§ 29. Mr. McCabeTo ask the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry what she is doing to encourage technology transfer from academia to industry. [33823]
§ Mr. WilsonThe Government's White Paper, "Excellence and Opportunity: a science and innovation policy for the 21st century", published last July, set out a comprehensive range of measures to help promote technology transfer from academia to industry; and we have made some excellent progress here.
Last October we announced awards totalling over £100 million to help universities grow their capability to interact with business and to realize the business opportunities offered by science—including further science enterprise centres and seed-corn funding to assist the transformation of good research into good business. We have doubled the number of new starts for Faraday 522W Partnerships to link the science base to business networks, and expect to have reached our target for a national network of 24 partnerships by the end of the year. We have increased our funding of the successful TCS scheme.
Total TCS activity grew by 25 per cent. during 2001; from 730 to 918 current TCS programmes. TCS enables universities and businesses to work together using high calibre graduates drawing on academic support and expertise while they work in companies on "business-driven" projects.
We are also continuing to provide support for collaborative research and development under the Link programme and have committed £12 million in 2000–01 to a further round of Foresight Link Awards projects complementing current Link programmes in Foresight priority areas.