"Creating Wealth from Knowledge: Practice and Policy

Professor John Bessant

Professor John Bessant, BSc., PhD. currently holds the Chair in Innovation and Technology Management at Tanaka Business School, Imperial College where he is also Research Director. He previously worked at Cranfield, Brighton and Sussex Universities. In 2003 he was awarded a Senior Fellowship with the Advanced Institute for Management Research and was also elected a Fellow of the British Academy of Management. Author of 15 books and many articles, he has acted as advisor to various national governments, international bodies including the United Nations, The World Bank and OECD and companies including Lego, Novo Nordisk, Mars, UBS and Morgan Stanley.

Synopsis

Every year the UK spends around £21billion of public and private sector money creating knowledge – an impressive figure but only a drop in the global ocean of R&D spending which the OECD estimates at around £600billion. In services as much as manufacturing we are seeing a huge push down on the accelerator pedal of knowledge creation as firms and nations try to climb the ladder towards becoming knowledge economies, competing on innovation.

But we need to recognise that innovation is a process – and getting value from investments in creating new knowledge depends on understanding and organising this innovation process. As if that weren't hard enough we also need to recognise that the innovation game itself is changing and being played by a different set of emergent rules in the 21st century. Changes in the context include increasing volume but also global distribution of knowledge creation, globalisation, fragmentation and virtualisation of markets, the rise of users as a powerful force for innovation and the growing concern with sustainability.

This talk will explore some of the issues in designing and operating effective innovation systems to create wealth from knowledge in the emerging 21st century context. In particular it will draw upon the findings of the Innovation and Productivity Grand Challenge, a major ESRC/EPSRC funded programme involving the universities of Cambridge, Cranfield, Liverpool, Loughborough and Imperial College and the Advanced Institute for Management Research.

Nicky Dee

Ray Edgson

Chief Technology Officer and Ventures Director, Cambridge Consultants

Ray was appointed to the board at the beginning of 2007 in a dual capacity as Chief Technology Officer and Ventures Director. As CTO, Ray is responsible for the company's technology strategy and the creation and exploitation of intellectual property. Within his role as Ventures Director, Ray manages the ventures portfolio and the company's venture investment activities, working alongside venturing partner, Esprit Capital Partners.

Ray joined Cambridge Consultants in 1986 and has won and led a number of the company's largest product development programmes, including a medical diagnostic instrument, an autonomous handheld nail gun, a dialysis system and the printed electronic displays programme.

Before joining Cambridge Consultants, Ray worked in the aerospace industry and manufacturing. He holds a first class honours degree in Engineering and an MBA from the London Business School. He is also a Chartered Engineer.

Robert Galema

Robert Galema is currently CEO of Lifestyle Incubator, a focal area within Philips to accelerate growth. In this position he is managing Philips’ investments in new ventures as well as managing existing ones from conception to maturity.

Robert returned to Philips in 2006 after building and managing his own venture portfolio for eight years. During this period Robert acted among others as interim investment manager for Nesbic, the Venture Capital arm of Fortis Bank, co-created the third largest Dutch energy supplier Oxxio and executed a number of company turnarounds following Management Buy Ins.

Prior to this, Robert was the director of Philips Semiconductor Division in Malaysia and Business Activity Manager of self-created business line Philips Professional Displays in Italy. Before joining Philips, Robert was working as Merchant Banker, advising on Merger & Acquisition transactions.

Native of the Netherlands, Mr. Galema holds an MSc in Business Economics of Erasmus University in Rotterdam. He currently resides in Maastricht with his wife and three children.

Qi (Henry) Ge

Mr Qi (Henry) Ge is Chief Representative of China Mobile UK Rep Office. Based in London, Henry is responsible for business development in both Europe and Africa, focusing on maximising shareholder value through innovative ways, enhancing service level to ensure greater end-user satisfaction and developing closer partnership with other operators.

Henry has been working in Chinese telecom industry for over a decade. In the past seven years he was director within Development Strategy Department for China Mobile Communications Corporation overseeing strategic planning at the Group level.

Henry, who speaks Mandarin, holds an MBA in Inforcom Management from Norwegian School of Management (BI).

Chris Goldsmith

Chris is a long term BT employee and has seen first hand the dramatic effects of technology explosion in the last ten years and why open innovation models are the only way technology based corporates can survive in such an environment. Starting off as a technical researcher, Chris' career has aligned with a number of technology and business model evolutions, looking at such things as the impact and opportunities created by the internet in the early 90's right up to the adoption and exploitation of open innovation in his current role.

