Being declared worse than
"The
Shame on us. Hung heads all round.
More to the point: "Companies are missing out on millions of pounds of FP7 (Framework 7) funding and therefore investing less in R&D", says the peer, "
According to Lord Jones, since the start of the recession, money spent on R&D by businesses went down by over 25% to £25bn in 2009, and much of this was due to small businesses cutting back.
But, points out Lord Jones, the EU has a €1.4bn fund for R&D performed by
The fund is part of the Commission's Seventh Framework Programme for Research and Development (FP7), which is designed to drive growth, innovation and collaboration across
Jones is absolutely on the ball in identifying why
"If they (the
Shrewdly, Lord Jones hits on the weak link in George Osborne's strategy for resurrecting the
"The Government is rightly focused on deficit reduction," says His Lordship, "but has so far failed to do enough to encourage growth."
"This country is only going to get itself out of this economic malaise if we trade our way out of it," adds Lord Jones, "if you ever analyse the first year out of a recession, it's always the small business sector that pulls the country out; it is the sector that starts to employ first, the sector that grows wealth again first. The small business sector is key to economic recovery."
"
"To do this, we've got to have a government that walks the path with business and doesn't ignore the value of small companies," says his Lordship.
"We need to trade our way into economic success by making innovative, branded, quality, value-added goods and selling them around the world," says the peer, "but the way in which
Spot on, Milord.
"Being declared worse than Belgium is always a good way of getting the nation's attention.."
hmmm, David, this subject merits a separate discussion in itself. Think of beer..and UK has an impossible task at hand. Think of running a country with no elected government for several months (more than a year even)..and you will begin to respect their bureaucracy..well, come to chips (as in fish and chips)..you know (for good reasons) why the Belgians swear by their chips. Belgium has it's blemishes, but who doesn't?
Having lived in both these countries for a fair amount of time (and being from neither of them), methinks Belgium has quite a bit to offer to it's neighbors from across the ocean ..and vice versa :-)
Indeed Belgium is easily the world's best place for beer, there is so much choice. I recall one nice bar near the cathedral in Antwerp which had more than 365 varietes on offer! And the moules frites in the IMEC canteen were pretty good too.
Trouble is, Keith, a bar can only keep 365 different beers if they're bottled beers, and who goes to a bar to drink bottled beer?
I do, when they're as good as some of the ones on offer. But Kriek and Framboise beers are a completely different thing to British beer, to be drunk more like a good wine.
Crikey [Anonymous] now you're into higher regions of connoisseur-ship than my rough-hewn tastes have ever encountered.
I concurr with Anonymous. I always bring back 2 - 6 bottles of several different types to sample at leisure. Some as strong as wines and are more like Barley Wine than Beer.
Even had some Delerium Tremens once (2 bottles left) and also the Devil's Brew
As a lowly Young's Ordinary drinker, Dr Bob and [Anonymous], I feel humbled - as Murdoch would say
As a highly experienced expert in this field, I can say with absolute conviction that Belgium's draft beers are even better than their bottled ones !!!
Leaving aside the weighty matters of the evidently high quality of catering available in Belgium (beer, chips, chocolate, waffles... surely they should be dying younger than the Scots?)...
Lord Jones is right in saying that FP7 is unattractive to SMEs and in fact any company who wants to get on rather than get by. It EU framework grants have historically been designed for firms accustomed to getting their nose in the trough by means of lobbying.
The requirement for cross national partners, the complexity application process and its documentation requirments and the likelihood of failure at this point are just a few of the barriers for small firms. Maybe there is another scheme now, but I think bitter past experience has put too many off to even sniff around now.
Now, does anyone else miss Wm. Younger's No. 3?
