Derek: Do you see the advantages of being a non-government organisation helping you achieve that? 

Iain: I do see big advantages in having a slightly arms-length relationship in terms of the way we operate. At the end of the day we are a government sponsored organisation and we have to work within a frame-work and I think the framework that’s been set by government with things like the government report “Innovation nation”, and the work that came out of BERR on the High-Value Manufacturing strategy provide a good framework under which we can operate. The advantage we’ve got in being an arms-length body is in terms of being able to make our own decisions, work with business, and attract the right kind of people into our organisation. You know a key selling point of our organisation is the business currency that we’ve got; over 610 years cumulated business experience in the small team we’ve got out at Swindon; you don’t have that in a traditional civil service department. So keeping that business currency alive acts as one of the key challenges for us as an organisation moving forward.

 

Derek: Can we talk now about microelectronics as NMI has a selfish interest here - microelectronics feeds into so many aspects of industry; everything from bio-technology through aerospace through automotive etc. I am interested in your views on our very strong microelectronics capability in the UK and how we can grow that capability and the investment in that sector.

Iain: I think you raise a very valid issue which is not unique to electronics by the way.  There are quite a lot of strong analogies if you look at the chemical industry for example and materials and things like that, the chemical industry is in everything that we do, it’s in the electronics industry as well, and yet just not a sector that is instantly recognisable by people. So the challenge for the electronics industry is ‘how does it put that across in a broader sense’, there’s huge opportunities by working across the different sectors. I make no secret of the fact that I came from a very strong sector in terms of it being well identified; I came from the aerospace sector. The aerospace sector was hugely dependant on electronics in everything it did; in terms of its avionics, control systems and things like that. Was it an advantage actually having a very strong market sector versus the type of capability that the electronics has got? Well actually the funny thing was; when you’re in a very strong sector they see it the other way round. You know, they see it as sectors like the electronics sector which are everywhere are being pushed by lots and lots of different sectors, so I think it’s important to recognise that the sector is an underlying capability that goes across a lot of leading sectors; automotive, aerospace and also into things like health-care and consumer electronics. It’s a massive market opportunity and I think behind it all is a much broader question; a much bigger question of how we get the general public to be more broadly aware of technology and what technology sits behind things that they just take for granted. So I don’t see the electronics sector as being at a disadvantage compared to other market sectors in that regard. I think what is massively important though is the communication of the role of the electronics sector to the public of what technology does for them so that people better understand the role that this sector plays.

 

Derek: One of the things making it difficult is the profile of the sector itself as there’s a lack of “National champions”.  We don’t have a Rolls-Royce or companies of that magnitude within the microelectronics sector to show case and that creates some challenges.

Iain: I think that is a challenge and that comes back to the issue of big companies and why it’s important that we’ve got big companies investing here in the UK, big companies that can be the champions of the sector. But it shouldn’t take away from some of the great things and the opportunities that, the exciting opportunities that exist in this sector. I mean I can think of the NMI awards just where Hossein Yassaie from Imagination Technology presented those PURE Digital radios; there’s a consumer product that captured the imagination of the public.  You think of Wolfson Microelectronics and the role it has played in digital sound; kids out there are all going around with these bits of equipment. The sector needs to talk-up the technology capability to excite people like that I think is something that the sector’s got to become good at because actually there’s some absolutely fantastic stuff going on.

 

Derek: I agree wholeheartedly. I think it’s quite strange at the moment that we’ve got so many young people that don’t do science and engineering but use all these consumer devices.

Iain: You get kids that can pick up a laptop or an iPhone or something like that and their mind thinks in different ways and digitally they can sort of work their way through the architecture of how something works, but when you just try and ask people beneath the software architecture and get into the hardware and whatever they’re just not there. Somehow we’ve failed to captivate and enthuse a generation of people coming through about just what it is we’re doing. So, it’s a different issue from technology but it’s important because it’s what’s going to encourage future generation of people to join this technology sector and encourage future funding into this sector. It’s about getting people aware of just what sits behind the end-product. It’s some fantastic stuff and that’s why from the Technology Strategy Board view I’m so excited by some of the stuff we’ve invested in.

 

Derek: Can you explain where you would like to see the Technology Strategy Board in 5 years time, what would delight you to say the Technology Strategy Board achieved in your time as Chief Executive?   

Iain: Derek that’s a good question and one that I do give some thought to. As I said we are still a relatively young organisation but there are a couple of generic things I’d like people to look back on in ten years time and say that the Technology Strategy Board had achieved.  I’d like to think that three or four of the biggest UK investors in R&D in this country stand-up on every occasion and say ‘One of the key reasons that we kept our R&D centre here in the UK, one of the reasons we’ve invested is because of the support we were getting from the Technology Strategy Board’. I’d like to think that when you look at the Sunday Times tech-track 100 companies in 5 years time that maybe 25% of those companies say that the reason that they are in existence today and the reason that they’ve developed to the stage that they’re at, is because of the support they got in the early days from the Technology Strategy Board. I’d like to think that in people’s career development planning, where people were thinking in business today, young graduates, people coming through business, who are planning their own career’s, I’d like to think that the Technology Strategy Board was a place where they’d like to come and spend some of their time in their career mapping, because it’s a place where you can bring ideas; where things can happen; where technology gets exploited and becomes good business proposition. So I think there’s a people side to it as well. 

