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Two propositions are explored: that present R&D evaluation methods risk missing key effects; that there is a tendency to underestimate the effects of public support. Using the example of a recent impact assessment of the EUREKA initiative, the paper seeks to show the limitations of typical questionnaire approaches. As an alternative, it introduces the ‘Iceberg Model’ as a metaphor for hidden effects and, building on work such as the BETA method and measurement of externalities, uses high-impact case studies to illustrate the importance of strategic behavioural effects and the use of technologies developed beyond the goals of the funded project. It is concluded that questionnaires are best used to identify the small proportion of projects that account for most effects and then resources should be focused on deep probes of these projects. The role of government in affecting positive strategic decisions or firms' routines should also be explored. Copyright , Beech Tree Publishing.

This volume casts light on mergers and alliances in higher education by examining developments of this type in different countries. It combines the direct experiences of those at the heart of such transformations, university leaders and senior officials responsible for higher education policy, with expert analysts of the systems concerned.Higher education in Europe faces a series of major challenges. The economic crisis has accelerated expectations of an increased role in addressing economic and societal challenges while at the same time putting pressure on available finances. Broader trends such as shifting student demographics and expectations, globalisation and mobility and new ways of working with business have contributed to these increased pressures. In the light of these trends there have been moves, both from national or regional agencies and from individual institutions to respond by combining resources, either through collaborative arrangements or more fundamentally through mergers between two or more universities.After an introductory chapter by the editors which establishes the context for mergers and alliances, the book falls into two main parts. Part 1 takes a national or regional perspective to give some sense of the historical context, the wider drivers and the importance of these developments in these cases. Included are both systemic accounts (for countries as France, Sweden, Romania, Russia, Wales and England), and specific cross-cutting initiatives including a major facility at Magurele in Romania and a Spanish programme for promoting international campuses of excellence. Part 2 is built from specific cases of universities, either in mergers or alliances, with examples from different countries (such as France, UK, Romania, Spain, Germany, Denmark, Finland, Switzerland). A concluding chapter by the editors assesses these experiences and indicates the implications and future needs for understanding in this domain.

This socio-economic study is based on the widely held view that there is an inadequate supply of human biological samples that is hampering biomedical research development and innovation (RDI). The potential value of samples and the associated data are thus not being realized. We aimed to examine whether the financing of biobanks contributes to this problem and then to propose a national solution. We combined three methods: a qualitative case study; literature analysis; and informal consultations with experts. The case study enabled an examination of the complex institutional arrangements for biobanks, with a particular focus on cost models. For the purposes of comparison, a typology for biobanks was developed using the three methods. We found that it is not possible to apply a standard cost model across the diversity of biobanks, and there is a deficit in coordination and sustainability and an excess of complexity. We propose that coordination across this diversity requires dedicated resources for a national biobanking distributed research infrastructure. A coordination center would establish and improve standards and support a national portal for access. This should be financed centrally by public funds, possibly supplemented by industrial funding. We propose that: a) sample acquisition continues to be costed into projects and project proposals to ensure biobanking is driven by research needs; b) core biobanking activities and facilities be supported by central public funds distributed directly to host public institutions; and c) marginal costs for access be paid for by the user.

The paper describes the process and outcomes of an exercise that used the ‘success scenario’ methodology to develop a shared vision of the future of business-university linkages in the city region of Manchester. The aim was to link the strategies of the four universities in the area (and in particular those of the two research universities that were in the process of merging) with the city's own self-vision of its future as a ‘Knowledge Capital’. The resulting report presented a scenario of what success would look like in 2008 in five dimensions: infrastructure, human resources, university missions, inward investment, and networking. The exercise has had a significant impact on regional strategy. The paper considers the design factors involved in gaining this level of action commitment from a foresight activity.

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to set out the process by which a smart specialisation strategy was developed for a small, peripheral economy in the European Union, the Republic of Malta. It assesses the applicability of the approach in the context of a micro-economy with an industrial structure based on a small number of foreign direct investments and a predominance of micro-enterprises. Design/methodology/approach – The paper follows an action research approach by presenting as a case study the process by which the strategy for Malta was assessed and developed through successive rounds of engagement with business and other actors with the application of scenarios and other prioritisation approaches to facilitate its development. An initial consultation with 20 public sector and representative organisations was followed by a general business workshop and 21 sectoral focus groups. Findings – Lack of critical mass can be mitigated by maximising the generic use of available skills and competences. Given the higher vulnerability to external shock in micro-economies, strategies need to have a high degree of flexibility and adaptability. Greater internationalisation provides the main response to peripherality. Practical implications – The approach can be applied more generally for micro-economies and in some aspects to other countries or regions lacking critical mass in research and innovation assets or facing peripherality. Originality/value – The smart specialisation approach had not been applied in these circumstances and hence the findings allowed the concept to be extended and adapted to deal with the issues raised.