Leaving aside the joys of Wm. Younger's No.3, Stooriefit, I would point out that on his way to becoming one of the country's richest men, at a time when his company consisted of four people in 1993, Andrerw Rickman the founder of Bookham, got a £160,00 grant from the EU and, at the end of the year, the EU doubled it. "If you understand the pitfalls involved, and take the time, and you don't have any choice, then it will work for you," said Rickman a few years later. So, although everyone I know agrees with you that it's a total pain, it can be done.
My feeling is that we are seeing very few *good* engineers gaining general management and confidence in using their own enterprise.
Recently I was amusing myself, oddly, by browsing an old magazine called D-Tack Grounded (a Motorola 68K mag).. and the following jumped out at me from March 1984..
"Since lots of our readers are engineers, you might like to know that the status of an engineer in Britain is very slightly higher than that of a janitor in our country. Wait now, you probably think we are exaggerating and we aren't. In this country it is commonplace for an engineer to eventually become the president of the corporation which employs him but not many janitors become presidents. Likewise, in Britain it is unheard-of for an engineer to become a company president, and almost unheard-of for an engineer to rise to any managerial post. Engineers in Britain are paid about 40% of the going rate in this country."
For some odd reason these days Universities and Government.. and perhaps even engineering societies think that only business graduates will be starting SME's.. When did this happen?
A then little known Cambridge company used to be involved in numerous Framework projects back in the 90s. The EU paid for quite a lot of their upgrades including several attempts at getting their DSP act together.
Odd thing is you see them involved in these projects much less nowadays but I suppose they can't claim to be an SME anymore :-)
It's something we've written about regularly in Electronics Weekly over the years, greg, and I had hoped that with the success of engineer-led companies like ARM and CSR, this had begun to change. Trouble is engineers graduate without entrepreneurial skills or mind-sets. This may be the fault of industrialists who persuade the universities and the IET that pliable cannon-fodder is what they need. But when you think that engineering is all about solving problems, and that starting and leading a company is about solving problems, you'd think engineers could turn their hands to starting and running companies. They certainly have done so in Silicon Valley.
Ah yes, Mike, ARM. I've heard EU people expressing regret that they don't have closer relationships with ARM. I wonder why things changed?
I'm sure it comes down to money.. there's no way around the need for ready access to credit for tech ideas. Its interesting to look at the difference to Germany's high tech strategy and the high tech fund they have http://www.hightech-strategie.de/en/index.php
It seems weird at the least that the IET doesn't constantly bang on about this to the Government, Universities, Media and even its own membership. In the last IET mag there was a for and against discussion on whether Engineers were even suitable to be entrepreneurs. IMO SME's are going to be where its all at in the coming decade/s.
You make my point for me Mike - the EU framework people seem to be too concerned with courting the headliners like ARM, and less concerned with those who will become the ARMs of 25 years hence.
They did used to be more forward thinking. A change of culture generally comes from a change of personnel, so who ever was navigating the ship 25 years ago was doing a decent job. Now, not so much.
@ Stooriefit - yes ! 20 years ago Pistorio et al were running things - all well known names in our industry and they changed Europe and the world. Nowadays I suspect many engineers cannot even name the CEOs and CTOs of the major Euro semi companies nowadays.
Concerning the ARMs of 25 years hence (or even 10 years) the problem is I don't really see so many possibilities nowadays. Universities still have great ideas but unfortunately few have any chance of commercialisation. Indeed one UK state funded investment fund has told me they aren't interested in one of the UK's core semiconductor competances. However this isn't restricted to the UK as the same is often true in many mainland unis I've visited/advised/spoken at. There you either get under the wing of a major player or you don't exist. Hardly the best breeding ground for the next major startup.
With ARM I suspect it was Saxby who pushed them into the Euro projects, as he did into so many contracts. Of course ARM processors are still used on many EU funded projects but with no direct contribution from ARM other than as normal clients. But there's still quite a few using obsolete processors where you think "why isn't ARM in here ?".
"Belgium" the rudest word in the whole Galaxy, except on one planet where they don't know what it means! - Douglas Adams - Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy.