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Industry is still unhappy with LINK, the British government’s scheme
to foster and part-fund technological collaboration between industry and
academia. The government has a rosier view of the scheme, begun in 1986,
and last week published two reports defending it*.

Although the government has pledged £210 million to LINK, only
£145 million has been committed so far, to 385 companies and 195 academic
groups. Robert Malpas, chairman of the LINK steering group, says that only
£30 million has actually been spent.

The EEA, the Association of the Electronics, Telecommunications
and Business Equipment Industries, says that so little has been spent because
LINK is ‘a very difficult scheme’ for industry to participate in. The association
complains of bureaucracy and the time it takes to win approval for a project.
Furthermore, says the EEA, almost all the government money goes to the academic
half of the collaboration, and the intellectual property rights remain with
the academics, so industry cannot benefit fully from its contribution to
a project.

‘There has been no great attempt to make LINK useful to industry,’ says
Peter Sachs, the EEA’s director-general. The difficulties are reflected
in the fact that only two-fifths of the companies taking part are small
or medium-sized, despite the fact that LINK is aimed at smaller companies.

Malpas admits that ‘LINK took a while to start – but that’s not surprising
because it was very ambitious’. The scheme is difficult to coordinate because
several government departments and all four research councils are involved.
Changes have been made to try to speed up approval of projects, but Adrian
Wheldon of the LINK secretariat says that approval can still take six months.
Sachs wants delays reduced to six weeks.

Last year, Segal Quince Wicksteed, a consultancy based in Cambridge,
produced a report on LINK recommending that the government should pay 35
per cent of industry’s costs in a LINK project (This Week, 8 June 1991).
But last week, the government rejected this recommendation, describing it
as ‘very restrictive and unacceptable . . . no such artificial constraints
(should be) placed on either partner’.

The Department of Trade and Industry, which administers LINK, feels
that intellectual property rights should pass to industry, rejecting the
report’s recommendation that rights should remain with whoever has the ideas,
with the first licence being offered to their LINK partners.

The government acknowledges ‘the need for greater clarity and consistency
in the treatment of intellectual property across Whitehall’. It calls on
partners in a project to negotiate the rights.

In a separate report published last week, the LINK steering group agrees
with the government on the question of rights, but points out that such
negotiations can seriously hold up projects.

Wheldon says there are two main reasons why so little money has been
spent so far. First, it has taken five years to solve LINK’s administrative
problems and entice companies into the scheme. And, secondly, companies
have been slow to put in their bills.

*Government reponse to the independant review of LINK by Segal Quince
Wicksteed Limited, HMSO, £3.90; First report of the LINK steering
group, LINK secretariat, tel. 071-215-6671.