Hard sell for metamaterials in the UK
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Hard sell for metamaterials in the UK gov.uk/government/organisations/innovate-uk
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cademic researchers who want their new materials to become profitable technologies should not present their ideas as materials that can do anything and everything. They should focus on particular applications of their discoveries. That was the key message at a recent UK government-sponsored networking event “Connecting Local Industry to Metamaterials and Emerging Materials.” Organized by the Knowledge Transfer Network (KTN), the event at the University of Sussex brought together academic researchers and representatives of major companies such as Huawei, the defense giant BAE Systems, and the materials company Johnson Matthey, along with startups and investors. The meeting was a crash course for researchers and businesses on how to seek public funding to move ideas out of the laboratory into industry. The KTN is a part of the government’s innovation agency, Innovate UK (IUK), which, in turn, is a part of UK Research
Acoustic metamaterial. Credit: Shutterstock.
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and Innovation (UKRI). Currently, UKRI has an annual budget of more than £6 billion, and exists to support businesses “to develop and realize the potential of new ideas including those from the UK’s worldclass research base” (see the February 2018 issue of MRS Bulletin, doi:10.1557/ mrs.2018.15). The KTN’s remit is to make connections between universities and industry. The Sussex event set out to explain how UKRI, along with government agencies such as the Defence and Security Accelerator, support innovation through a portfolio of business grants and loans. The event also addressed financing for early-career researchers to work in companies through IUK’s Knowledge Transfer Partnerships. Before money can flow to industry, there has to be business interest in the research. It is not always easy to attract business involvement with a subject like metamaterials, which may explain why there is a gap between how much UKRI
has spent on academic research and IUK’s investment in commercializing that work. Brian McCarthy, Knowledge Transfer Manager for Advanced Materials at the KTN, said at the meeting that the UK’s research councils have invested around £100 million in metamaterials research, most of it from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC). In contrast, when Lien Ngo, Innovation Lead for Advanced Materials with IUK, looked at the organization’s record, she found just six projects that mentioned metamaterials amounting to “two and a bit million” pounds of funding. Attempts to bridge this gap, and to drum up industrial interest in innovation, are a part of the UK government’s Industrial Strategy, which aims to increase the amount of the gross domestic product (GDP) that goes into R&D from 1.7% to 2.4% (see the February 2018 issue of MRS Bulletin, doi:10.1557/mrs.2018.15). The government has already committed an additional £7 billion of public funding up to 2022 as its contribution to reach the 2.4% target. In its delivery plan for 2019, UKRI descri
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