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Helping UK universities turn their ideas into business has turned into a business of its own – with four IP management companies quoted on London’s Alternative Investment Market.

It is one thing to recognise the need to manage intellectual property like any other strategic resource. But it is quite another to install the systems and devise the processes for doing it.

The climate for R&D-based start-ups in Central and Eastern Europe should be improving. But there’s still a way to go, writes Mary Lisbeth D’Amico.

Czechoslovakia’s development authorities are to win a reputation for the country as a magnet for emerging biotech.

Acrobot Ltd., a spin-out from Imperial College London, is currently fund raising and is seeking partnerships and licence agreements.

The time is not right to breathe back life into the European software patent, says Francisco Mingorance from the Business Software Alliance. Thomas Lau investigates.

Everyone wants to encourage innovation. But, says Alain de Serres from the OECD, a survey of the world’s leading industrial countries shows they are going about it in different ways and with very different results.

Europe preaches the knowledge society, but its aversion to risk and reluctance to change has got to go, warns Esko Aho, former prime minister of Finland.

"There is a large gap between the rhetoric of a political system that preaches the Knowledge Society and the reality of budgetary and other priorities that have shown little shift in preparing to engage with it." Esko Aho, former Prime Minister of Finland, in Creating an Innovative Europe, January 2006.

TU Delft ditched the usual model of outlicensing or seeking venture capital backing when it was looking to commercialise a novel wastewater treatment technology.

The European Commission is reviving a push for a common patent policy by asking for input of ideas from industry and stakeholders - a move that would renew a fierce debate that has spanned more than three decades.

Venture capitalists are once again funding nanotech start-ups, but their overall investment is small compared with government funding and corporate R&D spending, says to a new report.

In his first interview since taking up the job, Bruno van Pottelsberghe, the 37-year-old newly appointed chief economist at the European Patent Office, bemoans the failure to create a single EU-wide patent.