Drone pioneer flies a kite for targeted spend on commercialised R&D
29 Mar 2023
UK drone company chief Robert Garbett has accused Government funded organisations of wasting investment by failing to concentrate research and development money on commercially viable projects.
The Drone Major Group founder claimed that the country’s innovation funding strategy implemented by the now defunct Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy (BEIS) was “on the road to nowhere”.
The Government had previously committed to driving R&D spend up to the equivalent of 2.4% of the country’s GDP within the next four years.
Garbett complained that the grant funding process “usually omits any analysis of what the market needs” and slowing down the chance of “meaningful commercialisation”.
Garbett said that Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s recent reorganisation of Whitehall departments and Cabinet portfolios, leading to the renaming and reduction of the BEIS and the creation of the new Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, offered an overdue opportunity to rethink the existing R&D strategy.
He described the reorganisation as “a much needed opportunity to correct the UK’s fundamentally flawed innovation funding strategy, and to create a programme which drives more commercially-focused research and development with the potential to deliver billions in growth across our nation’s vital industries.”