Public procurement is increasingly viewed as having important potential to drive innovation. Despite this interest, numerous barriers prevent the public sector from acting as an intelligent and informed customer. This paper seeks to understand how barriers related to processes, competences, procedures and relationships in public procurement influence suppliers'ability to innovate and to reap the benefits of innovation. We address this by exploiting a dedicated survey of public sector suppliers in the UK, using a probit model to investigate the influence of structural, market and innovation determinants on suppliers'perception of these barriers. The main barriers reported by suppliers refer to the lack of interaction with procuring organisations, the use of over-specified tenders as opposed to outcome based specifications, low competences of procurers and a poor management of risk during the procurement process. Such barriers are perceived most strongly by R&D intensive organisations. Our results also indicate that certain organisations, particularly smaller firms and not-forprofit organisations, encounter greater difficulties with innovation arising from the procurement process, for instance in relation to contract size, lack of useful feedback and communication of opportunities. Government procurement policies are queried in light of the findings. © 2014 Elsevier Ltd. Allrights reserved.

open access article Public procurement is increasingly seen as an important potential instrument of innovation policy. However, policy design has been underpinned largely by anecdotal evidence and without a clear theoretical or empirical basis for understanding how supplying to the public sector actually influences a firm's innovation capabilities and performance and in what ways desirable behaviour and outcomes can be promoted. This paper seeks to address the basis of innovation procurement policy. It establishes a broad taxonomy of procurement policies and instruments that have emerged in OECD countries in response to perceived deficiencies and then compares these with the perceptions of firms using an analysis of a dedicated survey of 800 public sector suppliers in the UK. It is observed that policy measures include the creation of framework conditions, establishing organisational frameworks and developing capabilities, identifying, specifying and signalling needs, and incentivising innovative solutions. The survey findings confirm that the barriers encountered by firms correspond to the deficiencies addressed by policies but do not address them sufficiently. This arises from lack of coverage, lack of ownership by purchasers, failure to address the whole cycle of acquisition and to address risk aversion. The scope of policy measures needs to be extended in time, breadth of reach and depth.

Equipment is critical to the progress of research; therefore its provision is a significant science policy issue. There may be under-investment in equipment relative to other factors of scientific production such as staff. At a European level, inadequate infrastructure is a potential barrier to achievement of objectives, hence its recognition as a theme for the European Research Area. Equipment provision is inherently suited to benchmarking, though the scope of any exercise should be extended from instruments to include the whole policy and service package surrounding equipment. Three approaches to benchmarking are examined: opinion-based surveys; case-studies of matched research groups; and national surveys to a common format. Issues arising from comparison of experience in the UK and Ireland are discussed and conclusions are drawn regarding a possible European approach. Copyright , Beech Tree Publishing.

This article reviews the analytical tools, methods, and designs being used to evaluate public programs intended to stimulate technological advance. The review is organized around broad policy categories rather than particular types of policy intervention, because methods used are rarely chosen independent of context. The categories addressed include publicly-supported research conducted in universities and public sector research organizations; evaluations of linkages, especially those programs seeking to promote academic-industrial and public-private partnerships; and the evaluation of diffusion and industrial extension programs. The internal evaluation procedures of science such as peer review and bibliometrics are not covered, nor are methods used to projects and individuals ex ante. Among the conclusion is the observation that evaluation work has had less of an impact in the literature that it deserves, in part because much of the most detailed and valuable work is not easily obtainable. A second conclusion is that program evaluations and performance reviews, which have distinctive objectives, measures, and tools, are becoming entangled, with the lines between the two becoming blurred. Finally, new approaches to measuring the payoffs from research that focus on linkages between knowledge producers and users, and on the characteristics of research networks, appear promising as the limitations of the production function and related methods have become apparent.

