The development of a successful national set of policies that can capitalise on specific industry and technology developments in a country need to be based on a simple series of principles. Looking at the UK, one international benchmarking study found…
Continue ReadingHere are some findings from our recent research: UK Sectors in which the lack of skills is holding back innovation Level 4: Nanotechnology; Big Data Level 3: Civil aviation; Creative industries; Financial services; Industrial biotechnology Level 2: Agri-science; Electronics, photonics,…
Continue ReadingThere is a direct link between skills and innovation and, to be truly innovative, businesses need people with balanced sets of innovation-related skills. The higher STEM-based skills, which tend to be the focus of ‘traditional’ Research and Development (R&D), are…
Continue ReadingIn UK businesses, innovation has fallen alarmingly in recent years. So the publishing of the UK government’s new Research and Development (R&D) Roadmap seems to us to be falling into the old British trap of taking overstated pride in research,…
Continue ReadingFor manufacturing businesses in the UK, building workforces to be able to take advantage of Advanced Manufacturing (AM) innovations is quite different from that usually associated with more traditional Research and Development (R&D). Why? Well, normally R&D workforce development focuses…
Continue ReadingMore UK businesses need to be innovating. At a national level, R&D investment needs to be raised, together with the related spend on education and training for innovation. Together this would lead to greater levels of productivity and generate high-quality…
Continue ReadingThe business of information: looking for the golden threads? This post follows on from our main post here. Barrier 2: Focusing too much on products only The Data Value Chain[1] runs from generation, through collection and analytics through to exchange,…
Continue ReadingAn abridged version of this post can be found here. The value of information – reliable and timely information – has been highlighted during the coronavirus pandemic. In the UK we have seen debates over what constitutes a “test” and…
Continue ReadingA more detailed version of this post is available here The coronavirus pandemic has shown just how unreliable and untimely data can be. In the UK, experts can’t even agree on what constitutes a ‘test’ and how we count the…
Continue ReadingThe space technology industry is large, global and rapidly growing1. It splits into three major areas: Upstream; Downstream; and Beyond Earth2. Within each of these general areas it splits down further and further. We show the sub-sectors of the industry…
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