at sea and in the air, operating in four global markets – civil aerospace, defence aerospace, marine and energy”. Arman and Foden describe a four-session process that involved two workshops.

The end result is, the authors say, better and more informed decision making on R&D. Their intention, they say, was to “enable proactive searches for information on potential technology-related developments” The TI process can then assess these developments to that the messages reach the right people “with information, appropriate ‘alarm levels’ and the associated reasoning”.

Company culture

Arman and Foden see TI as a “people tool”. As much as anything, going through the steps that go into TI is itself valuable. Participants get a better understanding of what is going on, which should allow them to make better decisions. Whether or not this happens, the authors say, depends on a company’s culture. Companies that are equipped to “technology management processes” will get more out of TI than those that lack these resources.

Arman and Foden believe that “The deployment of TI strengthened the company’s ever-developing view on the importance of tools, particularly within the early stages of technology management.” The techniques proved so successful that “TI now forms an integral part of the company’s technology management activities and has been captured as an internal ‘How-To’ document.”

When Professor Mike Gregory started to plan to move the Institute for Manufacturing (IfM) from the mostly subterranean old building it shared with rats in the middle of the city, it might have looked like a final fling for a dying activity in the UK. Back then, some four years ago, just about the only people that governments listened to when devising economic policy were the masters of the universe in the financial sector. Manufacturing in noisy factories was yesterday’s way of making money.

By the time that Cambridge was ready to invite the Duke of Edinburgh, who describes himself as “the world’s most experience plaque unveiler,” to officially open the IfM’s new building, manufacturing was back in fashion. The attempts to revive the economy after the recent implosion of the financial system not only involved desperately shovelling money into banks, there was also support for manufacturing, in the shape of ‘incentives’ to keep open car making factories.

The M word now features regularly in politicians’ speeches who seem to have suddenly realised that making things is still a sizeable chunk of the UK’s economy. A select committee of MPs was one of many posses of politicians to point out, in a report earlier this year, that “In 2008, it was the world’s sixth largest manufacturing nation” and “In 2007, it was the eighth largest exporter of manufactured goods”.

Just this week, Lord Mandelson, the Business Secretary, complained that “we sometimes have a glib notion in this country that we don’t really make anything anymore, that we are no longer an industrial economy,” a notion that he dismissed, albeit in the context of the motor industry, a major importer of manufactured goods. He also announced new investment totalling £22 million “to further advance the development of ‘composite’ materials”

Another change since all that Gregory had to show of the IfM, a part of the engineering department at Cambridge University, was an architect’s model, has been further confirmation of China’s central position in manufacturing, with even more companies moving production to Chinese factories. If anything, this just confirms IfM’s steady move away from concentrating on the nuts and bolts of manufacturing, how to introduce robots on to the factory floor, for example.

China’s rise as a manufacturing giant has also provided the IfM with more research ideas. One outcomes was the report “Understanding China’s manufacturing value chain”

It might seem “a bit sad” as Gregory puts it, but “we like factories. So the robots, top of the line kit from Japanese manufacturers, still have a home in the new building’s automation lab. These days, though, the robots work alongside researchers who cover the “full cycle, from understanding markets and technologies through to products,” as Gregory said at last week’s opening of the new IfM on Cambridge’s west campus.

Unlike the buildings you traditionally associate with the university, those on the mostly undergraduate free west campus are more likely to appeal to makers of modernistic science fiction films than period movies. The new £15m home, with its ultra-green environment rating, might be a million miles from the IfM’s old home in the middle of the city. IfM now sits alongside other new Cambridge ventures, such as the IT department’s William Gates building and the Hauser Forum “a focal point for entrepreneurship and technology transfer”.

Like these other buildings, the IfM’s new facility gets its name from a major donor. Dr Alan Reece, founder of Pearson Engineering, which develops “combat engineer systems and equipment,” chipped in with a £5 million contribution to the building costs. A further £5 million came from the Gatsby Charitable Foundation, the vehicle that Lord David Sainsbury uses in his efforts to give away “at least £1 billion” during his lifetime, adding to £7 million or so that it has put into the IfM since 1991.

The manufacturing label hasn’t been an accurate reflection of everything that IfM does for some time now, which explains why it has added “technology” and “policy” to its banner heading. With 240 researchers and other staff, up from 50 a decade ago, the IfM also houses the Centre for Technology Management and is active in studying such hot topics as open innovation, for example.

You have to admire the Research Councils for their persistence when it comes to urging the researchers they support to pay more attention to what happens to all that new science after they have sent off the inevitable research publications. The Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council has just told us that it is putting £55 million over the next three years into grants for 12 Knowledge Transfer Account and 13 Knowledge Transfer Secondments.

The cash involved ranges from £450,000 to £8.3 million. But this isn’t just a case of lobbing money at a bunch of academics and leaving then to get on with it. EPSRC’s announcement says that “An essential element in the success of these grants will be universities and the potential users of research outputs being involved together in setting strategy and targeting resources.”

EPSRC’s web site lives up to is arachnid tag, so you have to follow a lot of threads to land on details of these grants. Do so and you will find that the big one, a staggeringly precise £8,298,190, goes to the Manchester Business School and Professor Rod Coombs, a long time player in research into innovation, who even comes with the job title “Vice President (Innovation And Economic Development)”. The details of the grant tell us that among the things that Manchester gets up to is “joint horizon-scanning which focuses on helping researchers and users to explore technology/problem domains and develop novel strategies to solve them”.

Training, CPD as they put it, lapsing into the jargon that seems to be obligatory in such things, is also a part of the Manchester package. The details of the grant, which runs from 1 October to 30 September 2012, promise “Masterclasses on a given technology domain” that “will enable users to develop strategies to exploit it”.

Another big grant is the £5,749,200 for the University of Sheffield’s Knowledge Transfer Account. This time the Principal Investigator, a title that they use even when there isn’t much in the way of research going on to investigate things, is Professor Tony Ryan, who spent some years advising ICI, the now defunct chemicals, on what went on at the frontiers of chemistry research.

A part of Sheffield’s plan is its Virtual Corporate Laboratory. It describes this as “an exemplar programme to fuel the product pipelines of corporate partners; working on collaborative programmes to convert University R into company focused D”.

There is stuff in Sheffield’s description about the group’s philosophy. For example, they write of their belief that “the point of contact between the academic researcher and the end user is critical to effective knowledge transfer”. You can say that again. It is good to see that some universities appreciate this simple fact of life.

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.

Scotland prides itself on the quality of its universities and their research. It has also put considerable effort into coaxing academics into turning their toiling in the lab into profitable businesses, through, for example, the  Scottish Enterprise (SE) Proof of Concept programme. But it seems that for all of its attempts to stand out from its larger southern neighbour, in one area at least it has been quietly sitting on its hands.

The Scottish Science Advisory Council’s (SSAC) reckons that the country’s businesses are deficient in their R&D spending. As Professor Steve Beaumont, Vice Principal for Research and Enterprise at the University of Glasgow and a member of the SSAC, puts it “Scottish industry appears to be less research intensive than business in the same sector elsewhere. If we are to accelerate innovation in the economy, companies need more incentives to invest in R&D and this in turn will help them capitalise on the strength of our universities.”

Beaumont was commenting on a new report, Business R&D in Scotland: A Missing Link, in which the SSAC says that “Business R&D conducted in Scotland under-performs the rest of the UK, contributing only 0.56% of GDP compared with 1.08% for the UK as a whole in 2006″.

The council puts some of the blame for this deficit down to poor links between business and the country’s world class universities. As the report puts it: “The outputs of Scotland’s universities (research, consultancy, trained PhD graduates) are not being captured by Scottish industry, which in turn exerts little influence on the research undertaken in academia.”

The report goes on to say that the mismatch between supply of academic research output and demand from industrial R&D “is at least a missed opportunity whose correction could improve our economic performance”.

According to Professor Anne Glover, Chief Scientific Adviser for Scotland and Co-Chair of the SSAC, “There is a compelling argument for business to benefit from the substantial public investment in our research base and to translate this into focussed business R&D programmes in collaboration with academia. Our research base has a role to play too, in reaching out to industry to help turn lab-based developments into the new products and processes that will boost our economy.”