This paper examines the role of industry in the support of academic infrastructure, in particular university research equipment. Although the United Kingdom provides the framework for discussion the described situation should be a familiar one in most countries. The argument is constructed around the perceptions, opinions and positions of universities, government and industry. Drawing on results from a survey of academic departments the equipment situation at UK universities is outlined. Following that the position of the Government attempting to attract industrial support for university research equipment is discussed. And finally, industry's views of where the demarcation between public and private responsibility lies are presented.

Europe provides large-scale public support for collaborative R&D, notably through the European Union's Framework Programmes and the intergovernmental Eureka Initiative. Experience in evaluating these programmes is reviewed, with particular emphasis on assessment of their socio-economic effects. For the Framework Programmes a panel-based evaluation system has been unable to address these effects adequately. New emphasis on promoting research as a solution to economic and social problems has created additional demands for evaluation. In Eureka, a 'continuous and systematic evaluation' process collects information about project impacts on and after completion. Results show a highly skewed success pattern and new complex benefits arising from knowledge generation and networking. A schema of outputs and effects is presented and the issues of additionality and policy persistence discussed. It is concluded that a broader view of effects is needed if under-valuation is to be avoided.

The efforts by policymakers to help firms become more innovative have created a strong desire to know which policies work. This has placed high expectations upon evaluation. The development of evaluation in this sphere has mirrored the evolution of policy, beginning with a focus on large-scale collaborative technology programmes and gradually moving towards an examination of measures seeking to enhance the environment for innovation. Evaluations in this field may be divided into those assessing direct and indirect financial support for research and design and those addressing opportunity-enhancing innovation policies such as technology transfer networks. Several tensions and challenges for evaluation are identified, including the lack of comparative and systemic innovation policy evaluations. Evaluation needs to follow the same adaptive learning approach as innovation policy itself.

This book addresses the critical issue of how and why European universities are changing and learning to compete. Anglo-Saxon universities particularly in the US, the UK and Australia have long been subject to, and responded to, market-based competition in higher education. The authors argue that Continental and Nordic universities and higher education institutes are now facing similar pressures that are leading to a structural transformation of the university sector.

This paper describes findings on the management of collaboration arising from an evaluation of the participation of the UK in the EUREKA programme. The principle issues addressed in the paper are the origins and motivations for collabration, the roles played by participants of different types and the significance of collaboration for project outcomes. The paper concludes that complementarity between partners in the key motivation for collabration. Complementarity may lie in different dimensions, matching different types of technical expertise or technical and market expertise. Vertical relationships, between users and suppliers, energed as being particularly important in EUREKA projects and frequently formed the initial basis for the collaborative application. The most important overall finding was that partnerships were genuinely interpendent, in part because of their foundation in complementarity. Successful collaborative structures were those which were sufficiently robust to accommodate the inevitable...

The European Union's Framework Programmes for research and technological development have been subject to a variety of evaluative activities over the past 10 years. These have included evaluations by panels, studies of impacts upon individual Member States, horizontal or issue-based evaluations and high-level reviews by, or on behalf of the principal stakeholders. This article reviews this experience, covering issues such as the interaction between peer review panels and supporting studies by evaluation specialists, the difficulties of establishing comparability across diverse national R&D systems, and the problems involved in addressing the Programmes' higher-level goals such as enhancing the competitiveness of European industry. The different perspectives taken by the main stakeholders, the Commission, the Member States and the European Parliament, are noted. In the light of recent proposals to develop the evaluation of the Framework Programme, conclusions are drawn on a series of topics. In particular, it is argued that the broader strategies of actors, and of the Union itself should be included within the scope of evaluations. In the final section recommendations are made on ways in which evaluation may be further institutionalized in order to increase the use made of it.

The papers in this issue provide a clear picture of the practice of research evaluation in the European Union. Experiences differ as would be expected given the diversity of systems in which evaluation is carried out. While programme evaluations are becoming more routine, institutional reforms have created a demand for a new kind of evaluation. This includes a strategic orientation which is likely to become a regular feature of more important programme evaluations. Trends towards infrastructural innovation policies will inevitably lead to an increased demand for evaluations of initiatives in this sphere. Copyright , Beech Tree Publishing.

The Joint Council Initiative in the UK was set up to encourage interdisciplinary research between cognitive science and human computer interaction. This evaluates the Initiative and the success of the collaboration across disciplines. A lack of clarity of objectives and definitions in programme design is a severe restriction on the ability to evaluate achievement. The solution in this case was threefold: to develop a personal perspective on interdisciplinarity; to examine the internal consistency of the definitions used; and to collect empirical information on a broad range of indicators, supplemented by case studies. Copyright , Beech Tree Publishing.

