Mandelson: UK good at inventing but not making money

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The UK is great at coming up with the ideas in IT, but currently lacks in the skills to make them commercially viable.

This was the claim made by Business Secretary Peter Mandelson during a self-proclaimed “cameo” role at today's launch of IBM's London Analytics Solution Centre.

Lord Mandelson praised the ICT industry, claiming it accounted for one million jobs in the UK and contributed more than 10 per cent of GDP, but his compliments had a sting in the tail when it came to our research institutions.

“We also want to turn our world class research base we have in this country to more commercial application,” he said.

“How many times have you heard that we are good at inventing but not good at turning these into commercially viable [ideas]? I want to encourage companies to establish links with our leading universities to... turn what we are good at researching and developing into commercially [productive] activity.”

He also spoke on recruitment in the sector believing that more technical apprenticeships were needed to continue to fuel growth in the UK.

“Our new strategies for skills and higher education, both of which I have introduced in the last three weeks are focused on bringing forward the highly qualified graduates to [support] these sectors,” continued Mandelson.

“We are good at creating graduates... but slightly less good at bringing in those more technical traineeships. This has been a weak spot in my view and we will be addressing this with 35,000 advanced [traineeships] over the next few years.”

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