While the UK games industry trade body TIGA continues to lobby hard for videogame tax relief, a government-backed organisation is actively courting the development community. Originally established in 2004 and funded by the Department of Business Innovation and Skills, the Technology Strategy Board (TSB) has a remit to promote innovation within UK industry. The board has a billion pounds to invest into British businesses over the next three years – and it’s asking the games industry for advice on how some of that money could be spent to aid their causes.

So who has control of this cash, who can claim it and what will be the benefits for the UK games industry? We spoke to Jeremy Silver, the board’s lead specialist in creative industries, to find out more.

How do you decide on the distribution of your funds? How are things divided up?
The Technology Strategy Board identifies individual vertical sectors - the creative industries are the most recent – and tries to draw out what the main technology trends are, what are the drivers for technological change, and the opportunities within the industry, and where could the TSB intervene to make useful contributions. The criteria are all about trying to make UK PLC a more successful and profitable place.

One of the oppositions to this sort of funding is that, surely if the companies have an innovation worth investing in, they should be able to track down finance themselves?
I hope the TSB enables a business to try something that it would otherwise not be able to afford to try – usually at a pre-funding stage.

The point is, there’s quite a lot of investment in academic research; we get reasonable levels of investment from the private sector in innovative start-ups. But there is a period in between where essentially you’re putting prototypes together - it’s very unlikely you could get funding because you wouldn’t have any revenues, you wouldn’t even necessarily have a proven idea. But you’ve got the beginnings of something. That’s really the place that the Technology Strategy Board intervenes. It’s not about giving public money to bring something to market – it’s more about making a pubic investment in a proof of concept that would allow a business opportunity to then be exploited.

It looks like you have an annual applications process for funding. Do companies simply come to you with a concept and go from there?
It’s a little bit more structured than that. The idea is, the organisation does its strategic analysis of the industries, and then it draws out themes that are relevant, that people are talking about. It’s not like we’re sitting up in some ivory tower looking down, we get out, we talk to people. In the case of the current report [Creative Industries Strategy 09], we talked to over 100 different companies, try to pool together what everyone is saying and then create our priorities based on that.

There are a number of different ways in which money is given out, but it’s also about creating collaborations and partnerships as well. So there are collaborative R&D calls - these are competitions where businesses and universities are encouraged to work together - and then there are open research competitions, where particular themes will be set out and then people with ideas that relate to it will be invited to apply.

So let’s specifically talk about videogames. Is this the first year you’ve considered games as part of your remit?
This is the first year we’ve published a strategy about videogames. We did actually have a call earlier this year, which was all about accessing and commercialising digital content in the networked environment and obviously to some extent that reflected the game industry’s needs as well.

What we’ve done now is to work all those thoughts into the strategy, so we have a view that relates to the needs of the industry. The game industry is talked about at a lot of different levels and, in fact, in a lot of our conversations, one of the things that came up is the skills gap – in particular programming and technical skills, for which we’ve had such a great reputation in the past. It isn’t actually something we’re directly involved in, but there’s a feeling amongst industry practitioners that this is something we need to do something about now, and we’re encouraging some other public departments to have a look at it. Our focus is on innovation rather than on training, but I wanted to mention it because it is very important.

So your funding model is based around identifying themes, and concentrating on companies with concepts that work within those areas; can you tell us what these themes are and how they relate to games?
What we’ve tried to do is find themes that cut across all the creative industries, so the first thing we had to do was work out, well, who are the creative industries? There’s this analysis that the Department for Culture, Media and Sport did in about 1991, which included all sorts of things like the performing arts, architecture, advertising… But as part of our report we said, let’s look at businesses that are using technology in the creative process, and let’s look at those that have technology built into the product, and let’s plot all the different subsets of the creative industries on a chart [a diagram is available in the published report].

And this chart puts games right up there in the top right-hand corner, because clearly games are produced with a high level of technological input and obviously the output is highly technological as well. We’re pointing toward where the value and the growth is in the creative industries as a whole, and that is actually very much in the technology space and therefore games are very much at the top of all that.

So what are you looking for from the game industry? Are you wanting to fund innovative new game concepts, or means of creating games?
Yes, we’re going to try to spell out a number of different areas where we want to put the focus – we can’t focus on everything at the same time, we need to deal with it in a themed way. So two strands have come out of what we’ve done. One is this huge category of meta-data, and the other is convergence and cross-platform development, both in terms of production and in terms of consumption and distribution.

Obviously these go across all sorts of different sectors, but I think they have a good deal of relevance to the game industry, particularly the cross platform side of things. What we’re just beginning to see is multi-user, web-connected [technologies] that start to move a game that may have lived on a laptop in the first instance into online, mobile and other platforms. I think we’re still in the early days of understanding how to consume those kinds of things and games developers are leading consumers in that direction, not the other way around.