The precise meaning of competitiveness is examined. Some basic concepts are reviewed and from these is chosen a relative concept which must be measured dynamically. The paper then discusses the application of this concept to the evaluation of R&D programmes, in particular the EC Framework Programme. Practical guidance is provided. How firms expect to enhance their competitiveness must be understood by the evaluator. Technology transfer within and beyond projects is significant. The results of an evaluation must be relevant to current decisions if it is to be useful to policymakers.

There is tension between the demand for measurement of the return on R&D as an investment, and the ability of current approaches to supply such measures. A common interest in this problem brings together a number of interest groups as evidenced by the membership of the SPEAR Network. In this paper we attempt to define the scope of the evaluation of the socio-economic effects of R&D and to locate within this a number of important studies, including both those reported in the literature and those coming to light through the Network. Copyright , Beech Tree Publishing.

The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) proposed to reorient its evaluation function to move away from a programme-based, objectives-oriented system towards a more strategic approach looking at the wider and longer-term impacts. This study by the Programme of Policy Research in Engineering, Science and Technology (PREST) recommended a combination of the development of facilitating tools for evaluation which can be used at several levels, and strategic studies. Copyright , Beech Tree Publishing.

In recent years, the higher education sector has increasingly been perceived as a key part of innovation systems at all levels of analysis, including national and regional, and through the eco-system which links large and small firms together and with their collaborators (Coombs and Georghiou 2002). The core functions of Universities, training and basic research, have been subject to external forces, some of which have already made their effects felt, while others are keenly debated as societal expectations of the sector change. These activities have been supplemented by a drive towards the Third Mission, relating Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) to their socio-economic and cultural context. As with, what are in many cases longstanding institutions which are either in the public sector or rely heavily upon its funding, the sector has also felt the pressures of public sector reform in its managerial and accountability structures. Despite an experience of major changes such as massification of student access, technological change, funding models, specialisation of mission, growth of research activity and internationalisation in all respects, there is a continuing expectation that further changes are coming and hence an apparent need for Future-Oriented Technology Analysis (FTA) activity to help institutions and their stakeholders to go forward. There is a growing politicisation of the Higher Education (HE) sector manifested in ongoing reform processes at different levels, for example in the EU Member States, where Lambert and Butler (2006) have summarised the challenges faced. In Japan the transformation of National Universities to “independent administrative institutions” (agency status) has been accompanied by a wide range of further restructuring and reform. As an example of a comprehensive national review the work of the United Kingdom’s National Committee of Inquiry into Higher Education (Dearing Report 1997) could be cited. Commissioned to advise on the development of Higher Education on a 20-year time horizon this implicitly involved development of a future vision but also resolved a particular political problem, that of how to introduce student fees into a system that had previously been paid for entirely by government. Change has also proceeded at regional and university levels. The range of stakeholders engaged in the international (worldwide) debate over the

The increasingly competitive nature of the international economy, and the associated structural changes which have taken place, have led policymakers in industrialised countries towards a renewed emphasis upon innovation as an instrument of industrial policy. During the 1980s this was most apparent in the emergence of national and international schemes to support collaborative research in the so-called “new technologies”: principally IT, telecommunications, new materials and biotechnology. Despite a prevailing non-interventionist stance among governments, these technologies were perceived as being too important to risk being left behind. The complex and fast moving nature of the under-pinning knowledge-base was used to justify both the collaborative dimension (through the need to combine skills and share costs and risks) and governmental support (to compensate for market failure, where private benefits were difficult to appropriate in full).

The paper assesses the impacts of a foresight exercise carried out in Malta in 2002–2004. An evaluation framework is applied which seeks to account for the dynamic and possibly turbulent environment of an accession country's emergent innovation system and to capture and assess those effects of foresight potentially extending well beyond those initially targeted. Three foresight pilots are described, with an emphasis upon an ICT and Education Pilot, and used to illustrate that in addition to targeted effects, important changes were stimulated in terms of tackling broader challenges related to the socio-cultural context. These included the engagement of a broader range of stakeholders in the innovation system and the generation of sustainable policy learning processes. It is concluded that an evaluation framework for foresight should be sensitive to these unforeseen process benefits which have broader societal impacts, even if the lines of attribution are blurred and not easy to trace.

