Out of the lab, off to market: a hi-tech blueprint for UK recovery

Ed Elias from Mountain Trike with one of the all-terrain wheelchairs the company hopes will be a hit in the US. Photograph: Linda Nylind for the Guardian

When the 2011 tsunami hit Japan's Fukushima plant, causing one of the world's worst nuclear disasters, it set off a chain reaction of research into nuclear safety on the other side of the world. As Dr Tom Scott of Bristol University watched footage of Japanese workers risking their lives to measure radiation at the plant, he thought there had to be a safer way. And so the airborne radiation monitoring system was born: a flying machine the size of a bathmat that can be controlled from anywhere in the world, avoiding the need to send people in to contaminated sites.

In the event of an accident, his "hexacopter" machines, which are still at the prototype stage, would "automatically go up like an intelligent crowd of angry bees", says Scott. But that cannot happen until the machines manage to fly out of the lab and into full production.

Showing the hexacopter, and videos of it in action, to potential investors at a conference in London, Scott said: "We are really good at what we do: what we want now is to attract people who have the experience to spin out the company."

Keen to get back to the lab, he and his team are looking for someone to manage the business. "They will be guiding everything: relationships with customers, negotiations for licensing and leasing, recruiting, accountancy, marketing – and bringing in phenomenal contacts."

Another company on the hunt for investors is Mountain Trike, founded by engineering graduates from Bath University. It makes an all-terrain wheelchair that can tackle sand, snow and mud. Putting it through its paces on a somewhat less demanding plush carpet, commercial director Ed Elias told a crowd of potential investors how it has the shock-absorbers, wheels and powertrain of a mountain bike, controlled by levers to prevent users getting muddy hands. About 70 Mountain Trike wheelchairs have already been sold, but the company is looking for £250,000 from angel investors to help it crack the US market.

British universities are more preoccupied than ever with turning their best research into commercial companies. Traditionally, British scientists have excelled in the lab, but are less good at turning their ideas into money-spinning businesses. As one familiar lament goes, while the world wide web was created by British scientist Tim Berners-Lee at the Cern laboratory in Geneva, it was the whizzkids of Silicon Valley who spun the idea into the commercial gold of Google, Facebook and Twitter.

"We need to harness the intellectual horsepower in our universities," says Sir John Parker, president of the Royal College of Engineering, who believes a cultural shift is under way. "We are not where Silicon Valley is yet, but I believe we are heading in the right direction."

In a time of austerity, universities are being asked to do more to boost economic growth. In a government-commissioned report published last month, Sir Andrew Witty, boss of pharmaceuticals giant GlaxoSmithKline, said: "This country leads the world in many cutting-edge technologies and inventions. But too often we fail to turn these great ideas into successful companies that create jobs." Witty wants to see a £1bn fund to help researchers at Britain's universities get their ideas to market.

The fact that the report was commissioned at all is another sign of the coalition's conversion to industrial policy. These days government ministers sprinkle their speeches with jargon such as "arrow project", "catapult centre" and "the eight great technologies". The coalition also chose to preserve Labour's Technology Strategy Board, an organisation that doles out public money to promising companies. Somehow, the UK has ended up with an industrial policy.

"It is one of the great surprises of the past few years," said Andy Westwood, a former Labour adviser and chief executive of GuildHE, a higher education lobby group. After the crash, Labour was reluctant to use the term "industrial policy", he said, "but now all three parties happily trot around that phrase".

The problem, says Westwood, is that 30 years of free-market philosophy have left the UK trailing behind rivals such as Germany that have spent years nurturing their manufacturing sectors: "We have slowly dismantled the infrastructure over three decades. You cannot just pull a lever and get it all back overnight."

With institutional investors focused on property and the stock market, would-be entrepreneurs find it hard to raise capital. Graham Harrison ofSetsquared, a collaboration between five English universities, says researchers are caught between angel investors – wealthy individuals who might invest up to £125,000 – and venture capital funds that are not interested in deals worth less than £10m. "Companies looking for half a million fall between two stools."

Setsquared has helped new companies raise £1bn over the past 10 years. One beneficiary is Jacob Marsh, 24, who founded his company while at university. Seeing the popularity of Raspberry Pi, the credit-card sized computers that have acquired cult status among programming hobbyists, Marsh hit on the idea of making cases for them. Initially he used 3D printers, but within a few days was overwhelmed with orders. SetSquared helped him find a factory to make the cases, which now retail for about £6 (ModMyPi.com). "Part of our success was that we were able to get the product to market so fast, and we could do that because we had the support."

But not everyone finds the ivory tower conducive to enterprise. Daniel Murray, a marine biologist, decided to leave academia to create his water-purification business. "A lot of professors are really set in their ways and don't do blue-sky thinking any more," he said. Last year he set up Industrial Phycology, which is trialling a water treatment process for Wessex Water. It uses algae to remove phosphates from waste water, in a process that should help utilities comply with EU rules aimed at reducing water pollution, as well as generating a byproduct that can be used for bioenergy. Murray has already been talking to investors in India – a big step for someone who hadn't even thought of starting his own company a year ago.

The public sector could be the key to a strong industrial policy, according to Westwood. The UK has huge strengths in the creative industries and life sciences: these could be used along with, say, the BBC and the NHS to "develop a sensible policy to support jobs".

In this way the public purse – from the NHS drugs and technology budget to high-speed rail projects – could be used to support British tech start-ups. "Even when cash is limited," he said, "you can still join some of the dots more cleverly."

THE GRAPHENE GRAB

Invented here, commercialised abroad? The government fears this could be the fate of graphene, the wonder material discovered at the University of Manchester.

Graphene is a one-molecule-thick layer of graphite (right) that is 200 times stronger than steel but six times lighter. First isolated by Russian-born scientists Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselev using sticky tape, it is expected to have scores of uses, from touch screens to membranes in DNA sequencing.

Earlier this year, science minister David Willetts voiced concern the UK could fall behind in the race to develop commercial spin-offs. "We need to raise our game," he said when it emerged the UK had a fraction of graphene patents compared to its rivals.

Around 35% of graphene patents arise in the US, 20% in China, 10% in South Korea and less than 1% in the UK, according to patent consultancy CambridgeIP.

But Quentin Tannock of CambridgeIP said this did not mean that the UK had fallen behind: "I don't think there is just one race. Graphene is a very complicated technology with a huge number of uses." Patents only tell a small part of the story, he added. "You get many patents being filed that are really not worth the paper they are written on."