| introduction |
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In January
this year Lord Macdonald, the Minister for Business and
Industry at The Scottish Office announced to the Scottish
Grand Committee that he was setting up a Knowledge
Economy Taskforce (KETF) to examine four issues. The
outputs should be:
- a possible framework
for the commercialisation of research, building
on the existing work within universities and
other higher education institutions coupled with
a refocusing of the Technology Ventures
Initiative;
- recommendations on
refining or developing academic incentive and
career structures within higher education
institutions to remove barriers to all forms of
industrial collaboration, to improve its esteem
and ensure Scotland gets maximum economic benefit
from the practical application of its outstanding
range of high quality research;
- a framework within
which higher education institutions and research
institutes can assist with the development and
implementation of Scottish Enterprise's cluster
plans for key industries in which companies and
public bodies will collaborate; and
- a blueprint that
Scottish universities could adopt, if they
wished, for a collaborative bid under the
Government's Science Enterprise Challenge for a
single entrepreneurial "Centre for
Enterprise" serving all of Scotland.
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| The
taskforce met on four occasions in February and March to
consider papers generated by The Scottish Office,
Scottish Enterprise, the Committee of Scottish Higher
Education Principals and the Scottish Higher Education
Funding Council bearing on these issues. It also
benefited from the pro- bono advice of consultants
PricewaterhouseCoopers and Booz, Allen and Hamilton. |
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| The four
related topics covered by the report are central to the
theme of exploiting the knowledge created in Scottish
higher education institutions for the benefit of our
economy. |
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| The first
topic deals with the exisiting national framework for
encouraging commercialisation. |
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| The second
considers the barriers at an institutional level and how
they might be mitigated. |
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| Both topics
come together in considering how our higher education
institutions and research institutes can become a part of
the cluster strategy. |
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| Finally, the
report considers how Scotland could benefit from a
national centre that would assist individual institutions
in commercialisation and act as a centre for
entrepreneural education. |
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| This report
is written primarily as a source for practitioners and
for interested members of the Scottish Parliament. The
report brings together much of the current activity and
thinking in this field as an aid to discussion of future
strategy. From 1 July 1999, of course, powers relating to
the responsibilities of SE and SHEFC will be devolved to
the Scottish Parliament.3 |
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