Bringing business and academia together will create fresh innovation
I MET recently with a delegation from the Netherlands keen to explore the role of innovation districts in city economic development.
They were in Glasgow just as The Queen was officially opening both the Queen Elizabeth University Hospital (naming it in the process) and the University of Strathclyde’s Technology Innovation Centre (TIC).
Both of these investments are already helping to shape new innovation districts which are bringing business, academia and government together in Glasgow to grow the health and life sciences and engineering sectors respectively.
At the Scottish Life Sciences Awards earlier in the year, the University of Glasgow together with NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde, Scottish biomedical informatics company Aridhia and the US research support company Thermo Fisher Scientific, won the title for the best innovative collaboration of the year.
Their joint work in the field of stratified medicine – which uses DNA profiling in clinical trials to improve the productivity of drug solutions – is just one example where the co-location of business, university and government at the new hospital is encouraging the commercialisation of research that Scotland has long been seeking. Credit should go to both the Scottish Funding Council and to the Glasgow City Deal for commit- ting funds to help make it all happen.
It is the collaborative sharing of the research agenda that is so promising.
So much of the past discussion of research commercialisation policy has been about how we spin out or licence research from our successful universities into the marketplace.
Actively encouraging companies and universities to work together from the beginning on problems with both an academic challenge and a commercial application may well be the key to creat- ing fresh innovation districts across Scotland.
At Strathclyde’s TIC the same principle applies.
The TIC is a fantastic new facility right in the centre of Glasgow packed to the brim with an almost bewildering array of amazing work on, for example, renewable energy, the design of cities of the future and advanced manufacturing techniques.
Weir Group has its advanced research centre there and Scottish Power, SSE and GSK are all close partners.
The presence in the TIC of the first UK Fraunhofer Centre for applied photonics is a feature that will also catch attention across German industry because Fraunhofer is such a respected name.
That is not to decry the value of spin-outs or licensing but since our record on commercialised research and development is not great we have to try something different. The TIC and the hospital look set to be part of the answer. I wish them well.