Check out the European Stats on Innovation

The changing map of Europe, showing member states and would be member states. The information below was release by the European Commission during January 2007:

• In 2005 the EU27 spent just over 200 billion euro on Research & Development (R&D)

• R&D intensity (i.e. expenditure as a percentage of GDP) in the EU27 stood at 1.84%, the same as in 2004. R&D intensity remained significantly lower in the EU27 than in other major economies. In 2004, R&D expenditure was 2.68% of GDP in the United States, 3.18% in Japan, while it has reached 1.34% in China in 2005.

• R&D expenditure in the EU27 rose by 1.5% in real terms on average per year between 2001 and 2005, compared to 1.7% in the United States and 2.0% in Japan between 2001 and 2004.

• Check out all the states here.
  

Shak Gohir

Using Nanotechnology to Improve Health in Developing Countries

Millions of people die each year in developing countries from diseases that are preventable and treatable. Moreover, tragically little research is done to prevent or cure some of the world’s biggest killers, such as malaria and tuberculosis.

What if doctors in Kenya could equip cells of the retina with photoswitches that can be flipped on, essentially making blind nerve cells see and restoring light sensitivity in people with degenerative blindness? What if public health workers in Bangladesh could place contaminated water into transparent bottles, which when placed in direct sunlight could disinfect the water and help prevent water-borne diseases like cholera, dysentery or polio?

What if a medical technician in Vietnam could use a tiny "reporter" molecule that attaches itself to specific bacteria or viruses in a patient sample and read with an inexpensive laser device -- no bigger than a briefcase -- whether an infectious disease is present? What if a nurse in Brazil could dispense a gel that would stick to the AIDS virus surface like molecular Velcro and prevent it from attacking healthy cells in sexually active women?

These scenarios are not science fiction. They are just a few examples of the exciting potential of nanomedicine -- an offshoot of nanotechnology which researchers in both industrialized and developing countries hail as enabling the next big breakthroughs in medicine and which they promise to change virtually every facet of health care, disease control and prevention.

Several of the projects being financed by The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s $450 million Grand Challenges in Global Health initiative involve nanotechnology including development of a nanoemulsion-based vaccine delivery system that uses a simple nasal swab rather than an injection.

What is nanotechnology? How is nanotechnology expected to transform medicine and health care in the future? How can nanomedicine help the truly needy in developing countries? And what are the challenges of ensuring that nanotechnology meets the specific health needs of Third World peoples? These questions are the focus of an event and live webcast on Tuesday, February 27th at 12:00 p.m. in the 5th Floor Conference Room of the Woodrow Wilson

International Center for Scholars (www.wilsoncenter.org/directions).

*** Webcast LIVE at http://www.wilsoncenter.org/nano ***

What: Using Nanotechnology to Improve Health Care in Developing Countries
Who: Dr. Andrew Maynard, Chief Science Advisor, Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies; Dr. Piotr Grodzinski, Director, Nanotechnology for Cancer Programs, National Cancer Institute, National Institutes of Health; Dr. Peter A. Singer, Senior Scientist, McLaughlin Rotman Centre, University Health Network, Professor, University of Toronto, and Distinguished Investigator, Canadian Institutes of Health Research; Dr. Jeff Spieler, Chief of Research, Technology & Utilization, Office of Population & Reproductive Health, U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), Moderator.

When: Tuesday, February 27th, 2007, 12:00 to 2:00 p.m. (Lunch available at 11:30 a.m.)

Where: Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, 5th Floor Conference Room. 1300 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW, Washington, DC 20004

This event is being organized by the Wilson Center's Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies and Global Health Initiative. The Center's Global Health Initiative provides an important forum to examine critical international health challenges including emerging health technologies and their impact on Third World medical care and economic development.

The Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies was launched in 2005 by the Wilson Center and The Pew Charitable Trusts. It is dedicated to helping business, governments, and the public anticipate and manage the possible health and environmental implications of nanotechnology.
Media planning to cover the event should contact Sharon McCarter at (202) 691-4016 or sharon.mccarter@wilsoncenter.org.

