Innovation is GREAT round up

At the UK-India Summit in February this year our Prime Ministers issued a declaration in which they “welcomed the rapid expansion of India-UK research and development cooperation, which is helping to generate and develop high quality, high impact research partnerships leading to new knowledge creation”.   But they also stated there was “considerable potential for expanding the relationship further” and “encouraged a renewed focus by governments and businesses of both countries … to exploit the potential for cooperation.” A lot has happened since then on UK-India innovation links…

During the Summit, the UK’s Technology Strategy Board (TSB) and India’s Department of Science and Technology (DST) discussed a joint programme to support research collaboration between the UK and Indian businesses. A month later India’s Department of Science and Technology (DST) and the TSB signed a Programme of Cooperation (PoC) to set that idea in motion at the evening reception of the Innovate UK conference. With delegates from the TSB in town last week, the finer details have now been worked out and we’re expecting a call for proposals to open next month.

Since the PM’s visit, the UK was ranked 3^rd in the 2013 Global Innovation Index. Set alongside the fact that the UK has the most efficient research base in the G8 in terms of citations per unit of R&D spend, it was a firm endorsement of the UK as a leading innovation nation.

Then in April, the UK’s Intellectual Property Office facilitated the creation of a practical toolkit to help academic institutions and business organisations understand how to most effectively manage the intellectual property that arises out of research collaborations between them.  Sam Pitroda, Chair of India’s National Innovation Council, was in the UK earlier in July. He attended a round table with the who’s who of innovation in London, met with Ministers and spoke at an event at Nesta about innovation. Some of the highlights of the event were recorded through the medium of Twitter (see the event page).

Last week, Rolls Royce launched their open innovation competition in Delhi and Bangalore. And we had the FICCI Global R&D Summit in New Delhi where Dr Nick Rousseau, Head – EU & International Policy, Department for Business Innovation & Skills presented his views on opportunities in International R&D Collaboration. We also had Dr John Clayton, Knowledge Transfer Partnership Advisor from the UK, highlighting the emerging role of SMEs in R&D and innovation (Watch videos of speakers at the FICCI R&D summit ).

A great example of UK-India partnership translating to innovation is the recent news report on how Imperial College, Indian Institute of Science and Indian Institute of Technology have helped Global engine major Rolls-Royce to develop a low noise technology to make their engines less noisy.

And that’s not it for the UK-India innovation. Next week, the UK is the country partner for CII’s 9^th Annual Innovation Summit. We’re sponsoring the visit of Mr. Richard Cawdell, Healthcare Tech Lead, AcceleratorIndia to take part in a session on cross border collaboration. It looks like a great event and I’d encourage you to get along.

Later in the year we have UKTI’s Graduate Entrepreneurs Festival in Manchester on 4-6 September (deadline for registration in 16 August), the Global Innovation Round Table in November in New Delhi, and the UK innovation and technology showcase in New Delhi.

And, of course, we’ve got the launch of the Industrial R&D call for proposals – followers of this blog will be amongst the first to see it. So, in summary, there’s a huge amount going on in Innovation between the UK India – next stop, a collaborative R&D call. Watch this space!