How much public money has gone into backing technology firms and is it well spent? I currently have an enquiry pending with the National Audit Office about this and whether they look at SMART and Faraday-type grants to assess the value of such investments.
Rather than waiting for a response from the NAO, I have also started to track down and talk to recipients of such awards. If I can write about one of these grants a week, describing how that project ended, it may be a valuable look at how public money is spent in this way. Of course, I expect it will be easier to track down the projects that were successful and possibly created a spin-out rather than the projects that came to an end.
I suspect I may be whittling a stick with which to beat myself with. There have been so many changes to the way grants are handed out in England that tracking down historical Government data of grant spending when it has most likely been stolen or lost, is not going to be easy.
However, with this intention in mind I have been speaking with David Hamilton, founder of Ateeda, which has EDA tools and services for the mixed signal semiconductor industry.
The company had a Proof of Concept (PoC) award from Scottish Enterprise of £197,408 and an additional PoC Plus award of £86,949. There was also university money between these two awards.
Ateeda spun out of research that Hamilton oversaw at the University of Strathclyde. “I had a PhD student which I took down a certain route in analogue testing. I realised it was commercially promising and applied for a first tranche of PoC funding,” says Hamilton.
With this money, Hamilton brought in a couple of staff from industry and worked on the technology for two to three years with the Scottish Enterprise backing. “Clearly there was an interest early on so it was straightforward to engage a few companies from industry,” he says.
The funding took the research to a point where Hamilton had to decide if he was going to licence it or set up a firm. “At a certain stage you are constrained by PoC funding because under their rules the money is not meant to be spent on actually making your first product.” However, the firm is now engaged with a dozen IDMs (integrated device manufacturers) at different stages.
In this case the PoC money seems to have been wisely spent, it took the fledgling company to the point where it realised it had to make a decision about how to commercialise its technology. The firm is young of course and its success is hard to gauge at this point but the PoC money did what it is intended for.
And Hamilton’s experience of the PoC experience? “It was very good for us. It was administered sensibly. They are straightforward and pragmatic at Scottish Enterprise. It is a unique fund in Europe.”