One problem facing Scotland’s policy makers seems to be confused evidence on the capabilities of the country’s industry. The reports recommends that, because of “mixed messages about the innovative behaviour and capabilities of the Scottish business base,” Scotland should seek to resolve “apparently contradictory findings from recent policy research on the capabilities of the Scottish business base.”

Among other recommendations, the report calls for the Scottish Government to “strengthen the pipeline of support mechanisms” including expanding proof of concept type support “to include business innovation”. The SSAC advocates looking into the idea of expanding SE’s Proof of Concept programme to “develop innovative products and processes of value from sectors of the economy other than the Universities, Research Institutes and NHS”.

One reason for advocating more emphasis on proof of concept activities is that it has already delivered results. As the report puts it “proposals seeking R&D grant support emerging from the SE Proof of Concept Programme tend in the main to be strong candidates for support – they tend to be ‘SMART-investment’ ready”.

One idea that the report floats might have come a bit too late. Scotland’s once proud financial sector now has rather a lot of egg on its face, thanks in part to innovations that turned out to be less than wondrous. However, the SSAC, which tactfully overlooks the sector’s recent woes, still thinks that there is room for innovation, especially in the sector’s use of new technology.

The council admits that it would be “pointless to expect this sector to increase its research spend to a national norm”. On the other hand, “investing in research-intensive sectors that create the technologies on which new services might be built not only creates new markets for those sectors but also enhances the competitiveness of the service sector”.

The council believes that “Scotland could enhance the competitiveness of one of its most important industries by supporting R&D in its technology supply chain”. It also says that “a better understanding of supply chain linkages between the technology and the service sectors is vital”.

Companies are not the only beneficiaries from their R&D spending. The latest edition of ZEWnews, the newsletter from the Centre for European Economic Research (ZEW), points out that there are also “additional social returns”.

The newsletter reports on a study that ZEW is carrying out in collaboration with SV Gemeinnützige Gesellschaft für Wissenschaftsstatistik mbH. The research shows that “R&D gives rise to both high direct benefits and high additional social benefits”.

These social gains may not be what the company had in mind, but when governments put money into R&D they should be higher on the agenda. As the newsletter puts it, there is a question as to “whether it is appropriate to concentrate research funding increasingly on areas that promise to generate maximum additional social returns”.

As well as putting numbers on the returns that companies gain from their own R&D – a 41 per cent return on investment within two years – the study shows that “knowledge generated by R&D also makes an important contribution to increasing productivity in other companies”.But these benefits are much lower than the additional social benefits.

The researchers claim that “From the perspective of the economy as a whole, the additional social benefits surpass the direct benefits from R&D. They represent between 130 and 150 percent of direct benefits.”

There are significant implications, says the ZEW team, for government investment in R&D. “The existence of additional social benefits provides an important justification for government R&D funding.” The researchers conclude that “the state must provide incentives for companies to conduct R&D in those areas in which such benefits accrue”.

Their key message is that “The government should therefore concentrate its funding on those areas in which companies, if left to their own devices, would not invest or only invest very little, because the transfer of knowledge to third parties is too great.”

“The optimum structure for a university TTO [tech transfer office] is for it to be a wholly owned subsidiary company of the University.” That is the view of Tom Hockaday, the Managing Director of Isis Innovation Ltd, the wholly owned subsidiary of Oxford University.

Hockaday,one of the most respected and experienced practitioners of tech transfer, comes to this conclusion in a short item on the website of Isis Innovation, What is the Best Structure for a University Technology Transfer Office? He may conclude that Oxford has it right, but Hockaday is open to other ways of doing things. As he puts it “Good people can make any system work and bad people can make any system fail.”

Hockaday makes important points that any tech transfer professional should heed. For example, he insists that “the TTO is wholly dependent upon the willingness of researchers to engage in the process, support from senior university members, and should adopt a philosophy of supporting researchers who want support”. In other words, don’t run around trying to bully researchers who simply don’t want to be involved in tech transfer.

This leads on to another issue, and one that can be a negative aspect of having a separate company. It can, he explains, “forget it is owned by a university. If the TTO starts showing off then the researchers will turn against it.”

Hockaday is too polite to name names. But anyone who has been around TTOs for any time can probably think of one or two who fall into this trap.

