PERSPECTIVE
Derek Waddell, Chief Executive Officer, Edinburgh Research and Innovation Limited
‘WE WILL CONTINUE TO BUILD ON OUR SUCCESS’
The past year has been extremely challenging for the global economy, so our excellent achievements in research and innovation are a great credit to staff within Edinburgh Research and Innovation and the University.
Our company formation activities have again delivered a very strong performance, reflecting the tremendous entrepreneurial spirit that exists within the University. We strongly encourage entrepreneurship among students and University staff, and our skilled and experienced company formation team provide class-leading support to University staff and student companies. This is exemplified in our Accelerator Pipeline initiative, which was created to support entrepreneurial postgraduate students who have developed their own intellectual property.
This is already showing great promise with one company in particular, Speech Graphics, having made its mark by being awarded the 2011 John Logie Baird Award for Innovation.
The University of Edinburgh is continuing to deliver effective innovation programmes for companies – from Scottish SMEs to large multinational organisations – and we have developed a number of mechanisms to support business and industry. These are highlighted in the stories featured in this year’s issue. We often work with companies on
smaller-scale research and consultancy projects. However, we also take a longer- term view through our various mechanisms
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focused on building relationships with companies, which often lead to bigger, more strategic research and development collaborations that help our partners increase their market penetration. A key attraction for new companies who wish to work with us, is the extensive breadth of research experience and expertise across the University in key technology areas that will be crucial to the growth in the economy, such as life sciences, renewable energy, communications and ICT.
Our feature on low carbon innovation highlights the University’s leading role in renewable energy developments over nearly four decades – from the invention of the groundbreaking ‘Edinburgh Duck’ wave energy technology by Professor Stephen Salter, through to the recent spin-out of NGenTec to commercialise a revolutionary generator system for large renewable energy wind turbines. We also feature the world’s first multi- directional wave and current testing facility being built at our main Science campus. This facility will be capable of simulating any desired combination of current and wave conditions around all the UK and the majority of key European coastlines. In the next 12 months, Edinburgh Research and Innovation will continue to build on our success, and work on new and effective mechanisms to increase our productive working relationships with partners across all sectors.
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Turn to page 20 to find out how the University’s research is helping society cut down the carbon in the atmosphere by developing leading energy and carbon capture technologies
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