How can industry integrate the kind of scientific research needed for breakthrough technologies? In their Policy Forum, [Coombs and Georghiou][1] argue that centralized solutions have been replaced by a new ecology where large firms are complemented by small technology-rich firms. Outsourcing, globalization, and technological alliances are of growing importance. Within firms, there are new ways to organize radical research, based on a small number of focused programs with ambitious targets aimed at new businesses and shared between corporate research and businesses. These are supported by new ways to link to universities based on long-term and broad scope relationships with top departments. To sustain the growth of industrial R&D, public funding of university research should keep pace. [1]: http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/296/5567/471

This paper outlines the structure of the institutions involved in scientific and technological development in France. It points to new trends in French marine policy, and gives details of the country's offshore petroleum technology and nodule mining.

This paper deals with the problem of identifying the major economic sensitivities of an unusual mineral extraction project when the project is based on a radically new technology which is still at the research and development phase. On the timescale for development of the technology major external uncertainties such as the future level of metal prices are critical, as well as internal uncertainties such as cost and time. The possible outcomes are explored using CASPAR, a computer-based network program with integral financial analysis features which allow use from pre-feasibility phases right through to eventual project management.

The Beecham Group’s Pharmaceutical divison gained the Queen’s Award for invention and development of semi-synthetic penicillins.

During the early development of semiconductor electronic components individual products had their own particular function, which in each case was roughly analogous to the function performed by a given type of thermionic valve. While the use of semiconductor components provided significant advantages over valves (in particular smaller physical size, lower power consumption and, once the devices had become established commercial products, lower unit-costs) these components, like valves, were manufactured as individual items and then wired together to make a circuit. However, by the early 1960s leading semiconductor manufacturers in America (notably Fairchild and Texas Instruments) had developed commercial processes that were capable of forming interconnected arrangements of components on a single chip of semiconductor material. These chips, or integrated circuits, enabled the functions of a number of electronic components to be performed by a single device.

Concrete Ltd (since 1977, Bison Concrete Ltd) won the Queen’s Award to Industry in 1967 for its development of an industrialised building system which was designed to meet the housing needs of local authorities. This system was originally launched in 1963 as a method of enabling the component sections of high-rise housing developments (of between eight and twenty storeys) to be manufactured in a factory, prior to on-site assembly. Two years later a similar system was also introduced for low-rise housing developments.

The problem of how to control a rolling mill so that the steel strip produced should be automatically held to close tolerances throughout its length of several thousand feet had been the subject of research work since before 1940. Two requirements were necessary, detection of variations in the gap and a response to remove or minimise these. Before the original innovation, measurement of strip thickness had to be made some distance away from the gap between the rolls. Further delay in response to deviations occurred while the operator adjusted the rolls, typically making several under- or over-corrections. Extensive investigations in the British Iron and Steel Research Association (BISRA) led to a patent being filed as early as July 1950, proposing that ‘load-responsive elements which will respond to variations in the separating force are incorporated in the mill and linked by mechanical, electrical and/or hydraulic means with the roll adjusting mechanisms in such a way that the desired relationship between the changes in separating force and roll setting is continuously maintained’. This concept was to lead both to the ‘Gaugemetcr’, featured in the Queen’s Award, and to the subsequent development of hydraulic control of the roll position gap.

BICC’s development of a process for producing continually transposed cable (CTC) for sale to customers in the transformer manufacturing industry, represented one of two innovations which enabled the company to gain the Queen’s Award in 1966. CTC was first developed in America by General Electric, during the 1940s, as a means of improving the performance of large-capacity transformers used in electricity supply networks. Although the British Thompson Houston (BTH) Co. was quick to license the American transposing equipment, it only produced CTC for internal use in the production of some of its high-performance transformers.

Marconi’s development of its Mark VII Colour Television Camera represented one of the innovations which enabled English Electric to gain the Queen’s Award to Industry in 1967. Although English Electric was taken-over by GEC in 1968, Marconi continued to operate as an autonomous subsidiary of its new parent. In the face of increasing international competition, the studio-equipment section of Marconi’s Broadcasting Division has formed a sales and marketing organisation in conjunction with GEC McMichael, which is another member of the GEC group. This organisation, formed on 1 April 1984, is known as the Marconi Studio Systems Division of GEC McMichael.

