WOULD-BE entrepreneurs in Britain鈥檚 universities received a boost in last
week鈥檚 Budget. The Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown, announced that
拢20 million of public money will be put into a fund set up to provide
seed-corn finance to turn bright ideas from university labs into commercial
products.
The University Challenge Fund aims to tackle Britain鈥檚 failure to reap the
commercial benefits of its spending on research. 鈥淔or too long, the great
scientific advances of British universities have gone on to become the
manufacturing successes of rival countries,鈥� Brown noted in his Budget
speech.
Brown鈥檚 拢20 million is to be matched by charities, mainly the Wellcome
Trust and the Gatsby Charitable Foundation鈥攁lthough neither will say
exactly how much it will contribute. Research teams selected to benefit from the
fund will also each have to raise 拢500 000.
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Candidates must show that their research ideas have commercial potential and
that academic staff would be given time to work on the project. Managers would
be drawn from the private sector.
The government was right to step in, says Gordon Murray, an economist at
Warwick Business School. British venture capitalists have failed to take risks
to get innovative companies off the ground, he says. 鈥淚t鈥檚 a classic market
蹿补颈濒耻谤别.鈥�
Denis Noble of the University of Oxford, a founding member of the pressure
group Save British Science, agrees that an important gap will be plugged. 鈥淭hose
of us who鈥檝e tried to raise start-up capital know that it鈥檚 a hard act,鈥� he
says.
The Treasury and the Department of Trade and Industry have also launched a
consultation process on measures needed to increase research spending by
industry. Britain is the only large industrial country where spending by
industry on R&D as a proportion of GDP has declined in the past 15 years.