The Cambridge Network Blog

Reason's rule

Let reason's rule now reign thy thought;
Since all too late I find by skill
How dear I have thy fancies bought

Last night we heard Adam Afriyie, Lord Drayson, and Evan Harris debate how their parties would approach funding and getting benefits from Science. It was the first time they had all appeared on the same platform, and apparently the first cross-party debate in the run-up to next year's election, so we were privileged to get them all together. RAND, who sponsored the event, also joined the panel drawing on their experience of advising organizations across Europe on Science Policy. We also had a strong Press presence - the FT, Nature, New Scientist and Times Higher Education give a much more detailed account of the debate. 

All of them said they would ringfence budgets for long term research, follow the Haldane principle that scientist themselves should judge where best to spend research funds, and respect the independence of scientific advisors. But the amount of money available within the ringfence beyond the current budgeting period of 2011 seems unlikely to increase, with levels of national debt from the banking crisis. When someone from the audience said that wasn't the fault of UK science, a panelist joked that the rocket scientists who had been recruited into the City clearly had something to do with it.

There were plenty of jokes, mainly about other politicians, citing the outcomes of particular votes or recent dismissals of scientific advisors. Cross-questioning from the audience was vociferous, particularly around the requirement for academics to submit grant proposals which predict the societal impact of their research or show the past track record of their unit. However all of the parties thought this is reasonable in a democracy where public funds are being laid out. 

These three political parties think Cambridge is important to the impact science can have for our society, and it was good of them to open up for questions here.

Sweet spontaneous earth

O sweet spontaneous earth
how often
have the doting fingers of purient philosophers pinched and poked thee,
has the naughty thumb of science prodded thy beauty

Last night I learned more about how waste becomes a valuable resource, from Enval, Bio Group and Green PB. The problem these companies are tackling is how to process things that break down very slowly or which produce bad effects in landfill, and recover the valuable components which cost so much energy to produce in each one.

There was a lively debate in the Cleantech Special Interest Group. The companies are at very different stages of technology maturity and the degree to which the supply chain already separates their inputs or values their outputs also differs. For example, for Enval and Green PB, producing aluminium and lead respectively, there are well established world markets and high prices for the outputs. By contrast, Bio Group gas outputs will have to be collected into a National Grid if they are not to simply be burned to produce electricity and release the carbon anyway, so their anaerobic plants initially rely on high gate prices as the UK complies with legislation to keep organic matter out of landfill. The way the companies formed was also quite different. Enval and Green PB came out of University of Cambridge labs, helped by Cambridge University Entrepreneurs and I-teams respectively, while Bio Group is based on industry expertise.

What they all have in common is novel processes, low energy and low carbon, to transform these  byproducts of the way we live and keep them out of the ground. Laminated plastic and aluminium, organic waste and lead car batteries are going to produced in our society and we will have to dispose of them. Its great to see companies setting out ways that Cambridge ideas can change not only the world, but the earth we live on.

Hi Matt,

I saw your blog entry from the waste event - sounds like it was very interesting.

A pernickity point of accuracy: burning landfill gas to produce electricity is still good for the environment, even though CO2 is released. This is because the landfill gas is methane, which is roughly 25 times more powerful a greenhouse gas than CO2. In fact, just burning the landfill methane is good, even if you don't recover any energy from it (this is called flaring). Recovering energy is even better though, because it displaces fossil fuel use elsewhere, and that's why injection into the gas grid would be the best use of landfill gas, because it is the more efficient energy conversion. So burning for heat is better than burning for electricity is better than just flaring, but they're all better than letting the methane escape.

Rant over!

Material collaborations

Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings

This week I visited Accelrys, a University of Cambridge spin-out with a European R&D unit that helps materials scientists share their work. The company is now headquartered in San Diego, and has grown through merger and acquisition of a series of companies from Cambridge, Oxford, Leeds and elsewhere, so we are fortunate that the European unit employs 120 people here. 

The ability to simulate, visualise and share molecular structures with teams around the world has been important in pharmaceuticals for a while. Accelrys is being used in 20 of the top 25 pharmaceutical companies, each with hundreds of expert users producing simulations or storing chemical data that may be consumed by tens of thousands of colleagues through web services. It has become the world's favourite way of encoding stereochemical information and storing it in Oracle or Excel. Partners providing workflow and data management for chemicals or pharmaceuticals companies include Microsoft and Deloitte.

