Is British innovation really dead?

Stop whingeing about interest rates and start investing in the UK’s world leading technical innovators – it will be the willingness and ability to leverage British Intellectual Property that will determine economic success in the long term, argues Matthew Walls, chief executive officer of Oxford BioSignals.

End of an Era

It seems a long time since Britain led the industrialised world in innovation. Indeed, over 1 million manufacturing jobs have been lost since 1997 and it would appear that the great British manufacturing tradition is sliding gently into history.

In the face of this decline, though the UK still retains an edge in some emerging sectors, such as biotechnology, including genomics, stem cell research and artificial intelligence.

The only way to be competitive in this market is to focus on quality and added value. With the pressures of cheap competition, escalating red tape and fluctuating global demand a standard component of the economic landscape, for UK business’ success and survival will depend upon moving the climate away from one where complaints about economic conditions and unfair subsidies predominate.

The question remains: how willing is British industry, and specifically the biotech sector – to maximise its investment in new technology and R&D to deliver the value, quality and innovation required to retain market share?

The real challenge is not just to create an economy that supports UK industry but to foster an environment where technical innovation is encouraged, supported and, critically, funded to provide business with the next generation of productivity enhancements and quality improvements that offer real value to a global customer base.

New Opportunity

Every UK business has streamlined operations in a bid to remain profitable within a market that has achieved little, if any top line growth. But with costs now reduced to the bare minimum, the emphasis has got to change.

Such a change can only be achieved if UK business takes a far more proactive stance on adopting new biotechnology and investing in R&D. And the lessons globally are clear: it is those economies that adopt leading-edge technologies that are growing.

And, critically, those economies have put in place a set of fiscal policies to actively control and retain the country’s Intellectual Property (IP) to ensure it is not lost to other, emerging or developed nations.

Over the last few decades the country has led the world in a number of technologies – from nuclear fusion to genetics – only to see a lack of investment and support drive experts abroad, leaving other economies, most notably the US, to reap the benefit.

If the UK is to take its rightful place as a leader in the world’s manufacturing economies there must be an evolution from the typical nickel and dime approach to investment and funding. What is required is a structured, coherent investment culture that maximises new innovations to deliver quantifiable, consistent business value.

Risk Taking

The change must come from the top down. The UK government needs to implement a set of fiscal policies that safeguard UK Intellectual Property and provide a platform for nurturing the innovation that is constantly being achieved within our universities.

By encouraging both industry and venture capitalists to invest in new technology at a very early stage – as occurs in the US – a far higher proportion of potentially business transforming concepts will actually reach the wider world and deliver critical competitive advantage to UK organisations.

This will provide the scientific community with the tools to maintain current levels of momentum and produce the next generation of advancements in the biotech arena. What is required is a structured, coherent investment culture to sustain a healthy level of innovation in a rapidly shifting scientific world order.