1. Lord Sainsbury, Competing in the Global Economy: the Innovation Challenge, Department of Trade and Industry, 17 December 2003, and posted on www.dti.gov.uk

2. Francis Spufford, Backroom boys: The Secret Return of the British Boffin, Faber and Faber, 2003

Innovation: Kick out the jams

Enemies of innovation are all around. It's time to confront their arguments, says James Woudhuysen. While the British seem to wallow in the myth that British Boffins innovate, and others commercialise, the one thing we do seem to be innovating are excuses to avoid risk-taking in business. Which is a nervousness the government shares.

Few newspapers gave much coverage to Lord Sainsbury's report for the Department of Trade and Industry, Competing in the Global Economy: the Innovation Challenge. (1) Yet the innovation challenge facing the UK will not go away too easily this year - or any other year, for that matter. You know the story...

Britain, still a nation of boffins, has great ideas for technology, great inventions; but after the boffins come the botches. While other countries rip off our science, in commercialisation we fail. We fail through an exasperatingly British mix of 'Not Invented Here' syndrome, the stigma that attaches to making mistakes and going bankrupt, and the lack of a US-style venture capital industry. We are world-beaters in creativity. Yet for every James Dyson we get an almost empty-handed Tim Berners-Lee, or a rubber-band Beagle Mars probe descending into nowhere.

There is something in all this, but not much.

As minister for science and innovation, Sainsbury himself believes that the UK should be a country '...famed not only for its outstanding record of discovery but also for innovation'. Yet as Francis Spufford has shown in his recent book Backroom boys: The Secret Return of the British Boffin (2), Britain has commercialised a number of key discoveries: Vodafone, one of his examples, is a powerful case in point.

Anyway, Britain no longer shows every inventor, bankrupt or aspiring venture capitalist the door. The trend is to outsource innovation. Gordon Brown wants American-style lenience with plucky but failed entrepreneurs. And British venture capitalists are booming.

So what are the real barriers to innovation in Britain?

A risk-conscious subservience to purchasers and regulators certainly dampens innovation down. However, I'd be also very interested to hear what readers think about the following arguments - arguments which, when I've overheard them in corporate corridors, have caused many an innovation project to collapse:

'We haven't got a budget for that / we'll have to go round departments X, Y and Z to get a budget for that'. Now that hanging loose and avoiding risks are thought preferable to investment, corporate short-termism has a whole new force.

'It'll cannibalise sales of our existing products and services, in which we've made a large investment. You can't just write that off'.' Yes, and that way no going concern would ever innovate.

'In the Gold Rush of 1849, people made money by sticking to the creative production of commodity shovels, not from stab-in-the-dust exploration. Innovation is too unpredictable. It's best to be a fast follower, not a first mover'. My last riposte again applies.

We might recognise that there was a time when the unpredictability of innovation was regarded as exciting, not dangerous.

The argument I hear expressed quite openly nowadays is the most pernicious one. It concerns how one explains an innovation. It runs:

'Sales staff and end-users are so dumb, they'll never grasp how it works. Anyway, they don't need to know and, apart from a few geeks, aren't usually interested'.

By assuming that people will never put their hands 'under the bonnet' with a new piece of hardware or software, this argument disempowers. It condescends. Where other arguments have failed, it finally succeeds in making those who are technologically ingenious look like an isolated, alien force.

'Don't make them think!'. Now that argument really does set back the cause of innovation. James Woudhuysen 2 August 2004

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