NIPC News

By XrysD - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=133523323 English Local Authorities   Jane Lambert Local enterprise partnerships ("LEPs") were collaborations between local authorities, businesses and universities to take over responsibility for local economic development from the regional development agencies.  They were established by the Coalition government shortly after it came into office.  I wrote about their formation in Local Enterprise Partnerships Begin to Take Shape   in the  NIPC Inventors Club blog on 21 Oct 2010. In his Spring budget statement, Mr Jeremy Hunt MP, who was then Chancellor of the Exchequer, announced a consultation on transferring the functions of the LEPs to local authorities (see Government Plans to abolish LEPs  by Kwame Boakye in the Local Government Chronicle of 15 March 2023).  After an information-gathering exercise by the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, and the...

Jane Lambert In November 2010, a few months after it had assumed office, the Coalition Government commissioned Prof. Ian Hargreaves  to review how the intellectual property framework supports growth and innovation. His terms of reference  expressly included "the cost and complexity to SMEs of accessing IP services to help them to protect and exploit IP". At para 9.2 of his report,  Digital Opportunity A Review of Intellectual Property and Growth , which   Hargreaves presented in May 2011, he identified "gaps in IP knowledge among SMEs and gaps in IP services available to them" which impaired the "ability of young and innovative UK firms to realise the potential value of IP".  That mattered, according to Hargreaves "because of the growing importance of smaller IP intensive firms to future growth."  Hargreaves found that the reason for those gaps was that current service provision was not configured as well as it could have been to ...