Chris currently uses his experience of BTs innovation capabilities, corporate customers and industry sectors to head up BTs Customer Innovation Engagement programme 'Engage' - a programme designed to enable corporate customers to take advantage of BTs open innovation ecosystem, by forming an innovation partnership with BT.

Mike Hield

Originally trained as a mechanical engineer and with an earlier career in manufacturing management and management consultancy with PA and PriceWaterhouse, Mike has over 17 years experience operating as a chief executive involved in a variety of companies and industries. These have involved publicly quoted, privately held, VC-backed and co-operative structures and have been primarily associated with marketing-led, high value-added, brand-oriented businesses. The majority of his experience has been with manufacturing and/ or distribution in sectors ranging from sporting goods to textiles and building products. These have mainly been multi-site operations and involved extensive international trade and have varied in scale from start-ups to over £100m turn-over. Currently Chief Executive of the InnovationXchange, a new venture set up by the University of Birmingham to assist companies, universities and other research institutes connect and collaborate more quickly and effectively on innovation and technology related issues and generate increased business growth and performance. An important feature of the service is that, where necessary, these connections can be developed and assessed under a confidential regime and without initially disclosing the identity of the parties, so reducing collaboration and partnering timescales and speeding entry of new technology to market.

Professor John Murphy (BSc, PhD, FIMA, C.Math.), Head of University Partnership Programmes, BAE Systems

After starting his career with lecturing and research activities in UK and US universities, John Murphy joined British Aerospace in 1985, where he established the Department of Computational Engineering within the research centre. He has taken lead roles in national and European programmes and working groups and was awarded an Honorary Professorship at the University of Swansea. He has authored a number of papers and presentations spanning in-depth research to strategic issues. As Head of University Programmes, he has strengthened links with the university sector and chaired national groups on business-university interactions. Through the BAE SYSTEMS University Partnership Steering Group he has steered the company to establish a University Partnership Programme with 60+ university partners to provide the required breadth and depth. This includes the flagship large scale integrated research programmes jointly funded through the company’s strategic partnership with EPSRC.

Paul Palmer

Paul J Palmer is a Senior Research Fellow at Loughborough University and Director of the Integrated Products Manufacturing KTN (Knowledge Transfer Network). He has interests in: electronic design; manufacturing processes; cost modelling; technology roadmapping and associated tools and methodologies. He has been involved in a number of 'firsts' - including helping to commission the UK's first microprocessor-controlled nuclear reactor test and monitoring system, and working on the manufacture of the UK's first driverless trains for the London Docklands Light Railway. With a first degree in physics, and a Masters is Manufacturing Systems Engineering, Paul has a strong interest in manufacturing issues, and has worked extensively with industry and academia. He ran his own technical consultancy for several years, providing manufacturing advice and writing specialist software. Paul has been employed by Loughborough University since 1998 splitting his time primarily between research and technology transfer activities.

Dr Allyson Reed

Allyson Reed, Director of Strategy and Communications at the Technology Strategy Board, is a commercial business leader with a scientific academic background.

She was previously Director of Innovation Partnerships at QinetiQ plc and prior to that Commercial Director of a national research laboratory where she headed technology transfer, developing a substantial commercial collaboration programme including licensing and setting up CLIK, the technology transfer company, the Rainbow Seed Fund, a portfolio of spin-outs, and a joint venture science park and incubator with an RDA.

Following early research as Rosalind Franklin Fellow at Cambridge University, Allyson has held senior management roles in a number of international healthcare, engineering and communications businesses. Until recently she was CEO of 3CResearch, a company commercialising research in new digital media.

She has extensive experience of public and private sector innovation, of the business and people skills needed to accelerate sustainable new business and of engaging large and small organisations in enterprise.

Synopsis: Connect and Catalyse: how the Technology Strategy Board accelerates innovation

Working at the interface between the research base, industry and government, the Technology Strategy Board’s experience in stimulating innovation will be described. This will include issues such as:

• The importance of challenge as an innovation and business opportunity
• Partnership and collaboration: how to be effective
• Promoting confidence in and enthusiasm for innovation and entrepreneurship

I will describe our policies and our practical experience, which includes working with an extraordinarily wide range of stakeholders and businesses, large and small. Our aim is to make the UK a global leader in innovation.