English Electric’s Aircraft Equipment Division (AED) won the Queen’s Award in 1966 for work which had led to lighter and more reliable electrical generating systems for aircraft. From the point of view of subsequent technological change, this achievement may be seen in the context of a long-term trend towards improved power-to-weight ratios in aircraft generating systems and the evolution of a technologically mature product. In assessing this strand of technological development the present case-study provides an interesting insight into the process of capitalisation of the benefits of success in the face of substantial changes in the structure of the UK aircraft equipment supply industry. The study also gives some indication of how an innovating organisation’s performance has been influenced by wider aspects of its operating environment, and specifically the role played by technology licence agreements.

Kelvin Hughes won the Queen’s Award to Industry in 1967 for its ‘Photoplot’ radar navigation aid. This device was designed to increase the ease with which information obtained from marine radar could be interpreted. The company was therefore concerned with introducing a novel accessory in an established market for radar systems. Difficulties with reliability, which led to a slower than expected rate of market adoption, focussed Kelvin Hughes’s attention on Photoplot’s technical shortcomings. Following an attempt to minimise these technical problems by improving the design of Photoplot, Kelvin Hughes hit upon a new component which circumvented the difficulties associated with the original system. This post-innovation development led to a new type of radar navigation aid known as Situation Display, which produced increased sales and enabled the company to gain a further Queen’s Award in 1975. The market for this new product however, was eroded in the early 1980s by an International Maritime Organisation (IMO) ruling that ships above a certain size should be obliged to carry the more-recently developed computer-based anti-collision radar systems. These performed a similar function to the Kelvin Hughes product by using a more sophisticated technology.

GEC Telecommunications Ltd received the Queen’s Award in 1967 for the development of an all semiconductored (ASC) range of microwave radio relay equipment. This was the culmination of a series of developments started in the immediate post-war period.

The development of Numerical Control (NC) Equipment by Ferranti’s Scottish Division was one of four areas of innovation that enabled the company to gain the Queen’s Award to Industry in 1967. In 1977 the Scottish Division became the Scottish Group, which is an independent trading organisation within Ferranti plc.

Summary An experimental approach for assessing links between researchers in a collaborative programme is described. Co-nomination analysis was carried out in the Man-Machine Interface area of the United Kingdom Alvey Programma for Advanced Information Technology. Researchers were sent a questionnaire inviting them to nominate those researchers whose work was most similar or relevant to their own. On the basis of the responses networks were constructed by assuming that links existed between co-nominated researchers and that the strength of the link was proportional to the frequency of co-nomination. The networks were then subjected to expert analysis. Results were realistic and encouraging. The technique is particularly useful in areas where bibliometric approaches are inappropriate.

Mirrlees National, which was a subsidiary of Hawker Siddeley, won the Queen’s Award in 1967 in recognition of the innovative developments embodied in its ‘K Major’ heavy-duty diesel engine. In producing this engine the company was able to combine its accumulated technological experience with a ‘scientific’ approach to design. Following the launch of the original K Major there have been two main chapters of post-innovation improvement in the form of the Mark 2 and Mark 3 models. The Major continues to be the principal product at what is now Mirrlees Blackstone’s Stockport factory, and to date nearly 1000 engines have been sold.

In 1967 the Colchester Lathe Company (CLC), part of the George Cohen 600 Group, won the Queen’s Award both for technological and for export achievement. The former award was in recognition of new methods of lathe manufacture based on assembly-line principles. The central feature of this assembly line was a hydrostatic conveyor system known as ‘Flowline’ which was developed by CLC in order to move partially assembled lathes between work stations.

The two separate firms gaining the Queen’s Award in 1967 for the Stereoscan electron microscope and the image-analysing computer were Cambridge Scientific Instruments and Metals Research respectively. In 1975 the two firms responsible for these instruments were merged to form the Cambridge Instrument Co. Ltd and therefore the developments of both innovations are considered in this one case-study.

The need for summation metering for bulk electrical supply arose with the development of the national grid during the 1920s. The basic function of a summator is to add electrical impulses, received at random from a number of sources, in order to calculate total energy consumed and the maximum demand for power over the billing period. The normal source of impulses is a watt—hour meter with a contacting device so the impulsing is proportional to meter speed, corresponding to a fixed value in kilowatt-hours. The Central Electricity Board needed to add and subtract large amounts of power from several locations. More recently the need for summation metering has been extended to Area Boards with large private consumers, such as factories, who are supplied at more than one point. Although the total energy consumption can be calculated simply by adding meter readings, the maximum demand is determined by integrating the electrical impulses over a short period, usually 30 minutes, and indicating or recording the maximum of any one 30-minute interval over the longer billing period.

