From Science to Growth

Hughes Hall City Lecture, University of Cambridge · 6 March 2006

By Stephen Allott, City Fellow, Hughes Hall; Executive Chairman and co-founder, Trinamo Ltd

“What exactly is the mechanism by which scientific research turns into economic growth?”

BUILD NOTE for the PoC: the source PDF is in the project at /mnt/project/From_Science_to_Growth_6_March_2006.pdf. For the first cut, render a brief intro (below) and link to the PDF. For v1.1, OCR the PDF into markdown and render inline as a long-form web page — the text from pages 1–20 is in /tmp/fstg_extracted/{1..20}.txt already extracted but needs light cleanup of line breaks, headings and the page-9 chart values.

What this lecture is

In March 2006, Stephen Allott delivered the Hughes Hall City Lecture under the title From Science to Growth. The lecture asks how academic scientific research turns into economic growth, and answers that the dominant policy emphasis of the early 2000s — improving the business-university interface to push more laboratory inventions out into the marketplace — is in many sectors the wrong emphasis.

The lecture argues instead that innovation in technology, particularly in software, is largely customer-led and people-led: it occurs through capable individuals connected to demanding customers, with light, persistent structures around them. The supporting evidence draws on McKinsey research into electronics companies, the Treasury’s 2004 Science and Innovation Report, the Cambridge Phenomenon, and Stephen’s own experience growing Micromuse and founding the Cambridge Computer Lab Ring.

The lecture is the foundational version of the argument that has continued to develop since. The current version, co-authored with Dr David Cleevely, is at The thesis.

Read the original PDF →