LEADING ARTICLE: Backing the British boffin

Consider the word "inventor". What image does it conjure up? Possibly your picture is of a wispy-haired loon, peering over cracked bifocals and gabbling about a deranged scheme for using household sewage to feed the population of Derbyshire. The fictional Professor Branestawm might serve as your model.

But it is more likely that your mind's eye sees a stolid hero, struggling against the odds to have a revolutionary idea recognised for the brilliant innovation that it is. The inventor of the bouncing bomb, Barnes Wallis, might be the prototype. This would reflect the feeling that many Britons have long nurtured about home-grown ideas: that we have the amazing notions, but that it is left to foreigners to develop and profit from them.

This is a view endorsed by a grouping of more than 300 British inventors, the Intellectual Property Development Confederation. They believe that many bright ideas fail to be exploited commercially. Their supporters point out that only about 80 of the 4,000 patents granted each year in Britain are ever manufactured. Big companies are often highly resistant to new inventions. According to one expert, "successful innovations always start as a joke, become a threat and end as being obvious". Many fail to make it at all.

Why is this? Sometimes inventors simply do not know where to go with their ideas, who will be most interested. Even the more enlightened organisations seeking a commercial rate of return are unlikely to lend money to a lone inventor. So inventors need to be put in touch with those companies most open to exploiting their ideas. Even before getting to that stage they will often need facilities to turn their ideas into prototypes.

The inventors' confederation suggests that pounds 4m of National Lottery cash should be matched by commercial sponsorship to create a National Innovation Centre. This would employ 50 people with the skills to evaluate ideas and generate contacts, and it would run its own laboratories to help produce prototypes. It proposes that such a centre should be based in the East Midlands and linked to Nottingham Trent University.

One of the scheme's early supporters is the British inventor/businessman James Dyson. He invented and developed the bagless vacuum cleaner, was turned down by all the major electrical manufacturers, but persisted and sold it through mail- order catalogues. It was a classic good idea that nearly didn't happen. He believes that there are more Dysons out there, and that an Innovation Centre might help them to succeed.

There is, of course, a risk that money will be wasted by cerebral types on uncommercial ventures. In the absence of a financial imperative, the new centre would need to be given clear criteria to operate by, and it would have to be tough enough to say no to pleading boffins. But we should back Mr Dyson's hunch on this one. After all, a country that can afford a lottery-funded Centre of Sports Excellence really should be able to run a National Innovation Centre.