Professor Roy Sandbach

Professor Roy Sandbach, B.Sc., Ph.D. is Research Fellow with the Procter & Gamble Company. He has worked in R&D in P&G for 27 years, with nearly 20 years in Frankfurt, Rome and Brussels. His career has spanned not only the global range of P&G product categories but also the breadth of R&D work from upstream new product development and prototyping to in-market execution of major initiatives and major competitive activities.

He has current interests in the holistic development of new products, going beyond standard technology application to design and sensory consumer response. In addition, he is heavily involved in new P&G product development strategy in the developing world. He has patents on several new-to-the-world products. One of these, introduced by P&G in the US in 2005, is now approaching a $100MM business.

Roy is visiting Professor of Industrial Design at Central St. Martins College of Art & Design in London. He is the only working scientist with a professorship at a leading UK Art & Design College.

Professor Henning Sirringhaus

Henning Sirringhaus is the Hitachi Professor of Electron Device Physics at the Cavendish Laboratory, University of Cambridge. He has been working in the field of organic transistor devices since 1997. He has an undergraduate and PhD degree in physics from ETH Zürich (CH). From 1995-1996 he worked as a postdoctoral research fellow at Princeton University (USA) on a-Si TFTs for active-matrix liquid crystal displays. His current research interests include the realization of functional nanostructures using solution self-assembly, the charge transport physics of molecular, and polymeric semiconductors, the development of printing-based high-resolution patterning techniques, and the use of scanning probe techniques for electrical characterization of molecular nanostructures. He is also co-founder and Chief Scientist of Plastic Logic Ltd., a technology start-up company commercialising printed organic transistor and flexible display technology for applications in electronic readers.

Professor Jeremy Watson, MSc DPhil CEng FIET MIEEE

Jeremy Watson is Arup's Global Research Director, responsible for Group research strategy and the research consulting business. He has held research and technical management roles in industry and academe including service with the DTI and EPSRC. His specialities include Strategic Technology Development and Transfer, Innovation Processes and NPD Management. He also has technical expertise in Industrial Instrumentation and Control, Power Electronics, Signal Processing and Biomedical Engineering. Current research interests include Renewable Energy, Control for Energy Efficiency and Ambient Assistive Technologies.

Jeremy is a Chartered Engineer and Fellow of the IET (Chairman: IET Control & Instrumentation Sector Panel), a Senior Member of IEEE and Visiting Professor at the Universities of Southampton and Sussex. Jeremy is also a Board Member of the Government’s Technology Strategy Board.

Synopsis: Creating Value from Innovation - The Arup Perspective

Arup is a global engineering consultancy which offers a wide range of business and design services. Innovation has, since Ove Arup founded the firm in 1946, been a central factor in success, allowing Arup to lead its industry sector with creative solutions ranging from the Sydney Opera House to the Channel Tunnel Rail Link. Now grown to 10,000 employees in 90 offices, Arup's approach to innovation has been reviewed and redesigned to provide scale-independent focus, quality and value.

To do this, traditional thinking has been robustly challenged. The corporate Technical Director with central research group has been replaced by a three-fold directorate globally managing distributed Foresight, Research and Skills, and reporting to a Design and Technical Board with devolved funds to support internal and external research collaborations. Innovation is stimulated by engaging businesses and research leaders to consider the new opportunities which will be enabled by research. Foresight workgroups operating with internal and external teams produce top-level agendas covering overarching topics such as environmental, economic and regulatory drivers. A roadmapping process is used by the Research team to evolve detailed 'needs' under these and other business-led headings. These 'needs' focus applications for research project investment by businesses and corporate Arup. The learning and expertise that is gained through research is then embedded in the firm through Arup's Skills Networks, which engage people at all levels of the firm globally in sharing expertise and knowledge between projects.

In a strongly client-focused consulting company, funding for research is paramount to secure staff engagement. A Design and Technical Fund (DTF) buys time for Arup staff to collaborate with university partners and support research students. 'Investment in Arup' an open proposal process, is offered via the intranet for rapid application, peer review and approval.

Innovation is more than invention, and must lead to commercialisation, so specific business processes are deployed to embed and realise value from evolved knowledge. Several processes are used at Arup, ranging from bespoke project application, transfer into consulting practice via the Skills Networks, and submission to an in-house Intellectual Property group. This team coordinates and funds IP protection and licensing.

The presentation will seek to illustrate each of the above points through case studies.