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Industry secretary Michael Heseltine will soon have a chance to give
his views on technology and innovation. His ministry, the Department of
Trade and Industry, is drawing up a shortlist of organisations that want
to run trial schemes aimed at bridging the ‘innovation gap’ between industry
and academia.

In March, the DTI invited commercial research organisations and higher
education institutions to submit proposals for pilot schemes in which graduates
would work towards a higher degree while undertaking industrial research.
The move was a response to the report of the working group on innovation
set up by John Fairclough, head of the Engineering Council. That report
called for the creation of ‘Faraday centres’, based on the German Fraunhofer
institutes (‘British innovation, German style’, New Å®ÉúСÊÓƵ, 21 March).

The DTI, which intends to establish five trials, invited all universities
and polytechnics in Britain and more than a hundred research organisations
to submit bids; 58 responded. The department expects to announce the ‘winners’
before the end of May.

Neither the Fairclough report nor the government laid down a detailed
blueprint for Faraday centres. There is some concern at the DTI that its
trials are being seen as the model for future centres.

Some of the organisations that submitted bids certainly see the trial
in this way. This is why ERA Technology, a research organisation that specialises
in electrotechnology, submitted a proposal that questioned the wisdom of
tying research organisations to a single academic institution. ‘We cannot
find a single (institution) that has the required level of excellence in
all the fields we want to work in,’ says Michael Withers, managing director
of ERA.

Bob Whelan, director of the Centre for Exploitation of Science and Technology,
who championed the introduction of the Fraunhofer concept in Britain, agrees
that it could be limiting to restrict collaboration to ‘one-on-one’ arrangements.
But he also believes that the aim should be to produce ‘strong couplings’
rather than ‘diffuse relationships’ between organisations.

Once the scheme begins, the DTI says students will receive grants of
£7000, and higher education institutes will receive £2500 per
student from the Science and Engineering Research Council to cover their
costs. Whether participating research organisations will receive government
money is still open to question. But Withers denies that what the companies
will get out of it is a ‘free pair of hands’. ‘Students would displace engineers
who would bring in £50 000 a year turnover,’ he says.

The Association of Independent Research and Technology Organisations
(AIRTO) responded to Fairclough’s report last week. It argues that higher
education institutions and their spin-off companies should not be eligible
as industrial partners in the centre. Nor should government-owned laboratories
that have been granted agency status.

AIRTO also says that research organisations should be able to do research
of their own choosing. Companies commission mostly short-term projects,
making it difficult for research organisations to carry out strategic R&D.
For this reason, AIRTO welcomes Fairclough’s statement that untargeted government
funding is vital if these organisations ‘are to be able to pursue their
function of anticipating the market needs of their customers’.