By Steve Ranger, 16 January 2006 15:00
NEWS
The UK is less innovative than Belgium, according to a report by the European Union, which accused government and businesses of not spending enough on research and development.
The European Innovation Scoreboard report rates member states in terms of R&D spending, innovation and entrepreneurship measures, and development of intellectual property.
The UK ranks seventh on the scoreboard out of the EU 25 member states, behind Austria, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Sweden and Belgium.
Given the strong policy push in the UK to increase private funding of university research, the continual decline of university R&D funded by private companies - from 7.3 per cent in 1999 to 5.6 per cent in 2003 - is a "major failure of UK innovation policy", the report said.
It added: "This decline is probably contributing to the crisis in the public research sector, due to inadequate public funding and the assumption that the gap would be covered by private sources."
Business R&D is also below that of many of its peer performance countries and the report added: "The second challenge for the UK is to improve the innovative capabilities of its SMEs. A below average percentage innovate in-house or are involved in innovation co-operation."
UK companies blame lack of interest from customers for their lack of innovation, the report said.
The report also said the UK had well above average results for science and engineering graduates and lifelong learning, but said its worst performance was for the share of firms that receive public funding for innovation (around half the EU average).
It said the UK performs well above the EU average for IT expenditures and employment in high-technology services, and is strong in broadband penetration.
But, it also said: "The UK performs in eighth place for innovation governance. This is entirely due to a low score for e-government."
Comments
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1. Dick Winchester
Great... Something else for Gordon Brown to celebrate on Britishness Day..
2. Roger Huffadine
Why bother to innovate? The UK patent office is so useless that they are unable to properly conduct initial searches and fail to communicate effectively with applicants.
I know of two cases in the past year where incompetence at the patent office has resulted in large losses for innovators.
In one case a patent had been issued even though an identical patent existed - the holder of the second patent approached a friend of mine to try to license the technology to him, only to be told that my friend already held a prior patent.
The other case caused me losses of about £4000 and all I have so far is a letter from the patent office saying "we should have found this on the initial search 5 years ago"!!
My circle of friends is not that large so I wonder how many other cock ups are wasting the time and money of our innovators.
3. simon
Too many bean counters in top management. A friend, mentor, and previous employer put it this way ...
The bean counters take over, and R&D or Development just don't have a value they can put on the bean counting sheets. Therefore they view it as a cost, not an investment - and predictably it's an area they eye up for savings.
Of course, everything carries on fine for a while - there's new products already developed etc. But after a while (time dependant on industry sector) the products are 'old and tired' and the competition has overtaken them. Trouble is, by this time, they can't associate the savings they made several years ago with the problem now - so they start engaging in "South Sea Island" activities, doing things because they see other still successful companies doing them, not because they've determined that they are right for the business.
So the business goes into decline, and usually falls down the plughole eventually. But the people in charge at the time are not to blame - they'll blame the sales dept for failing to sell, etc, etc. But they won't blame themselves for not investing in development all those years ago.