25 years ago, when Vince Cable was business secretary, we had a reasonably coherent industrial strategy, which saw the launch of the Catapult Network. This worked well for several years, helping to turn companies such as Airbus (based at Broughton, north Wales), into the largest commercial aerospace component business in the world. Since then, this positive momentum seems to have slowed down, especially where smaller, fast-growing enterprises are concerned. A kind of entropy has set in. And this is important for UK innovation and our country’s long-term success as a high value manufacturing economy.
Expanded to cover nine sectors in 2017, things seemed to go awry from here. It might have been austerity, lack of focus or just good old economics, but I increasingly found myself leaving meetings with various Catapult managers with an uneasy feeling that they were more interested in meeting their financial independence targets set by the government than supporting UK innovation. I don’t blame the employees of these organisations, it’s just that the structure around that has forced them into this mould.
Last year I attended a meeting with a Catapult in the Midlands, which will remain nameless. I was keen to explore how a specific technology might be introduced into a manufacturing process I was helping to commercialise. After several hours of talking to some very well qualified, capable people, I was offered a consultancy session with one of their team to take this enquiry to the next level.
This implied fees commensurate with the expertise offered and the goal to become ‘self-funding’ by a date in the future. This frankly astounded me. While large organisations might have been able to engage this Catapult in a more meaningful way, I got the impression that any fast-growing SME, whatever their potential would not be able to afford it. What an odd way to encourage grassroots innovation!
A similar situation is now occurring with our universities with the pressure on them to remain solvent with rising costs and declining incomes. The universities hold vast amounts of knowledge and facilities the use of which is rapidly becoming too expensive for small expanding companies to use.
Surely during this vital post-Brexit period, we need a robust plan that gives more overseas investors the confidence to back British businesses. Part of this surely involves picking winning sectors – but another major element is sorting out Catapult and university funding goals so that they can transfer their skills and facilities affordably to encourage smaller entrepreneurial companies to grow faster.
If we continue to insist on ‘market rates’ for these services, we most certainly will not get the growth which the UK so badly needs.
Dr Colin Tucker is chairman of antenna specialist Novocomms. He was the founding CEO at 3 and CTO and COO at Orange.
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