Organiser: Wilson Center's Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies and Global Health Initiative (http://www.wilsoncenter.org/nano)

Contact details
Sharon McCarter
Woodrow Wilson
International Center for Scholar
5th Floor Conference Room 1300
Pennsylvania Avenue
NW Washington, DC 20004
United States
E-mail: sharon.mccarter@wilsoncenter.org
Tel: 001-202-691-4016

Google Hints at Smart Billboards & Digital Display Networks for Advertising in Malls, Hotels, ATMs, Shopping Centres and Outdoors

Google may start appearing on digital billboards and displays in a shopping centre near you. The company recently filed a patent application for technology that will allow local stores to connect their stock control systems to a Google-powered network of electronic displays.

The patent, filed December 21, 2006 with the United States Patent and Trademark Office, covers systems and methods for allocating advertising space in a “network of electronic display devices.”

• To check out the patent, just click here.

"Advertisers may upload advertisement messages to a server specifying information such as budget, price per impression, preferred billboards and other constraints. One or more keywords or other descriptors are specified for each advertisement message,” according to the filing.

Google's system would then generate an advertising campaign specifying where on the display devices the advertisement message will appear. “The output may consist of various forms, including video, audio, printed incentive, interactive data transfers and/or combinations of these,” the company mentioned in its filing.

If the filing is a sign of things to come from Google, kiosk billboards, ATM machines and other digital displays in shopping centres and hotel lobbies could start promoting products and services directly from a nearby retailer’s inventory and/or service offering. Presently, advertising via similar screens is limited to looped, poster-type advertisements, in Google’s vision, the ads could be pulled directly from a retailer’s stock control system.

In the filed patent application, Google explained that its technology could remove the burden of manually loading looped ads, instead enable retailers to create campaigns from available goods. The adverts can be displayed in rotation and stopped automatically once the product has sold out. Once the product is back in stock, the advertisement can be re-added to the display cycle.

Shak Gohir

Salmon DNA improves OLED performance

Incorporating salmon DNA into the structure of a conventional OLED makes it ten times more efficient and thirty times brighter, say researchers in the US.

Salmon DNA could hold the key to more efficient and brighter OLEDs, according to researchers in the US. By incorporating a thin layer of DNA into the OLED structure, the team says its "BioLEDs" are as much as ten times more efficient and thirty times brighter than their conventional counterparts.

The team's idea involves using the DNA as an electron-blocking layer. This improves the probability of electrons and holes recombining and emitting photons, which in turn enhances the device's luminance. "It turns out that DNA has nearly ideal energy levels that allow hole transport to proceed unimpeded while it prevents electrons being transported too quickly," says Andrew Steckl from the University of Cincinnati.

The team tested a green- and blue-emitting BioLED against conventional OLEDs and found that the DNA electron blocking layer improved the luminance in both cases. For a current density of 200 mA/cm2, the green BioLED achieved 15000 cd/m2, whereas the baseline device reached just 4500 cd/m2. On the other hand, the blue BioLED had a luminance of 1500 cd/m2 at 200 mA/cm2, while the corresponding baseline device reached around 800 cd/m2.

Conventional OLEDs are renowned for having lifetime issues but Steckl and colleagues believe the DNA could also play a role here. "Our preliminary results show that the lifetime of the BioLEDs are significantly longer than that of equivalent OLEDs without the DNA layer," said Steckl. "We are working on understanding the difference in degradation mechanisms."

Shak Gohir

The World's Top Innovators

Globalisation and global challenges has puched innovation to the top of the agenda for governments. In today's global and connected economy countries have to respond to global challenges to ensure that their national and regional economies remain competitive. All economies are interdependent and interconnected.

Innovation is going to the single most important driver in determining any nation's success in the 21st century. Where once competitive organisations made improvements to optimise efficiency, operations and quality, now whole nations must optimise our entire society and economy for innovation.

