SEEDA braced for cuts

Jayne Conway wrote:

This news isn't going to give me any sleepless nights. If SEEDA's management of other projects is as shambolic as the Tipner Regeneration Project in Portsmouth then it's probably a better use of public money to have the whole mare's nest that is SEEDA wound up. Far from adding to prosperity by their activities in Portsmouth, urban dereliction and local unemployment has been added to with little more than a 'suck it and see' plan.
Jayne Conway
local muck raker

20 Jun 2010 11:51 PM

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Dr David Hill wrote:

It does not matter what form the new equivalent of the RDAs will be as they will fail with the same mentality and misunderstanding that government and the civil service has of the 'innovation chain'. For the knowledge base is just not there and that’s why according to independent research by the Taxpayer's Alliance, the RDAs have stood still since they were created over a decade ago. Or in other words, the changes that have happened would have occurred anyway even if the RDAs did not exist. Unfortunately though Britain has not seen any economic dynamism of merit for the 15-billion plus investment.

What all these so-called wise men in the civil service miss time-after-time is that we have to have the catalysts first and not just pumping money into established businesses in the hope that they will succeed. For the latter is like living in perpetual hope that things will change but where they usually never do. Indeed when you look at the UK economy over the past 25-years you see a constant decline in industries that can sustain us in the future as a nation. So much so that the UK economy is now a poor economic model.

For what we need vitally for Britain's future is new technological industries, not trying to prop up old industrial models that are superseded every year by other nations that have far more innovative government advisers than our own. In this respect we have to create principally innovative development centres for our inventors which are according to leading research by the Germans and the Japanese the best in the world by far. Indeed, according to them the fundamental thinking of British 'independent' inventors (those outside the confines of universities and corporate research centres) has created up to 54% of what we call the modern world today.

Therefore the fundamental and vital missing-link to the UK's economic dynamism is the establishment of special incubator centres throughout the UK and where our ground-breaking ideas can be brought out and exploited by our universities and corporate enterprises – not the other way around that we have today and that goes literally no where.

For without this new realism and requirement the UK will definitely be left behind over the next quarter of a century as the full economic might of SE Asia kicks in.

I therefore hope that the new conservative-liberal government opens up its mind and sees this time where Britain's true economic dynamism resides. For it certainly does not reside in the minds of Whitehall and their advisers based upon the last 50-years. If it did the UK would be booming and not like it is today, in decline year-on-year and a moribund economy. For staying with the status quo or something similar will just bring us more misery in the future. Britain was once built upon its great inventors, it has to go back to those fundamental days and do the same again.

Dr David Hill
Executive Director
World Innovation Foundation Charity
Bern, Switzerland

25 May 2010 9:40 PM

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