Spin-out companies from university science departments are very fashionable, important and much encouraged by governments. The new high-tech companies offer the hope of keeping Western economies viable at a time when much manufacturing is being outsourced to developing countries. At the same time they are the best possible means by which those same developing countries can move away from a mere reliance on cheap labour and develop their own sophisticated industrial enterprises. They can also be a means of sustaining university finances, an idea reinforced recently in the UK by the Lambert Report