Simply doing the same as before is no longer an option for governments and companies. Commercial and economic prosperity urgently demands that businesses shift to creating fresh value from new products and services. INSEAD, one of the world's leading business school based in Europe, and World Business have jointly established a Global Innovation Index or GII, ranking counties by their innovation capabilities.

GII is caluculated from combining scores for a nation's Institutions and policies, human capacity, infrastructure, technological sophistication, business markets and capital, knowledge, competitveness and wealth. What the GII ranking shows is that pressure for nations to remain innovative is already changing the our planet. The 20 innovator:

• 1 US 5.80
• 2 Germany 4.89
• 3 UK 4.81
• 4 Japan 4.48
• 5 France 4.32
• 6 Switzerland 4.16
• 7 Singapore 4.10
• 8 Canada 4.06
• 9 Netherlands 3.99
• 10 Hong Kong 3.97
• 11 Denmark 3.95
• 12 Sweden 3.90
• 13 Finland 3.85
• 14 UAE 3.81
• 15 Belgium 3.77
• 16 Luxembourg 3.72
• 17 Australia 3.71
• 18 Israel 3.68
• 19 South Korea 3.67
• 20 Iceland 3.66

The UK is ranked in third place just behind Germany as a global leader. What analysis of the top 100 shows is that developing countries including India, China and African nations are also using technological innovation as a springboard for improving their economies. Since the early 1990s China has boosted R&D invest by 50% and is now aiming to get R&D to a level of 2.5% of its GDP.

Read more....

Shak Gohir
Business & Programme Manager

New R&D funding opportunities in Europe - FP7

The DTI organised a major event to mark the start of the EU's Seventh R&D Framework Programme ( FP7 ), held in London on the 6th February 2007. It was also an event I decided not to miss, especially as Mike Carr, BT's head of research and venturing, was presenting and talking about the commercial importance of Open Innovation.

Entitled "Global challenges and global opportunities" the event was attended by some 500 people from the UK research community, industry and government.

Scientists working in university and other institutional laboratories, research divisions in large companies and even small enterprises can apply for funding from the FP7 pot.

Malcolm Wicks, the UK Minister for Science and Innovation opened the event with his keynote speech. He commented that ".......The UK is good at science. We have an envied record in research and have long been a key player in the Framework Programme. We need to maintain our strong position in the face of increasing international competition for the best researchers and research investments. ...........UK organisations have traditionally done well in the programme and secured significant levels of funding. In the previous sixth programme, FP6, the UK has so far received around 14.5 per cent of the overall funding, second only to Germany"

Ashley Ibbett, from UK's Office of Science & Innovation commented in his presentation that "Britain is involved in more projects than any other country in the EU. In a globalising economy, our scientists are on the front foot in co-operating with their counterparts across Europe".

Most of the UK's projects are based in universities. The UK government wants greater involvement from industry; it wants more corporations to follow the example of BT which now has 10-15% of its research spend tied up in Framework-funded projects.

"If you look at the technologies out there today, the window for exploitation is extremely short," explained Mike Carr, head of BT's research and venturing. "....From our point of view, the only way to succeed is to have a very rapid implementation strategy, and that means you've got to tap into technology from wherever it's from - open innovation. ....In BT we probably only do something like 1% of the world's research in telecoms; 99% is going to come from somewhere else. And FP7 is all about tapping into that wider community of knowledge."

At present the EU spends about 2% of its GDP on research and development, significantly less than the US (2.8%) and Japan (over 3%). Some emerging Asian countries, such as China, are now increasing their R&D investment to a rate where they will soon catch and overtake Europe. Business investment has stumbled of late. As a consequence, Europe is now on track to miss the so-called Lisbon objective of boosting its spend to 3% of GDP by 2010. "We need to do much more and we need to do it quicker," said Janez Potocnik, the European commissioner for science and research.

Shak Gohir