Yay, my first blog. Sorry. Bit excited. Milestone moment.

I must have been the only accountant in London not glued to TV/radio/internet on Wednesday. Instead I attended an Innovation Summit. Far more enjoyable than listening to the Chancellor’s budget speech.

The event was about how governments should help stimulate innovation. Creativity is reckoned one of the UK’s strengths, although it expends a lower proportion of GDP on R&D (1.78% in 2005) compared to Germany (2.48%), the US (2.62%) and Japan (3.33%). These figures come from the OECD Factbook 2008: Economic, Environmental and Social Statistics.

Engaging civil servants from the Dept of Innovation, Universities and Skills (DIUS) described their remits which made me realise what a variety of assistance there is - fiscal incentives, policies, standards, mentoring, facilitating networks and advice. But also that the DIUS assumes a fair bit of prior knowledge on the user’s part to navigate their way around the various teams, programmes, partners and initiatives.

To be fair, DIUS have tried to create access points like their Business Gateway page, which lists the various organisations (of which there are many) and their objectives. But this is still a good way from a one-stop shop, organised from the users’ perspective. I’d like to see resources organised according to the stage of development the user was at, to answer the needs they have at that point in the development process from pure research to market. In the early stages, the questions might be “how do I determine if there is a commercial use for this?”, then “how do I get in touch with a partner who will want this?”, “how do I attract investors?”, “how do I find a route to market?” and “how do I protect my intellectual property?”

One issue raised was an apparent weak link in the process where knowledge gets transferred from higher education institutes to industry. CIMA is in that space – for example, we make it a condition that the recipients of our research grants produce outputs for practitioners - but lots more could be done to foster relationships between industry and academia. Has anyone had experiences with university technology transfer offices (in any country) they’d like to share?

Some of the delegates were a bit surprised to see CIMA at the event – wickedly suggesting that innovation was not a term usually associated with accountants. My instinctive riposte to these kinds of remarks is an anguished “we’re not that sort of accountant!” but as usual I held back and managed something more measured along the lines of CIMA advocating the involvement of accountants right from the start of the design process, since 95% of costs are locked in at that stage. Then had a qualm - did I remember that stat right?