I’d also like to think that trade-bodies such as NMI see the Technology Strategy Board as being a key delivery vehicle for the sort of technology investment that you know you’re sector is looking for. Whether it be through collaborative R&D as we’ve got it today or perhaps more importantly through different types of procurements methods so that when people stand up and compare the UK with the rest of the world they’re not always talking about what happens in the US or what’s happening in Finland or what’s happening in Korea, they are talking about SBRI that happens here in the UK.  They’re talking about the challenge-led, the Innovation Platforms and how that’s pulled different people together, different communities together, different sectors together to provide world leading businesses so that we’ve become just part of the general dialogue about good innovation on a global benchmark basis.

 

Derek: We’ve been working on increasing R&D in our sector and one of the things that keeps coming up is how other regions and other geographies see microelectronics as a core competence, investing in it to a much higher degree than we do in the UK. However, I can also see that it’s sometimes easy for Government to ignore sectors that don’t organise themselves to present a strong message. 

Iain: There’s an element where you can stand back and see broader pictures in how you can get different sectors working with each other, that’s certainly a role which the Technology Strategy Board can play. But then I think you are quite right, there are roles that sectors can play; people like NMI have got a very strong role to play and they can articulate back to government, to organisations via the Technology Strategy Board about what’s important for that sector, what can we do to help. You know the sector, the whole principle of business led type of organisations and challenge led organisations is that  the business are the ones that understand what needs to be done; business through representative bodies can define the challenges. The role of the Technology Strategy Board is then to try and find ways of helping them to achieve the goals that they have set for themselves and at the same time ensure that it happens here in the UK and we’re realising UK economic benefit from doing it.

 

Derek: Can we just expand on that for a second or two Iain?  You’re suggesting there’s an intermediary role that NMI and organisations like it can play to provide most benefit to our industry members and to the Technology Strategy Board and help bring interests together?

Iain: I think it’s very important that as the Technology Strategy Board we understand our routes to market and our routes through to business. When you look at business itself, you could probably count on the fingers of two hands the really big companies that we deal with here in the UK but when you get into the SME’s and you get into the smaller businesses, then there’s thousands of them.  We can’t talk to every business; we need to find ways and means of understanding what’s important for small business and getting them to understand the opportunities that are available.  For me there’s a number of different routes to that; there’s the route through the regions and things like the science and industry councils, there’s routes through Government’s established links like Business-link or the Manufacturing Advisory Service, there’s routes that we’ve put in place like the KTN’s which I think can play a very powerful role and then, and this is where I think NMI is massively important, is the voice of the sectors themselves, the trade bodies. As you know the trade bodies have a really good understanding of the sectors they work in, they know the pulse of the sector they are representing and where the key issues are.  We know that skills are obviously a key concern.  Technology investment is a key issue dominated perhaps of the day-to-day pressures of the credit crunch right at the moment. But the trade bodies, they’re the ones that have the pulse of what’s going on in their sector and it’s vitally important that the Technology Strategy Board can develop good positive links with the trade bodies and use that as another of our routes to market to explain what we’re doing and then more importantly to understand the needs for business coming back to help influence our strategies and help work together to understand the shape of future competitions and future initiatives.

 

Derek: That is a challenge that NMI can certainly rise to as well. I wanted to talk to you about European investment as we see a peculiar dichotomy in the UK; we’ve got an Academic sector that interfaces very well into Europe and we’ve got an industry sector that interfaces very poorly into Europe. There’s also a large pot of investment that’s available through the European funding bodies and if we fail to access and tap into it then we’ll lose out and be all the poorer for it. What are your thoughts about that?  

Iain: I think you summarised the dilemma perfectly that we ignore that at our peril.  A huge sum of UK tax-payers money gets invested in European funds. Yet too many UK businesses or businesses based here in the UK see it as diluted in terms of getting engaged in European programmes or that the bureaucracy is too great so they don’t bother going there. The reality is as you suggest; UK universities have traditionally done pretty well out of European programmes and they’ve done it by teaming-up with companies based overseas. That can’t be the right thing to do. So at the Technology Strategy board I think we’ve got a number of challenges on our hands.  In the first instance how do we encourage UK businesses to take more advantage of that significant sum of money that is out there and not see it as diluted and just overly bureaucratic. Perhaps more important in the longer term is; how do we start shaping the next round of competitions, like the 8th frame-work programme to be more meaningful to us in a business context?

What I’m starting to see is Europe beginning to adopt the same kind of language we have in terms of a challenge led approach; something where industry or government is defining a challenge that then pulls technology through and I think that we’ve got a very big opportunity to shape things. It’s quite interesting what you said earlier about sector approaches as well and perhaps we get too hung up; Europe has worked very much on a sector type of approach and maybe that’s why we’ve lost out.  If you look at electronics and microelectronics in the context of a challenge led approach; if Europe was to start looking at it from a cross-cutting perspective then maybe that plays very much to a discipline that is in its own right is cross-cutting. So I think that the big role that the Technology Strategy Board has and one that again we want to work with industry sectors on is how do we shape and help influence the future European programmes so that they deliver things that are meaningful to UK industry.

 

Derek: I think that would be a two stage goal in that process and the first stage is to get people engaged with the programmes that can be to their advantage but in the slightly longer term there’s a real need to start to influence what’s going on.

Iain: Yes.  At the NMI dinner we made an announcement about a couple of projects that will help the electronics sector in preparing itself for European competition. So, you know hopefully that’s an illustration in the very short term of the kind of things that we could do to help UK business, because as I say I think the big thing is actually longer-term than that and its how we shape future competitions.

Derek: I believe we need to be clear about our industry needs and the key development challenges that we see here then it applies to UK investment as much as it does European investment as well so it doesn’t need to be two different messages there. 

But Iain, thanks very much for your time.  I enjoyed our discussion and look forward to close co-operation with the Technology Strategy Board.