Putting aside the inherent fragility of emerging economies, there's the question of whether regions outside the US and Europe, with their long traditions of free speech and creative destruction, will be able to replicate the curiosity and frank exchange of views required to commercialise such thinking.
For its part, BioInsights has now revised its bullish forecast down as protein-chip makers grapple with the problem of how to commercialise such a complicated technology, while trying at the same time to convince customers that there is more to biotech than genes.Pentium for proteinsPart of the problem is the comparison between protein chips and gene chips.
And Xerox's Palo Alto Research Centre (PARC) devised the personal computer's distinctive elements, including the mouse, the graphical user interface and the Ethernet protocol for computer networking (although it was criticised for failing to commercialise such leaps forward).Now the big corporate laboratories are either gone or a shadow of what they were.
If the UK misses the opportunity successfully to translate and commercialise such therapies, scientists will start to be attracted to other countries, according to Sir Richard Sykes, chairman of the UK Stem Cell Foundation, newly-appointed head of the Royal Institution and former chairman of the pharmaceuticals giant GlaxoSmithKline.
"These introduce aspects of commercialising ideas such as ideas evaluation, how to write a business plan, and how to market a high-tech product," says Phillips.
In countries that are good at commercialising new ideas, such as America and Norway, even newly founded firms coin valuable intellectual property (see chart).If governments want to see a blossoming of clean technology, therefore, they should use taxes to put a price on environmental externalities (such as carbon) rather than coddle pet technologies.
The key to commercialising this idea is that such antennae can be stamped by the billion on to plastic sheets.
My experience of almost 20 years of advising on commercialising public sector enterprises, including Royal Mail, is that such attempts are doomed to failure.
The bad news, they report, is that instead there are lots of pitfalls for those seeking to commercialise research in fields such as IT, life sciences or engineering.
Dr Povey, who is also the boss of VLC, a firm set up to commercialise the technology, thinks such devices should be able to reach 1 gigabit per second (Gbps), and do so over greater range.
