30 April 2016
One of the things I have been doing in my enforced inactivity is reading those newsletters that pick up on your past interests and force-feed you their views. I have therefore seen a lot of speculation about my old employer – the organisation formally known as the Technology Strategy Board, but now known as InnovateUK.
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28 October 2013
At the beginning of the year I tried to explain how our ideas about Catapults had evolved as we designed and assembled the first 7. We realised the importance of alignment with our other programmes – not only so that they could source the “second third” of their funding, but also because our programmes are derived from extensive consultation and represent what our analysis suggest are the growth opportunities for UK based companies.
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24 January 2013
A little over a year ago, the Prime Minister announced the setting up of a network of elite centres to drive faster commercial exploitation of UK science. They were given the working title of technology and innovation centres – which inevitably became abbreviated to TICs.
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21 January 2013
Some time ago, I set out to explain our thinking behind the Catapults. At that point we had begun the roll-out of the programme and what I described was, admittedly, mostly theoretical. We have now taken the business case for the seventh catapult to our Governing Board for approval and have learnt a lot over the 8 months since I last wrote on the subject.
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26 February 2012
When we first started thinking about the need for physical centres to support innovation in the summer of 2009, we had some very specific ideas. At that point, we had been an agency for just over 2 years and we were beginning to understand the specifics of several of the areas we were supporting – and saw what adding a physical centre to the infrastructure could achieve. We also had the heritage of the Micro- and Nano-Technology Centres to deal with – where one version of a centres concept had been implemented in too distributed a manner – so had developed very clear views about the need for focus and clarity of purpose.
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