I spent yesterday at Innovate 07 at the Queen Elizabeth Hall in London. This is the first of these meetings organised by the Technology Strategy Board in its new guise as an “arms length” body. It was an impressive event and the materials community can take some pride in its relevance to where the Technology Strategy Board is heading. The morning session was a plenary and contained speeches from the usual talking heads. John Denham, the Secretary of State for DIUS (who are the link into Government for the Technology Strategy Board) started at the high level but chose to provide some detail of the work programmes, Graham Spittle described his aspiration for the new body – more, faster and a whole range of improvement adjectives were used – and the new CEO, Iain Gray rounded out the introductions. An important part of these presentations was the announcement of the new Collaborative Research and Development Competition. There are three subjects in the first round of this and one of them is “Energy Materials”. This is the result of strong interaction between the Energy Materials Working Group and the new Technology Strategy Board. A break for coffee was followed by presentations from Steve Bold and Sebastian Conran, both describing their own experiences of innovation. Followers of the Materials KTN and MADE will know that Sebastian is a powerful and articulate advocate of integrating design into the industrial process and that Sharp Laboratories of Europe have a track record of interaction with both UK universities and innovative new UK companies.

The afternoon was a huge improvement on last year. The workshops were well attended and (mostly) well facilitated – and nearly all focused on market needs or outputs. This will require a bit more effort from those at the beginning of the value chain – like materials suppliers – but that means they will have a better understanding of what their final market requires. It is nice to see that the much used phrase “business led” might actually be turning into reality.

David