www.innovation.gov.uk

What is innovation? The UK Government's Innovation Unit (which is staffed largely by business people on secondment from their own organisations) defines it as:

"The successful exploitation of new ideas"

Britain has always prided itself on its ability to produce new ideas; our problem seems to be exploiting them. That's why the last Government set up the Innovation Unit and it sone (of many?) ideas that the new Labour Government continued with. If nothing else, the site offers access to the texts of the seven Annual Innovation Lectures, given by people of world renown, such as Akio Morita (Chairman of Sony), Lars Ramqvist (CEO of Ericsson) and William Coyne (V-P R&D for 3M), and from the UK Girolami (Chairman, Glaxo), Peter Williams (Chairman and CE, Oxford Instruments), Keith Oates (Marks & Spencer) and, in 1998, Richard Branson (of Virgin).

This is distinguished company, and the ideas that these seven offer provide a wonderful resource for any manager - or management trainer - keen to learn more about innovation. Of them all, Bill Coyne probably gives the best value. It would be hard to challenge some of his profound insights into managing an organisation in a future-oriented way. As well as the lectures, you can also obtain the annual UK R&D Scoreboard, the rankings of Britain's main companies by R&D spend, collectively and by industrial sector. If you want the depressing facts about the UK's investment in R&D, at about half the level of our major overseas competitor nations, then the data is here for you to study and ponder over.

But it would be wrong to judge the website by the bad news that it offers. As you can see from the screen shot, the site offers information and advice on a range of strategies designed to encourage British business to innovate and emphasises that innovation isn't just about investment in science and engineering - it's also about investing in people, since it is people who exploit new ideas.

The Innovation Unit's website - a shame they haven't practised what they preach.

What a shame, then, that it does it in such a pedestrian way. Somehow I expected that the site would be at the forefront of exploiting web technology. You might have thought that the Innovation Lecture texts and the R&D Scoreboard would be downloadable materials, probably Adobe Acrobat .pdf files (see box). If you did, you'd be wrong. You have to place an order for them and wait for good old-fashioned postal delivery. Not only is it slow, it also costs them far more to send the materials requested. What a failure to exploit (not so) new ideas.

So, hurrahs on the effort put into publicising the Unit, but yah boos for the outcome.

Review from 'Progress' published by NEBS Management, February 1999