Is the UK good enough at commercialising innovation?

Innovate 2011v4A recent edition of the FT (Financial Times) examined a contentious topic: that the UK is not very good at commercialising the innovations that its universities and startups create. A comment from Hanadi Jabado, who directs a start-up accelerator at Cambridge university’s Judge Business School, sums up the issue under debate: “The UK leads the world in terms of research but if you look at the commercialisation of innovation, the UK lags behind. What we seem to be doing is to develop a concept and then sell it to international companies to optimise. We’re preparing the lunch, we’re cooking the lunch, but someone else is eating the lunch.”

Are we doing enough? Are traditional methods of evaluating the commercialisation of innovation no longer valid? And what more could be done? Read the article in full.