Business Secretary presses for growth in UK’s ‘knowledge economy'
Government claims the UK needs to further the environment for addition growth in ICT; announcement on ‘stronger interactions’ between government and businesses due next week.
The secretary of state for business, innovation, and skills, Lord Mandelson, has spoken on the UK’s needs to build on its position as a competitive business environments for ICT by, “investing in infrastructure, innovation, high level skills all the time to keep pushing the boundaries and grow in strength.”
Lord Mandelson claimed the government was, “focused on building the UK's strength in high value centres [such as ICT] and interactive processes to drive our growth in the years ahead.”
Lord Mandelson also admitted that whilst the UK was ‘very good’ at creating highly skilled graduates, it wasn’t as good at producing more technician level workers, and claimed “We are plugging that gap over the next two years with the creation of 35,000 advanced apprenticeships, who will operate in that technician class.”
The UK was “good at inventing”, said Lord Mandelson, “but not good at turning them into successful commercial ventures. We want to encourage companies to establish links like IBM has done with leading universities to turn what we’re good at researching and developing into commercially successful activities.
Source: Public Technology . Net