THE gulf between academic inspiration and business innovation in Scotland is infamously wide and only haphazardly bridged, with most scholars still preferring to publish rather than produce commercially-successful products.
Industry and academia in this country used to have the knack of collaboration, but began losing it about 50 years ago.
The result has been the compilation of an often-recited list of Scottish inventions which have been exploited to the benefit of individuals and companies abroad.
The distance between business and scholarship goes so far as to affect each side's eating habits. Those who strive to reunite the two camps - commercialisation task forces such as Connect and Technology Ventures - often joke about the problem.
Hold a networking meeting over early-morning breakfast, they say, and rest assured that only business people will show up. Hold the same meeting over lunch and the suits will stay away while the scholars show up in droves.
Although many academics are reluctant to get involved in commercial ventures, the Scottish landscape is still littered with companies set up by men with bright ideas who did not succeed in running the business built upon their technology.
Alex Deas of Dalkeith's
Memory Corporation, Vincent Lavin of Magnum Power in Livingston and Norman White of Calluna in Glenrothes are the most recent examples of founders who were unable to take their companies on to the next level of expansion.
In each instance, the boffin was replaced by an industry heavyweight with years of hard-nosed business experience.
They are now joined by David Horrobin, the founder and former chief executive of Stirling-based drug development company Scotia Holdings. Horrobin resigned yesterday as a non-executive director after failed attempts to oust chief executive Robert Dow, who came to the post in January with Horrobin's blessing.
Since that time, Horrobin has been forced to watch as the company he originally founded in Canada in 1977 struck out in dramatic new directions.
Gone was the seemingly endless array of diverse development projects, with many dropped in favour of focusing on six key areas.
''The company was definitely on a new track, and sometimes that is not an easy thing (for the former chief executive) to accept,'' investor relations manager David Dible said. ''But that is not a unique situation to Scotia at all.''
Indeed it is not. Biotechnology analyst Martin Wales of Greig Middleton said such a development was a ''fairly common scenario'' given that many academics and inventors do not have a strong business background.
''That's particularly true in the biotechnology industry, because it takes such a long time to bring a drug to the market,'' Wales said. ''It's generally not surprising that different skill sets are required to achieve that.''
Breda McMillan, the head of Scottish Enterprise's Technology Ventures commercialisation arm, said some leading-edge companies brought in outside executives straight away to bolster the firm's business acumen. That was the case with PPL Therapeutics - the creators of Dolly the cloned sheep - when managing director Ron James was headhunted at the request of PPL's venture capital backers.
McMillan said many technology-based companies spun out of academic research became ''lifestyle companies'' for their creators. Although the chief executive is the primary driving force behind the firm, his or her high level of personal involvement can also be a constraint.
''If you look at the evidence from the US, start-up companies there will quickly build up a network of advisers around them with a strong business background,'' McMillan said. ''That is something that doesn't happen so readily here in the UK.
''I think there is a lot of Scottish pride that comes into it. It's their idea and they want to protect it, and they want to keep control.''
McMillan said Technology
Ventures attempted to discourage that sort of thinking by hooking up new firms with people who had ''been there and done it''.
The programme's incubation projects are stocked with people who apply business focus to innovative ideas, while the Technology Ventures roadshow takes experts such as solicitors and corporate advisers out to fledgling firms.
The main objective is to help those with bright ideas realise when they need some outside help.
''The skills requirement changes after the company reaches a certain level of growth, and that is true across all companies, not just technology companies,'' McMillan said.
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