Funding innovation

Here’s a contention: that in the history of technological innovation, most of it has come about because of direct or indirect government money: tax payers have funded most of the quantum leaps we’ve seen since agrarian times.

The UK was the heartland of the Industrial Revolution. Whilst most of that, from cotton mills onwards, was supported and built on private equity, that surplus cash came about from the success of trading in goods from the East and West Indies. That trade was only possible because of the investments made in protecting the lucrative trade routes by the British Navy.

The Twentieth Century, shadowed throughout by the threat, or reality of war saw great leaps and bounds in technological innovation funded through investment in defence: the internet, to a great extent the space race, and so on.

Even the technological innovation of home computing, the very reason why I’m doing the work I do today, in large part came from the funding into IT Literacy through the BBC Micro computing initiative that helped kickstart the UK industry in the 1980s.

Big ideas, with big innovation, take big amounts of cash that don’t, necessarily, have any need for direct financial return. Since the end of the Cold War, we have struggled to find such big ideas to focus around – and whilst there has been significant social impact in the past 20 years from IT and software, it’s revolutionary underpinning comes from the former era to a great extent (ARPANet, and of course the government-funded work at CERN that lead to Tim Berners-Lee creating the World Wide Web).

The gap in inspirational projects is perhaps starting to show – STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths) subjects are struggling to find students in schools and universities. Whilst the riches of being a Social Media entrepreneur may lure some, being the next Facebook isn’t exactly being the next Apollo mission (and from an engineering perspective, large-scale social networks are a challenge, but not exactly at a putting people on remote planets level of complexity).

There are glimmers of hope for what might replace the government investment of old; we shouldn’t expect a return to the old days, i Funding innovation n my opinion, not because of a triumph of economic liberalist thinking, but because with aging populations all of our spare government cash is going to go into tending the elderly.

Initiatives like the XPrize Foundation look to promote education and revive areas of industry as a result. Today I was lucky enough to hear a talk from Richard Noble, former world land speed record holder and now helping to realise the dream of a 1000mph car – Bloodhound SSC. On the face of it, the project is a bit crazy – why on earth does someone need to drive a car faster than a fighter jet? But today Richard made clear that the car, in many ways, is the tactic: the mission is to help inspire the next generation of engineers and scientists, and the education supporting the project is the way that will happen.

Bloodhound are looking for Ambassadors – people willing to volunteer time to help spread the word about the project to schoolkids. I’m signing up. Take a look at their website and see what you could do too.