Tension, is the word that I would use to describe academic and practitioner perspectives on Africa.
A devotion to the obsessive pursuit of knowledge within a narrow and sharply defined area is one way to view academic research endeavours; in ‘The Bottom Billion’ Paul Collier describes research as an intense but very narrow beam of light. [...]

Robert Pitkethly’s (18th February) presentation asked a few important questions. What are Intellectual Property Rights? How do you manage them? What is the purpose of them? How do you get them? He eloquently explained the bewildering array of terms – patents, trademarks, copyright, appropriation, registered designs, confidential information, and he showed that one needs to [...]

Today’s entrepreneurs are truly striking, particularly the Silicon Valley brand,  stylizing themselves as romantic cowboys –  roguish yet righteous and idealistic, riding into the sunset with a fist-full of dollars and a great idea.
Yet, anyone who knows anything about “how the West was won” and how fortunes were made and lost at “The Frontier” also [...]

Prof Sue Dopson’s presentation for the Medical Innovation lecture series (‘Why is Innovation in the NHS often hard to achieve?’ – 11th February 2009) effectively unpacked the shared, common conceptualisation of innovation in large healthcare organizations as a predominantly rational, linear and planned process. Presenting her research on Evidence-based change in the NHS several important [...]

Oliver Bernath’s lecture ‘How do you make a good idea successful?’ (4th February) was a candid look at the entrepreneurial spirit and how to capture it. Based on his own experiences, some positive and some negative, Oliver showed that being a successful innovator has much less to do with the idea, and more to do [...]

What makes a good Medical Innovation?
In his lecture, “what makes a good medical innovation?’ (28th January 2008) Prof Lionel Tarassenko noted that several important ingredients are required.  The organization developing the new technology must remain nimble, and it must find the right partners in the early stages.  But also, drawing on fascinating examples of signal [...]

Now in its 8th year, Silicon Valley Comes to Oxford 2008 is led by the Oxford Centre for Entrepreneurship and Innovation. To keep the concept fresh and challenging, we innovated by inviting Oxford’s finest together with enterprising European pioneers to gatecrash the prestigious Silicon Valley party in a series of debates, arguments, discussions, experiments and [...]