Boffins becalmed: we are good at inventing incentives, but not at producing inventors

Gordon Brown promised last month to "make Britain the best place for R&D and create the best incentives". Promoting innovation may well be an important theme in his pre-Budget report on Thursday - it normally is. But while it is always tempting to propose new policy initiatives, it is equally important to take a long, hard look at those that are already in place.

For many years, the Department of Trade and Industry presided over a bewildering range of business support schemes, some of which were designed to encourage innovation. It has pruned them back significantly but political pressure to go further is mounting, with the Tories now promising to shrink the DTI and the Liberal Democrats to abolish it.