| I am very pleased to be invited to open the Mansfield i-centre. It is an exciting building which will provide a real opportunity to help regenerate the area by nurturing small, dynamic companies to innovate and grow. It is vital that the achievements of companies like these and the wider achievements of the UK's national science and technology base are used to benefit society and are translated into jobs and businesses.
I am looking to the Mansfield i-centre, and other innovation centres like it, to provide a supportive, creative, high profile environment for these innovative new industries. Their impact on the local economy will be a real factor in changing the traditional picture of labour intensive production and low paid employment and help stimulate the growth of high quality, skilled and value added employment opportunities for local people.
It is encouraging that we are now getting more than our fair share of fast growth high tech businesses in the UK. Recently, Deloitte and Touche published a survey of the 500 fastest growing European ones - 150 are in the UK, compared with 51 in Germany, 97 in France and 43 in Ireland.
Ideas and innovation are at the heart of the regeneration process and we are dependant on the knowledge, risk-taking and creative energy of businesses like these to deliver. Businesses that, here in Mansfield, range from laser technology, instruments to analyse materials, bio chemical science through to new media solutions and services which help develop community entrepreneurship. It is the qualities of your people here that this Government wants to stimulate, encourage and support.
When Patricia Hewitt became Secretary of State for Trade and Industry last summer she felt it was the right time for the DTI to take a fresh look at how the Department supported business in the UK. That review told us that we needed to build on what we have been doing over the last four years to strengthen our science and technology base. It said we needed to focus primarily on where we can make the greatest difference, and to be more joined up in the way we assist business. Crucially, we had to commercially exploit the UK science, engineering and technology expertise in the most effective ways.
That Review led to the creation of the new Innovation Group in the Department, part of whose job is to bring about greater coherence to our existing activities. A new innovation strategy will mean that we use available resources in ways that achieve the maximum impact. Things like intellectual property, skills and standards are all vital to creating an environment that helps business to innovate.
I am also keen to put a much stronger focus on promoting the key drivers for innovation. In particular, we will be putting much more effort into:
- stimulating business to increase their investment in activities that lead to innovation, like R&D and investment in people and
- alerting business to the things that will drive change in the future, like emerging technologies, new business models and resource productivity.
The universities will be at the heart of helping this change take place. The Government has already done much to help them develop the skills and networks needed to take forward the innovation agenda with initiatives like University Challenge, the Science Enterprise Challenge and the Higher Education Innovation Fund. We also support the LINK programme, the TCS scheme (formally the Teaching Company Scheme), the SMART programme. In 1999-2000 we had 199 spin-off companies from universities compared with an average of 70 per year on average in the previous 5 years.
On a wider front, we set out in the white paper Opportunity for All in a World of Change the Government's strategy for innovation in the regions, work which will be taken forward by the Regional Development Agencies. Each RDA has been tasked with producing a Regional Innovation Strategy, setting out their approach to innovation.
It is the development of facilities like the Mansfield I-centre that will transform these hopes and plans into a reality. I congratulate the partners of the i-centre project: Mansfield District Council, Nottinghamshire County Council, East Midlands Development Agency and Angle Technology, on their foresight and the level of support they have given to bring this about. My thanks, also, to 3-D Lazer Tec for their commemorative gift.
The exciting advances taking place today in science and technology will create many opportunities to develop new businesses and new jobs. We need to seize those opportunities, and I believe that the Mansfield i–Centre, and innovation centers like it, can play a major role in helping us to do so.
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