Robert Peston

So it has put money into two businesses, ineffable and isomorphic.

Look, it may be that the taxpayer ends up making a fortune out of these investments, isomorphic and ineffable.

And if it does, great.

But that is not the whole thing that governments should be doing.

What they should be doing is...

Making a judgment about business that may be fresh out of university, is it going to get the finance at the right price to take it to the next stage?

I'd like to see government taking real risk.

The problem is the treasury is always risk averse.

Nick, there's so much we need to talk about, but we're just going to go to a quick break.

Just had a conversation with Mariana Mazzucato, who I'm sure you'll have come across, the influential economist.

She thinks the other thing that we ought to be doing more is recognizing when we create within our universities, publicly funded, or within our research institutions, many of them publicly funded, incredible IP with...

commercial, huge commercial potential and making sure that some of that value just automatically is owned by all of us and it would have to be via the state.

So one of the things that is quite, I don't know how much of, you know, essentially, you know,

the isomorphic or the ineffable IP flows from university research, probably not that much given the more recent track record of silver and cannabis.

But there is a world, it seems to me, in which the state ought to be hanging on to just a share of some of these businesses.

There's another argument which I'm sort of interested in.

I'm interested in it, I suppose, from a slightly different perspective from how it was put forward by, you know, the Nobel Prize winning economist Krugman.

I don't know if you saw his... He stirred up a bit of controversy by not...

In a sense, refuting the Draghi case, that one of the reasons our productivity, certainly in the UK and for most of the EU, not quite all of the EU, but most of the EU, has simply not grown in the way that it should have done, we would have wanted it to do since the financial crisis.

Right.