On Tuesday, October 20, Consul General Phil Budden and the Boston Science & Innovation team joined Cambridge Consultants for Innovation Day 2009, a day long symposium featuring remarks from the area's innovators and demonstrations of cutting edge products. The day featured presentations by Consul General Budden, Lita Nelsen, Director of the Technology Licensing Office at MIT, Duncan Smith, Head of Consumer Products for Cambridge Consultants, and Bob Metcalfe, General Partner at Polaris Ventures.

Watch the Consul General's presentation, in two parts, below:

Consul General Budden's speech, 'Bridging the Atlantic: British and American Hubs of Innovation,' focused on the innovation ecosystems in Massachusetts and the UK. The Consul General noted that substantial revenue is generated from hubs of innovation:

*       MIT alumni have founded over 25,800 companies
*       Those companies employ over 3.3 million people
*       $2 trillion in global sales - the equivalent of the 11th largest economy in the world

The UK-US ecosystems work effectively in partnership: the UK-funded Cambridge-MIT Institute (CMI), established in 2000, explores how academics, industrialists and educators might work together to stimulate competitiveness, productivity and entrepreneurship. CMI set out to enhance competitiveness and innovation by improving knowledge exchange between universities and industry, and has prompted a myriad of UK innovation. Praxis, an organization that provides knowledge transfer training in the UK for commercialization experts from British institutions, and was developed by Lita Nelsen in 2002 initially as a division of CMI, in an effort to export "the business of knowledge transfer" from Boston to the UK. It has trained over 1,200 people, making a critical contribution to the vitality and success of the knowledge transfer community in the UK on an ongoing basis.

Boston's Science and Innovation team focus on innovation, climate/cleantech/energy, and life sciences, and have brokered a number of the aforementioned partnerships. They engage and encourage developments in the innovation economies on both continents, and seek partnerships from which value-add, knowledge transfer opportunities are derived. For more on Boston's Science and Innovation team, please click here.

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