Mannerisms

Judging by past attempts by bureaucrats to stimulate emerging technology, it will verge towards the prophylactic option. The Alba Centre went that way along with numerous other such initiatives in numerous other nations.

The truth is that the creative mind-set and the bureaucratic mind-set do not mix well. The bureaucrat likes to measure and control and monitor, the creatives like to tinker and talk and try things out.

Following the old adage that 'He who pays the piper calls the tune', it is informative to look at who will be paying the PETeC piper.

Every backer is a bureaucracy: One North East, The Northern Way, County Durham Development Company, County Durham Economic Partnership, the DTI and the EC. Bureaucrats all.

What sort of tune will they be calling for? Not, it seems the tune of: 'Get something made, make sure it's commercial, and flog it.'

"We will not be doing production but we will be understanding the cost basis and designing for production", says PETeC's director of science and technology.

That does not bode well. The only sure way of getting a new technology to work is to try and get it to work, and try and get it to result in something useful.

The tried and tested best way of doing that is via venture capital-backed entrepreneurism, where there are real-world pressures to make the technology work, to make it commercially useful and to make it profitable.

But VC-backed entrepreneurism is a wild and woolly beast far removed from the dainty ways of bureaucracy.

It's a very nice thing for bureaucrats to put up a proposal, usually supported by some academics and an analyst or two, to get a budget from the authorities, to find a building, to hire more bureaucrats, and to have meetings to discuss how they will monitor and measure progress.

But will PETeC prove attractive to creative minds on whose intellect and creativity the success or failure of an emerging technology like plastics depends?

Creative technologists usually prefer to be involved in something which is going to produce a real-world product for real-world use.

Not bureaucratic condoms.