Lab Notes

On inventive Californians, technology transfer, how to approach the business press, and other insights into R&D management.

Too busy to read what they write about R&D? Never fear. At Science|Business we love this stuff. Here's the cream off the top of recent publications.

Perpetual motion for US patents

Every year, the United States Patent and Trademark Office feeds everyone’s mania for statistics with its annual scoreboard. Before downloading the full report, we chuckled at the sentence in the accompanying press release telling us that, in the words of the Under Secretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property, Jon Dudas, "During fiscal year 2005, the USPTO continued its efforts to make the world's best patent and trademark office even better."

Lots of people find the US patent system to be terribly puzzling. Not least those who laughed at the fact that one of the patents awarded this year was for a perpetual motion machine.

When we turned to the numbers, we saw that of the US residents Californians were the most productive, or patent savvy, depending on how you interpret the fact that they accounted for 23 per cent of the patents received, three times as many as went to inventors from New York.

The USPTO received 406,302 patent applications and awarded 165,485 patents.

Tech transfer in the Houses of Parliament

Observers of the technology transfer process in the UK could be in for a treat over the coming months. The House of Commons is on the case. It has launched a new inquiry "to examine the way in which the UK research councils support knowledge transfer".

For anyone not familiar with the select committees, they may come as a bit of a surprise. But unlike the playground antics of the main chamber, the committee actually asks sensible questions, and gets, sometimes, sensible answers.

This notice of the new inquiry invites people to submit their evidence. "Submissions should be as brief as possible, and certainly no more than 3,000 words. Paragraphs should be numbered for ease of reference, and the document should include a brief executive summary." Something to put together over the Christmas holiday? You have until 16 February to deliver.

Lords debate science

While we are on a UK parliamentary roll, perhaps we should point readers to a slightly older story, but one that illustrates a point. This is the debate in the House of Lords at the beginning of November. It was all about science and technology.

The first point to note here is that, horror of horrors, the speakers actually knew what they were talking about. The upper house is packed with eminent scientists, and a few also-rans, who would not be seen dead running for parliament but who ended up in the House of Lords thanks to the UK's quaint parliamentary system.

The debate started with a speech by Lord Kumar Bhattacharyya, head of the Warwick Manufacturing Group at Warwick University. Sadly, Kumar was speaking on behalf of the government and he had to set the scene, so his contribution was a bit tame in comparison with the sort of thing he will say when he gets a chance to bend your ear personally.

But follow through the debate and you can read some less predictable utterances from the likes of Lord Bob May, recently retired President of the Royal Society and before that Chief Scientific Adviser to the government. "Lord Bob" had a swipe at the business sector: "When you look at the last stage in the process, private spending - the spending by business and industry on R&D - the comparison [with other countries] is unfavourable"

How to approach the business press

There is a feeling within the European Commission that it supports lots of good research that ends up sat on the shelf. One reason for this, the commission believes, is that projects are not that good at communicating with the business audience.

To begin to change this, there was a session on reaching the business media at the recent meeting in Brussels on communicating science. There is not much detail in this account of the event, but we were there and can attest to the fact that it was a useful gathering and that the basic message is correct. Then again, communication is a two-sided process. At Science|Business we reckon that the business media pay too little attention to science. That's what we are here for. Then there are the businesses that the researchers want to reach. They could also do a bit more to seek out the messages.

Creativity And Design

We recently sat in on a presentation of an interesting piece of innovation that hinged as much as anything on the design of the packaging. Get it wrong and the product was doomed to fail. Creativity, Design and Business Performance, a new report, from the Department of Trade and Industry, is one more contribution to the debate on the link between innovation and design.

As the accompanying press release put it "Investment in creativity and design has a positive impact on business Performance".

There are also links to other contributions on the subject.

Newcastle City of Science

Not that Newcastle City, nothing to do with football, Newcastle University has always been one of the more interesting places for research, although you would not know if from the fixation with the "golden triangle" of Oxford, Cambridge and London. Now the Tyneside region, awash with money from the Regional Development Agency, is pushing to make the place a commercial hot bed for science.

Newcastle's science promoters did well to get lottery money, not to mention money from the Wellcome Trust and the EU, for the Life Science Centre there. (You have to admire them for snaffling a great URL in the shape of life.org.uk.) Now we have finally caught up with the fact that the Newcastle Science City initiative has snapped up the old site of Scottish & Newcastle Breweries and hopes that "up to 100 new technology-based companies could be set up or attracted to the region by 2010".

Engineers with a chip

You have to wonder about engineers. While the rest of the world gets on with its life, engineers (in particular British ones) bang on about not being loved by their neighbours who insist on confusing them with (usually) men in overalls. Engineers have a point; in the UK even a senior manager at British Gas mistakenly described the company's fitters, who are threatening to strike, as engineers. They aren't. As highly skilled technicians, their role is far more important that that of many an engineer.

It is that act of labelling that upsets the real engineers, those with letters after their names. Which is why they have launched yet another initiative, cooked up by The Royal Academy of Engineering, to get the world to take them more seriously. They have even managed to line up lots of big companies to support the campaign.

The academy says that the new initiative, Shape the Future, "will start young people on a journey, making connections between the issues they face and the solutions engineering and technology can provide". A laudable goal, but they face an uphill struggle in trying to get schoolteachers to understand what engineering is, let alone to urge it upon their students. These days they are more likely to proclaim the delights of plumbing, such is the demand for this profession.

Nanotech gets its ethical minder

The speed with which nanotechnology goes from mad idea to watchdog industry never ceases to amaze. Now we don't just have the environmentalists and health police on the case, there's a nascent ethics industry. Australian IT reports on this because one of their own, Professor John Weckert of Wagga Wagga University, is to edit the new journal Nanoethics: Ethics for technologies that converge at the nanoscale. Trouble is, by the time this new journal surfaces, in 2007, the fad may be long gone.