He is also too polite to name any of the “bad people” who have managed to make a system fail.  They still exist, despite many years of increasingly professional TTOs.

Talk to enough people and you will still hear occasional complaints that TTOs manage to get in the way, and to screw up relationships between companies and researchers who desperately want to work together. One reason that you sometimes here for these failures is the intervention of lawyers. It would be interesting to read Hockaday’s views on this aspect of tech transfer.

The notion that you build and run racing cars for the benefit of today’s motorists is about as convincing as the idea that you send people to the Moon so that you can build a better frying pan. It turns out, though, that Formula 1 motor racing may have a point beyond its ‘benefit’ to TV, advertising and makers of champagne. (Such a waste.)

A recent report from the Advanced Institute of Management Research (AIM) looks into “how the successful introduction of innovation in motorsport is organised and managed”.

The report, Racing For Radical Innovation: How motorsport companies harness network diversity for discontinuous innovation, tells us that motor racing is not small beer. It has an annual turnover of £6 billion, exports worth £3.6 billion and supports 38,500 full and part-time jobs, 25,000 of them engineers. Motorsport and performance engineering is, they say, “one of the UK’s industrial success stories”.

But trouble is just around the corner. Professor Rick Delbridge of the Cardiff Business School, who did the research behind the report, warns that “innovation activity is under extreme pressure. Regulation changes, increased concerns with costs, and limits to exploration and networking for knowledge creation are undermining the innovativeness of motorsport firms.”

The Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile (FIA) wants to slash the budgets that companies can dedicate to each year’s new Formula 1 racing cars. One consequence might be to slow down the pace of innovation. But there are lessons we can draw from all the money that has already gushed into making faster cars.

The report, tells us that there really are some “innovations which have their origins in the motorsport industry” – things like “carbon fibre wheel-chairs, non-slip boots, hi-tech fishing line and the influence of pit-stop crews on the efficient transferral of patients from the operating theatre to intensive care”.

Like the non-stick frying pan, that mythical spin off from the US’s space programme, these innovations might well have happened without motor racing. But looking at racing’s technological advances can still teach us some wider lessons about innovation itself.

The AIM report looks at a number of innovations within racing itself and draws from then some thoughts that might be pertinent for others who are pushing forward technology.

For example, the report describes diesel engines developed for the 24-hour Le Mans race. A German racing car manufacturer created an engine block made out of aluminium, “something nobody had done before”.

This particular idea relied on working with long-established partners, but that may not be the best source of groundbreaking ideas. The report says that a weak spot in the industry’s innovation strategy may be its failure to tap into external input of the sort behind another “radical innovation” in motor racing technology, the use of carbon fibre in Formula-1 cars.

In general, the report advocates more “lateral thinking within the industry”. It also recommends “the development of inter-sector relationships, between the aerospace and motorsport industries, for example”.

The nice thing about the motor sport industry is that it is a less complicated research challenge than bigger and complicated sectors. This relative simplicity can make it easier identify and study the factors in play when it comes to successful innovation.

Professor Delbridge certainly has lessons for the motorsport sector, and advice to the policy makers on how to keep the show on the road. But there are also messages in the work for the wider innovation community.

The report says that “By studying the way that the motorsport industry approaches innovation it is possible for organisations in both the public and private sector to become more effective at supporting and developing radical innovation.”

The topic in the researchers’ headlights was “the way the motorsport industry harnesses the power of diverse networks -  networks outside the usual sphere that a firm operates within – to generate radical innovations”. That’s something that all innovators have to think about.

The report has a set of bullet points that describe the characteristics of successful innovators. They:

• Engage in wide exploratory innovation search activities, looking beyond their own knowledge base and domain of expertise;
• Identify the advantages offered by new combinations of existing knowledge, through the application of technologies and materials initially developed elsewhere;
• Often partner with ‘unusual’ firms – firms that operate beyond the usual sphere of collaboration, in the motorsport industry;
• Collaborate with partner companies to establish a close working relationship – strengthening personal ties and promoting more general reciprocity and trust;
• Encourage lateral thinking within their existing web of partners.

You don’t have to be a petrol head to find something of interest in there.