The gap between business and innovation is often vast, and the pathway to delivering business success is mostly littered with complex, indecipherable information. But for Stephen Lake, the man behind QinetiQ's ventures and licensing programme, there is a simple message for technology innovators striving to make money and win their first customer: "Be a risk-taker. Develop your technology and deliver it into the hands of your customer as soon as possible."
Lake, a speaker at this year's London Innovation Conference (18 March, 2005), says: "Get your technology road-tested, used and, most importantly, seen and talked about. Much is said about the need for market surveys and detailed customer-need studies, but the best mechanism for customer feedback is for them to actually use the technology."
Since its inception a little over two years ago, QinetiQ's New Business Accelerator programme has grown rapidly and is expected this year to generate in excess of £35m in revenues, a 100% growth on the previous year's income. The pathway to this level of success is not an easy one and tough decisions need to be made along the way.
"Most pre-revenue-stage and early-stage technology companies dream that their products will one day dominate the market, but the route to market is littered with bad and often indigestible advice," says Lake. "There's no one-size-fits-all solution, but if one were to look to North America, there are a number of clear initiatives - private and government programmes - which gives that particular market critical mass and allows the US to enjoy a world-leading role in terms of successfully nurturing and making money from innovations in technology."
Lake says that US technology innovators are helped enormously by Government departments which are inured to risk-taking and which possess strong domain knowledge. "It is the government in the US which most significantly plays the role of early adopter for pre-revenue-stage and early-stage technology companies. This effectively propels new technology ideas into the marketplace, and gets them used and improved within a very short time. US innovator companies are thereby able to secure their first customer and showcase their technologies all at once. Even the CIA possesses its own venture fund - In-Q-Tel - which tells you something about just how seriously the US takes its innovation community."
While the UK government's commitment to innovation is very welcome, Lake says this needs to be matched with an innovative procurement model, similar to the US, which can then be partly underwritten by industry. "This model is even more important in the EU where government spend is often 40% of GDP," he says.
Lake says that the argument for improved use of government procurement is widely accepted, but that no one knows how to implement it.
"QinetiQ espouses a very practical approach to addressing this issue. There are four key steps, which are:
- Ministers to be accountable annually for innovation pull through in their procurement
- The DTI innovation budget to be enhanced and used for pull through and not more invention
- The Office of Science and Technology budget to be opened to companies bidding with universities for pull through programmes
- Research and Technology Organisations to be recognised as strong vehicles for bridging the innovation gap
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