George Smith visited; brought along by Nigel Pigott after meeting Alan Bassindale. George is a great advocate of the OU. He is the m.d. of a nanotechnology company and mixes with those at the Insitute of Materials, Minerals and Mining, has been involved with Foresight panels, knows important folk at the DTI and has speaks with Lord Sainsbury.
He would like to get all of the above to visit KMi; Nigel is on the case.
The reason for his interest is that he thinks that there are many things which we do that would feed into Lord Sainsbury's agenda for technology transfer (and has told him and the DTI precisely that). Being in the nanotechnology business himself, he knows the difficulties and thinks that the technologies we have will help support these companies in a way which the proposed tech transfer mechanism will not.
Showed him (quickly) BuddySpace, D3E and variations, Rostra, Hexagon and finished with Prolearn. He was much impressed by all and went away saying that he would be on the phone to his contacts asap. His final shot was that the DTI and Sainsbury would leap at the opportunity to use these technologies – the DTI is under pressure to deliver under tech transfer (which is a Gordon Brown thing and likely to be funded whatever).
If we get a visit from DTI we should have a one-page outline ready. Similarly, if Lord Sainsbury arrives we should video? his entrance and have it on a web page when he leaves – a cool move would have him record a short message to the troops and webcast it.
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