The company is enjoying steady growth in materials modelling, helping oil and gas majors with catalysis and other members like Johnson Matthey on fuel cells. With a lot of the most innovative chemicals companies still located in Germany, a European focus on materials makes sense. They have a pattern of scientific collaborations with mainly European universities working on visualising and simulating molecular structures for materials, including several with the University of Cambridge.

It reminded me of another member ARM, a company that was able to provide common microprocessor architectures to clients around the world because of widespread adoption of Electronic Design Automation software. EDA was developed by big,vertically integrated microchip companies to simulate performance of microchips in design phase, share that information around the world and streamline the workflow to get a product to market faster. But once it was in place and working effectively, much smaller companies like ARM could also play an important role without having to own the fabrication plants.

How will improved simulation change the world of chemicals and materials? We're lucky to have one of the companies driving that change from here, still incorporating Cambridge ideas that change the world.

Wisdom has built her house

Wisdom has built her house; she has hewn out its seven pillars.

This week I visited Sophia Antipolis to present on our experience of marketing internationally. The architecture was familiar – Sophia was founded 40 years ago like our own Trinity Science Park - and the High Tech conversations I overheard in the hotel lobby were certainly familiar. But it is a bit harder to walk around – it was carved out of hilly forests with car drivers in mind, and I couldn’t find any real centre.

Fortunately a Sophia Business Angel came to me to tell me more about their ecosystem. They have been actively involved with our local angels, particularly since a recent tax law change in France which allows wealthy individuals to shelter from tax by investing in startups anywhere in the world. I learned that Sophia really owes its existence to one man, Pierre Laffitte, who presided over the conference. While the 6^th Fleet and then IBM and Texas Instruments showed that ex-pats loved the quality of life in the region, it was Senator Laffitte who established the infrastructure, brought in France Telecom (now Orange Labs) and Air France Reservations (now Amadeus) and attracted the next 1,300 companies and 30,000 employees who have joined them. He is still clearly a lynchpin.

Many other regional clusters are being funded across  Europe by governments keen to have their own Sophia or Cambridge. We heard about Germany's progress in spending 600M euros on just 5 Spitzenclusters. I shared our own experience of the value that companies place on real live contacts maintained by recent attendance at relevant events and the people they hire through our jobs board and train through The Learning Collaboration. I was proud to cite a few of the past outcomes of our Corporate Gateway – Plastic Logic’s involvement in Dresden, Nokia and Philips involvement in Cambridge...

Clusters are only as real as the people who turn out, like the Members who met and delighted our Corporate Gateway visitors last week. You are the best marketing Cambridge can have.

Opening to innovation

This week we had very senior visitors from some of the largest companies in the world. They came to Cambridge for two days of pre-arranged 1-to-1 meetings with local companies with technologies in their key areas of interest, combined with a dinner with some of our Founder members and a large networking event around new ideas from some ideas coming out of our Universities.

Businesses like Procter & Gamble probably don't need to come to Cambridge to learn about the principles of Open Innovation, although it turned out they did know of the work going on here on the topic. P&G's success with the approach made the concept popular, and they mandate that 50% of R&D projects need to be carried out externally. Our visitor is just one of 30 scouts around the world constantly meeting with potential partners and signposting them to the right people in the business to assess their technology and scope a potential project.

Obviously nobody was talking in detail in the lunches and dinner breaks about the local companies and University units that they rated most highly. There is simply too much potential overlap between the innovations that a PepsiCo or a Procter & Gamble could exploit. But they were prepared to say how many "hits" they had got from their last visit - initial meetings that resulted in successful collaborations. They were clear that the process of pre-qualifying from among many potential leads locally generates many more hits than they get in equivalent partnering sessions elsewhere in the world - typically 3 or 4 in a two day period. For our Members who kindly sponsored the event, East of England International and Cambridge Science Park, those projects also represent a hit - new investment and new exports from this region.

At the dinner, we heard about Open Innovation from one of our Founder Members who had first come to Cambridge as a visitor on Cambridge Gateway. Philips Research have an active policy of inviting other companies to co-locate with them in Eindhoven - but still chose to locate a research unit here in Cambridge to participate.

Clearly the Corporate Gateway is helping Cambridge ideas to change the world - and I was personally very happy to find each of our guests so satisfied at the end of their visit.