WE often think of innovation as being the preserve of the high tech sector, but this week I found a great example on an industrial estate in the back streets of Darlington.

Our leading business story today looks at the bold plans to grow the Netpark science and technology business hub in County Durham.

Since it opened 10 years ago the site has been regarded as one of the poster boys of North-East innovation. It struggled to live up to the hype during its formative years, but more recently the park has begun to find its feet.

If you want to see an innovation-led business then pop over to Netpark and talk to Richard Kirk at Polyphotonix. Richard’s awards cabinet is steadily filling up as news spreads about the revolutionary mask the firm has designed to treat, and potentially cure, cases of diabetic blindness.

Nearby Kromek produces sensors that are in demand from physicians, airports and the US homeland security services.

Across Netpark’s 23 businesses you will find similar stories of companies striving to find new and better ways to adapt materials into products. If the park’s 10 year masterplan is implemented there will be 200 similar businesses forming a community of like-minded innovators right here in the North-East. This is inspirational stuff.

The swish labs, clean rooms and offices of Netpark may be regarded as County Durham’s small scale version of Silicon Valley, but Cleveland Street in Darlington is an unlikely setting for cutting edge innovation. At least that is what I thought when I pulled up outside a drab-looking industrial unit where Aycliffe Filtration Limited has its base. But AFL boss David Franks is as much an innovator as anyone on Netpark. His determination to survive the downturn, and carve out a niche amid cut price Chinese-made filtration products, has seen him refine and adapt to whatever his customers wanted. His workshop where he experiments with new ways of filtering nasty stuff out of water is more Heath Robinson than Steve Jobs, but it thrums with the spirit of a business that lives and breathes the concept of innovate or die.

Tony Blair famously set out his priorities for office, and encapsulated the mood for change, with his memorable education, education, education speech. If Ed Miliband wants to jolt his election campaign into life he could do worse than replace the word ‘education’ with ‘innovation’ to produce a stirring clarion call for radical change.

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