Graham Spittle opens the first Innovation Summit

Comments from the opening speech at the inaugural Innovation Summit being held at The Royal Society today.

Today, the first Innovation Summit was held in London.  The event brought together existing evidence on a range of important issues around economic productivity and growth in advanced economies.  Speakers and audience were drawn from business, academia and policy makers and the opening comments were made by Dr Graham Spittle.  Dr Spittle is the chairman of the Technology Strategy Board, a publicly funded organisation responsible for promoting technology-led innovation in the UK.  One of the organisation's activities is the propagation of technology transfer - finding commercial applications for discoveries from science and engineering - drawing on a £1bn fund.

Graham Spittle, surveyed the economic adversity ahead for the UK economy as an opportunity to become to a world leader in innovation, more capable in commercialising the academic research of the country's best universities.

"There is no steady option," Dr Spittle said, "we either slide backward or move forward in comparison with other countries."

The UK economy is heavily reliant on service provision, rather than manufacturing. This makes universities, as sources of knowledge and skills, pivotal to economic growth. On improving the interaction between universities and business, a barrier to productive economic activity, Dr Spittle was forthright. Encouraging more interaction, he suggested that the "sacred cows of business and academia must be slaughtered and the risk of failure accepted more readily." He added, "Only by collaborating today will we find out what works, and what fails, and be able to move forward in the face of a recession and global competition."

Dr Spittle also raised the question of where value lies in the current innovation system. Traditionally, this has been the high value attributed by academics to peer-reviewed papers in journals. However, some call for this to shift to the translation and commercialisation of academic work. Dr Spittle accepts that fundamental research is  crucial to the economy as it serves as a pipeline for future commercialisation, he encouraged academics to reach out and engage with transactional relationships with industry to "not wait for strategic partnerships but to see this as a contact sport where we just need to play together". He also encouraged business to simultaneously define its needs more clearly and to also begin working with universities on problems of shared interest.

David Gann, head of the Innovation and Entrepreneurship Research Group at Imperial College Business School and host of the Innovation Summit, acknowledged the importance of value creation and appropriation for the UK economy at a time when approaches like collaboration, IP, user engagement and more recent trends like open source and open innovation, all need to be reexamined.

"Today's discussion should help us advise business and government to re-engineer the processes we use to create value," Professor Gann said.

The all day event will cover issues of IP, open innovation, entrepreneurship and business and university relations will all be discussed today.  The event is sponsored by the UK Innovation Research Centre, a joint initiative between Imperial College Business School and the Cambridge Centre for Business Research.

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