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Speed – and staying close to the customer – is the key to commercialising new materials for electronics. But you can’t do this in Europe, says Thomas Geelhaar, head of R&D at Merck Chemicals.

An OECD conference highlights the hottest trend in corporate R&D. But take heed: in business or politics, beware too much success, says Richard L. Hudson.

After more than 30 years of failure there could be political agreement paving the way for a Community Patent by the end of the year.

Spend a third of the EU’s basic research budget through the European Research Council – and spend all the rest on Joint Technology Initiatives.

Thomas Geelhaar, Head of Chemicals R&D at Merck in Darmstadt, Germany, describes how the company scouts for technologies and interacts with universities.

ITI Life Sciences, Scotland’s publicly funded innovation group, is to invest a further £2 million in its programme to develop new drug discovery tools.

A record 156,000 patents were filed under the Patent Cooperation Treaty in 2007, up 4.7 per cent over the previous year.

Radiologists are in short supply in parts of Europe. Telemedicine Clinic solves the problem by remote control, with a network of doctors who diagnose patients on the basis of medical images that arrive by email.

Corporate incubators bridge the seed funding gap, but apart from pocket money what can start-ups learn from their foster parents?

The 2007 European Innovation Scoreboard published this month shows a continued process of convergence within the EU.