The introduction of an automatic gearbox as an optional extra for the British Motor Corporation’s (BMC) (from 1968 the British Leyland Motor Corporation’s (BLMC)) 850cc Mini enabled Automotive Products (AP) to gain the Queen’s Award in 1966. AP produced the gearbox after a joint development programme with the BLMC, and the close supplier-customer relationship which emerged has been a strong element in shaping the path of post-innovation developments. Minor modifications to the gearbox enabled BLMC to offer automatic versions of their 1100 and 1300 ranges, which like the Mini used the company’s A-series engines. Moreover, a direct descendant of the original award-winning gearbox is still produced for the Mini Metro. In 1972 a further strand of post-innovation development was established with the launch of a new design of the original gearbox, which was suitable for larger capacity engines of between 1300 and 2500cc. In addition to applications in BLMC cars, AP have also supplied this uprated gearbox for use in Lancia’s Beta, Gamma and Delta models.

Lytag Ltd won the Queen’s Award for ‘innovation in building materials’ for the development of ‘Lytag’, a lightweight aggregate manufactured from the pulverised fuel ash (pfa) produced by a modern power-station. The firm was a wholly-owned small subsidiary of John Laing Ltd, the civil engineering and building corporation, and was set up to manufacture and market ‘Lytag’ which was first commercially produced in 1961. In July 1982 Lytag Ltd was acquired by Pozzolanic Ltd, a firm specialising in quality-assured and monitored fuel ash which is used as a partial substitute for cement in concrete. Three months later Blue Metal Industries, which owned Pozzolanic, was itself taken over by the BORAL group of companies, which had amongst other interests substantial fuelash operations in both Australia and the USA.

An ideal inertial navigation system should present an accurate indication of the position and the velocity of a vehicle at every point on its journey. For civil aviation, maritime and land uses this provides a task of enormous technological complexity, but it is in military aircraft and aerospace applications that the demands made on a system reach their peak. Great accuracy, light weight, fast response and the ability to cope with extreme operating conditions (including aircraft manoeuvres) all contribute to this. Two types of components, the accelerometers and the gyroscopes, provide the sensors by which motion is detected. The principle behind their operation is that matter resists changes in its motion — that it has inertia. In its simplest aspect, the accelerometer measures vehicle acceleration, integrating once to give a measure of velocity and twice to give a measure of distance travelled. The direction along which the accelerometer measures must be kept fixed in space or else allowance must be continuously made for its changing direction. This is achieved by the gyroscopes which provide a stable attitude-reference.

Current discussions of the long-term prospects for the nuclear power industry centre on disagreements over energy demand forecasts, aid on social, political and enviromental issues. The availability of adequate uranium supplies is also necessary for any expansion of generating capacity, and for consideration of possible fast breeder reactor strategies. This paper outlines some of the factors which will determine the viability of one non-conventional source of uranium, and comments on work currently being undertaken at the Universities of Salford and Manchester into exploitation of uranium resources in seawater.

Joseph Lucas (Electrical) Ltd won the Queen’s Award for Technological Achievement in 1967 in recognition of pioneer development work on high-voltage transistors for use in petrol-engine ignition systems. Ths use of semiconductor technology, in the form of high-voltage transistors, provided an electronic switch which was capable of performing the function previously achieved using mechanically operated contact-breaker points. This electronic switch enabled the company to upgrade the performance of an established product through the use of a new component.

Vosper Thornycroft won the Queen’s Award to Industry in 1966 for its development of gas-turbine powered fast patrol boats (FPBs). This award, which was conferred just after the Portsmouth-based firm of Vosper had taken over John I. Thornycroft of Southampton, recognised pre-merger development work undertaken by Vosper Ltd. The FPBs in question represented the culmination of a path of development, on which Vosper first embarked in the 1930s, that aimed to produce small, high-speed warships. Such craft could attack larger ships and then use their speed to escape before the target could bring its defences to bear. Vosper’s innovative use of gas-turbines in FPBs, coupled with a range of general design features oriented towards achieving high speeds, was intended to exploit this principle of ‘strike and retreat’ to the full. With top speeds in excess of 50 knots these FPBs were among the fastest warships ever built.