Tim Harper's Thoughts on Innovation and Emerging Technologies
Industrial strategies have a bad name in the UK and deservedly so. Repeated attempts at government intervention to stimulate industrial sectors led to a string of failures from Blue Streak to INMOS and reached their peak with British Leyland in the 1970s; a company where people who had no interest in making anything other than tea were herded together in …
It is just over four years since I drove through an ice storm in Georgia and South Carolina for the meeting that led to the founding of G2O Water Technologies. In case anyone thinks that this was the toughest bit of entrepreneurship, let me give you the background story. My involvement with water began in September 2004 when along with …
Graphene City I spent Thursday at the National Graphene Institute in Manchester at SME and Investor events. While the key applications of graphene appear to be composites, composites and more composites, there was a mood of optimism that graphene is now entering its teenage years and approaching some kind of maturity. Hopefully that will break the teenage addiction of most …
Recent elections and a certain referendum highlighted the dangers of living in a bubble or an echo chamber. This can include surrounding yourself with people who always agree, creating a safe space on social media by filtering out anything that may contradict your world view, imposing a tyrannical Steve Jobs / Kim Jong-Un style culture by firing or executing anyone …
G2O’s graphene membrane technology had its first encounter with the global water industry this week at the Global Water Summit 2017, and its first real test. Fortunately the recent work at the University of Manchester using the same material, graphene oxide, had generated a huge amount of publicity while also demonstrating that G2O’s approach works. The key difference is of …
After three years of promises, Levi’s Commuter Trucker jacket embedded with Google’s ‘Jacquard’ technology aims to bring practical purpose to wearables seems to be slouching towards production. The promise of Project Jacquard is that “everyday objects such as clothes and furniture can be transformed into interactive surfaces.” Given the huge range of smart and conducting textiles available we were expecting big …
The UK’s House of Commons Science and Technology Committee published its report on Managing Intellectual Property and Technology Transfer this week, something that grew out of the initial inquiry about the commercialisation (or lack of it) around graphene. Focussing on graphene was an excellent starting point, but it soon became apparent that the UK has a problem with linking its …
This week I spend two days at the Northern powerhouse Conference in Manchester trying to understand what it actually is, and how the kinds of hard technology (also called deep technology or really anything that requires more than IT to develop) would fit in. After attending every session and listening to the panel discussions I came away with a slight …
The Northern Powerhouse is a hot topic at the moment following the launch of the First Report of the Northern Powerhouse Partnership and the upcoming Northern Powerhouse International Conference in Manchester. Even the Chinese are getting in on the act. The North Needs More Than Infrastructure While it’s important to focus on infrastructure – from where I live near Skipton …
I posted recently on the N8 Universities and their lack of entrepreneurial spin out activity. This reiterated by todays Northern Powerhouse Partnership First Report which point out that “The North also currently loses around 30,000 people with graduate level skills every year as students choose to leave the city in which they have studied after their course finishes.” The report also calls for …