CENTIVE

CENTIVE stands for the Centre for New Technologies, Innovation and Entrepreneurship

CENTIVE has a dual focus:

New technologies, the industries developing around them, and the sectors on which they impact (including financial services as a major user, and as a source of capital investment for these technologies).
Theoretical and practical issues to do with clusters, innovation, and entrepreneurship, on which the success of these industries rests.

The result is a Centre that bridges the technology/business interface, through its concern with leading science-based sectors and with the key issues that exercise practitioners, policy-makers and academics, in relation to economic development and company performance.

The new Centre brings together staff with common interests and a strong track record of research in emerging industries based on some of the key technologies that are transforming society in the UK, Europe and across the world.

These technologies include: alternative energy systems; biotechnology; telecommunications, new media, e-business (ICT); opto-electronics/photonics; and nanotechnology. CENTIVE will concentrate on the process and practice of innovation involving these technologies and entrepreneurship in applying them.

These new technologies are important because they are:

Major drivers of economic growth and social change.
Strategic ‘enabling’ industries.
High value, global industries of great interest to the City of London and other financial centres.
Enormously pervasive in the products and new opportunities they create.
At the heart of the UK's scientific base, through R&D-intensive companies and investments in higher education.
Industries in which the UK is internationally competitive, although with some weaknesses and a tradition of often failing to commercialize early scientific breakthroughs.

The development of these sectors, and the sectors on which they impact, is characterized by certain common themes. Foremost among these is the role of clusters.

Much government policy, at the regional, national and European level, is now heavily influenced by the cluster perspective. Clusters and other networks, such as supply chains, provide a focus for understanding issues like innovation, entrepreneurship, alliances between large and small firms, the creation of ‘intangible' value, the development and circulation of skills, and the human impact of technological change.

Many sectors (including financial services in the City of London) exhibit cluster phenomena, and their continuing success is linked to their evolution as clusters.