Technology and Innovation objectives

Our objectives at a glance

• To identify technology initiatives and innovations that have the potential to make a major impact on the UK electronics sector in its widest sense
• To help government to understand the industry and its needs, and help the industry to understand how it can best work with government and research
• To support the many small businesses in the sector and encourage them to be innovative.

The objective of the Technology and Innovation Workstream of the ELC is to identify and initiate a few key programmes leading towards increased UK economic strength emerging from the provision of electronic technology or services related to its use.

The DTI EIGT report Electronics 2015 – Making a Visible Difference provides some guidance for this. It states that there are around 10,000 UK companies identifying themselves as 'electronic', employing an average of 26 people. It also illustrates that it is a highly fractured community, with more than 90 per cent of these businesses employing fewer than 10 people! But it also highlights that there are just as many companies whose primary business is not electronic, but which include a significant electronic activity within them (such as aerospace, automotive, financial, retail). The EIGT report also confirms that though manufacture of electronic objects themselves is increasingly being done offshore, the contribution of the UK electronics industries tends to be in the higher-value parts of the product life-cycle.

Overall the scale of UK electronics is very difficult to quantify, but even in its unstructured, disorganised and uncoordinated form it is probably contributing £30–£50 billion per annum to the UK economy. In other words, it’s already a significant sector and, more importantly, it presents a real opportunity for improvement.