The UK appears to have fallen behind its G7 rivals in technology research. When it comes to nurturing new IT products and services on the open market, the UK has a lamentable record compared with the US, Japan and other European countries.

Recently, industry figures met in London to examine how the UK could incubate the next generation of technology innovators. But there was little agreement, with academics and company executives each blaming the other for the slow pace of progress.

Fabio Ciravegna, professor of language and knowledge technologies at the University of Sheffield’s department of computer science, argues that the expectations placed on academia are too great.

“Twenty years ago, large industries invested a lot in research centres but have since retracted from that. They left it to universities to fill the gap, but they have not been able to do it,” he says.

Roberto Cipolla straddles the business-academia divide, as a professor of information engineering at the University of Cambridge and also managing director of Toshiba Research Europe’s Cambridge research laboratory.

He argues that many of the brightest graduates are tempted into higher-paying jobs in the City, rather than complete PhD courses ­ especially when there is scant evidence that their research will lead to new opportunities.

“There is a lot of technology talent in the UK today, but the problem is translating that into new business,” he says.

However, business leaders remain reluctant to invest in research where they cannot have a meaningful contribution to curricula.

“IBM has both joint university programmes and academic fellowships,” says John McLean, IBM’s vice president of WebSphere connectivity development and director of IBM UK’s Hursley Laboratory. “But the universities have an agenda already and want to graft it onto where we are going. This is often not an obvious marriage as far as we are concerned,” he says.

Others agree that academia is not particularly good at aligning its own goals with what businesses are looking to achieve.

“There must be communication between academia and business. Taking these new, challenging ideas from universities and changing them into actual products requires co-operation and deep, profound insight,” says Nobuhiro Yoshida, corporate vice president and general manager at Toshiba’s technology planning division.

The problem is compounded by a similar reluctance on the part of the UK’s venture capitalists to invest in university research ­ in stark contrast to their peers in Silicon Valley, says the University of Sheffield’s Ciravegna.

“Lots of students have good ideas but they cannot find venture capitalists to back them, because the fear of failure is too big in the UK ­it is not like the US, even though it is cheaper to invest in UK research,” he adds.

Even where investment is available, squabbles over intellectual property can delay research and poison the relationship between business and academia.

IBM’s McLean argues that companies such as his invest money in research only because they expect to get something back, such as software patents from development projects. And this expectation demands that the research itself is closely tied to the commercial application of the software in question.

“The challenge is getting from the innovation to implementation,” he says.

When it comes to sponsoring research students, business leaders insist academic acumen alone is insufficient for their requirements ­ any students taken under their wing have to be good team players as well.

“If you lack people with business backgrounds, the innovation agenda suffers,” says Geoff Scott, head of development at BT Innovate.

And while UK graduates are “among the best in the world”, many lack the business and interpersonal skills demanded by today’s leading enterprises, says IBM’s McLean.

That could be improved through greater use of job training as part of undergraduate and postgraduate courses, admits Cambridge’s Cipolla.

“We should make it easier for PhD students to spend time with companies during term time, but funding is a problem because universities do not do it, and companies are not practical and see it as too risky,” he says.

What is needed, according to Scott, is a radical shake-up of the way that academic institutions structure their IT courses, to put research students in closer touch with businesses and to enable them to switch easily between industry and academia for the purposes of funding and career advancement. BT itself is currently experimenting with a scheme it calls a skills escalator, where it tracks the student research from diploma to PhD.

At the University of Sheffield, software development students are already required to consider the commercial aspects of projects they undertake, says Ciravegna.
“In the second year of their course, we ask our students to find a company to work at. They must also decide where they want to be in five years’ time ­ they need to know if a company is interested in a project, not just do it for fun,” he says.

One thing that both company executives and academics appear to agree on is the need to get more small to medium enterprises (SMEs) involved in research projects.
“Big companies such as BT, IBM and Unilever can afford to play the academic game but we may be missing a big trick in not including SMEs, which are leading the way in innovation. We are all in the same ecosystem and having more diversity and more players would benefit us all,” says Scott.

Ultimately, if the UK is to improve its record on technology development, business leaders need to improve their relationships with academics, ensuring that new ideas are more closely tied to product delivery.