In a recent presentation Josef Konwitz has pointed to the vital importance of innovation as one of the few levers currently available to governments as they seek to pull their economies out of recession (Konwitz, 2010).  He argues that the traditional factors of growth which have served the western world well from the end of the second world war have lost their potency, restricted by the very crisis from which, in earlier times, they would have fostered economic recovery.&n