Supportive network for innovation

Jan 15 2009 by Andrew Mernin, The Journal

WHEN giving an elevator pitch, it helps not to be in Taiwan’s Taipei 101 building. With an elevator going at 1,010 metres per minute, you’ve only got about 37 seconds from getting in to reaching the 87th-floor observatory.

Your pitch would have to be pretty brief and in mine I’d want to get straight to the point that County Durham Development Company encourages innovation and strategic investment in the county, on behalf of Durham County Council.

I’d stress the innovation aspect. In last week’s column, on the NETPark expert panel debate on biotechnology, I mentioned that Nigel Perry, chief executive of the Centre for Process Innovation (CPI), had remarked that it was the private sector that took research and turned it into marketable products.

And investing in innovation is a high-cost activity. Nigel reckoned that every £1 of research needs £63 to reach commercialisation – but, on the plus side, generated £400 of wealth.

So it’s a high-cost, high-risk activity – not all research is going to result in a profitable, wealth-generating product. But without investing in innovation, the UK’s prospects in an enormously competitive global economy would be pretty slim.

Its importance is neatly expressed in a sentence you’ll find on the regional development agency’s website:

“Boosting the innovation and science capability of the North East is key to long-term improvements in regional productivity and competitiveness.”

Indeed, One North East’s regional economic strategy builds on the North East’s technological strengths in energy, process technologies and health sciences and healthcare, with each of these three pillars supported by centres of excellence established to co-ordinate the commercial exploitation of technologies and new products emerging from research activities.

The centres of excellence are key partners for the region’s universities, helping to connect the universities’ world-class science capability to the market.

They also play a vital role by reducing risk by working together, pooling resources and building up world-beating expertise in particular technologies.

It’s all part of a supportive regional infrastructure and culture designed to provide the ideal platform for setting up manufacturing in new technologies and attracting attention on a global scale.

Stewart Watkins is managing director of County Durham Development Company, which is driving the development of NETPark and NETPark Net