'I think he liked it - he said he might like to get one.'
Plastic Logic may have bagged its first e-reader customer, judging by Lord Peter Mandelson's recent comments to CTO Henning Sirringhaus.
The e-reader, called Que, and OLED lamps from Thorn Lighting were just some of the examples of products based on plastic electronics technology that the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) perused before he launched a new UK initiative for the industry on 7 December.
For the UK government, plastic electronics is the poster boy of so-called 'advanced manufacturing'. Not to be confused with the heavy industries of Britain's past, plastic electronics is a promising field of technology that could reinvigorate many traditional industrial and manufacturing sectors with new products and applications.
'We have to continue to reinvent, even reindustrialise our economy,' Lord Mandelson told a room of 100 or so plastic electronics developers, investors, researchers and government officials. He acknowledged that already this pre-competitive industry, in terms of actual commercial products that use or exploit plastic electronics, faces intense competition from abroad, with the US, Germany and Japan all looking to get a headstart.
As part of the strategy, a 'plastic electronics leadership group', chaired by Keith Rollins, will be established to help guide the UK industry towards commercial activity.
As the initiative was disseminated, in the QE2 Conference Centre in the heart of Westminster, the UK's strength as a national resource in this field was emphasised, boasting five centres of excellence devoted to R&D and prototyping of plastic electronics. These include the Welsh Centre for Printing and Coating, Cambridge Integrated Knowledge Centre (CIKC) and the jewel in the crown - the Printed Electronics Technology Centre (PETEC).
The Sedgefield-based centre aims to develop manufacturing processes at pre-production volumes to help bridge the lab-to-fab challenge of taking one-off novel devices and proving them for commercial production.
Based on the £20 million investment in PETEC by BIS and a regional agency - One North East - and also two competitions launched by the Technology Strategy Board (TSB) as part of the strategy - together worth £8 million - the UK is shaping up to be the prototyping piece in the global plastic electronics jigsaw.
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The outcome of projects funded under the TSB competition 'Building the Technology Supply Chain', will be demonstrators or proof of principle. The other competition, called 'Plastic Electronics Demonstrators', aims to create an environment where designers and end-users invited to work with plastic electronics developers and academia will come up with concepts for products that could exploit the technology.
The UK Plastic Electronics Strategy intends to play to the UK's strengths - promoting the industry to design houses that can create product concepts for exploiting printed and organic electronics technology on behalf of end-users.
But as Rollins, who outlined the strategy at the launch, conceded manufacturing is where the money is. In the long-term the true test of the Plastic Electronics Strategy's success is whether it can transform R&D, an indomitable strength of the UK's, into manufacturing - plants and production lines, jobs and ultimately wealth. Already, developers of plastic electronics technologies, such as conductive ink and printing solutions, are taking a leaf from Plastic Logic's book and going abroad to set up plants and lines where governments are readily prepared to back their commercial aspirations with generous subsidies and incentives.