Thank you for your letter of 16 December. I have reviewed my previous submission to the Science and Technology Committee which gave details of the Newcastle University Engineering Design Centre and Regional Centre for Innovation in Manufacture.

  I have very little to add to what I said previously. I would like to stress that in my opinion the implementation of innovation is often inhibited by the perception that the risks associated with the new and untried are unacceptable or inadequately quantified.

  I accept that we need to become less risk averse and probably more technologically literate. I believe that we also need design tools such as those being developed in the Newcastle EDC which allow both the benefits and risks of new innovations to be more accurately modelled, enabling investment proposals to be better evaluated. I am not sure that we lack innovative ideas but we do lack the tools to translate the implications of these ideas into business cases that will win financial backing. I believe that engineers and technologists must learn to translate their visions into language that the business and financial community will understand.

22 December 1998