British technology"s uncertain future | @guardianletters

‘Graphene has immense possibilities,’ says James Dyson. Photograph: Alamy

It is no surprise that British businesses are getting outpaced in the global commercialisation of graphene and other high technologies, even though they are getting pioneered by British universities (How the Uk trails the world on a excellent British invention, 4 December).

I am convinced that graphene has immense prospects, which is why Dyson is exploring potential applications (secret, I am afraid) with Andre Geim at Manchester University, and other universities in England. As quickly as Andre offers a appropriate researcher, the Dyson-funded undertaking will begin. University research is beneficial and powers future technology, even if there is no evident fast application. Competing internationally needs the very best technology in the world. This relies on investment and brains.

Dyson invests £2.5m a week in investigation, we have 1,500 engineers and scientists (though we desperately want much more) and we are working alongside dozens of British universities. All to build patentable technology that will be owned in Britain and exported close to the world. The government’s £350m investment to help doctoral coaching is promising, but will only be of long-term worth to Britain if the resulting research is nurtured and commercialised by British sector. It will fuel Britain’s future.
James Dyson
Inventor

• Aditya Chakrabortty’s article highlights one particular of the wonderful myths of Uk innovation policy, namely that the main source of productive modern new firms is academic inventions. This is no a lot more accurate in Cambridge than it is in Boston or Silicon Valley. We can’t financial institution on Manchester’s graphene analysis being the exception. It is the alumni of wonderful study universities that drive economic development by means of the chance to use their expertise and creativity in firms, in certain by solving troubles and establishing new goods for demanding buyers.

By the specifications of our most direct industrial rivals, the United kingdom government underspends on investigation and growth by about £4bn a year. Nonetheless, the gap is not in university analysis paying but in the funding of “exploratory development”.

This is the extended and risky procedure of trying to make new technologies function in true-planet applications. Germany has 22,000 scientists and engineers carrying out this in non-university Fraunhofer Institutes. The US funds this kind of operate via R&ampD procurements, with modest firms and not-for-revenue R&ampD organisations taking part in a crucial function.

We will only deal with the difficulty when we completely recognise what it is, rather than striving to get universities to perform a part they are not created for.
David Connell
Senior analysis fellow, Uk Innovation Research Centre, University of Cambridge, and Chairman, Archipelago Technological innovation

• I hope the new £61m National Graphene Institute at Manchester will reap some rewards (Letters, five December). Graphene is an exciting materials, and its unusual properties give fantastic hope that there will be rewards. Even so, like most wonderful new components, it is a solution seeking for troubles.

The greatest rewards will be to organizations that recognize and produce novel applications to business scale. Sadly, most of these will not be in the Uk, due to the fact governments considering that the 1970s have allowed our market to be broken up, offered off or shut down in the drive for brief-phrase gains by banking institutions and the stock market. There is now a plethora of centres for this and that, usually set up as government initiatives to show they are investing in the potential or as a sop to placate angry response to however another industrial closure. The difficulty is that, with out a secure Uk manufacturing base, they are investing in the potential for somewhere else.
Dr John Birtill
Highcliffe Catalysis Restricted, Guisborough

• Martin Durrani’s letter (5 December) touches on the closure of AstraZeneca’s research centre in Cheshire and its relocation to Cambridge and concludes that it “raises separate queries more than the north-south divide”, which indeed it does. This is not the initial time that effective and well-established research has been moved to the “golden triangle”, the most extraordinary example being the relocation of 2nd-generation synchrotron analysis from Daresbury, close to Manchester, to the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory close to Oxford. Offered that all the preliminary and brilliant developments took spot in Daresbury, this was a odd and unfair selection, the motives for which have in no way been entirely disclosed. If it truly is effective and in the north, move it south. What assumptions and influences are at operate right here?
Daniel McDowell
Ludlow, Shropshire

British technology"s uncertain future | @guardianletters