Chart 16 illustrates this for one technology - computing. It shows the percentage of employees in a company using a computer on three dates (2002, 2008, 2015). The good news is that it shows a clear trend towards increased employee computer use over time. 35  European Commission (2018). 10  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/speeches  10  The distribution of computer use is, however, clearly twin-peaked. There is an upper tail of companies where more than 90% of staff use computers. By 2015, this had increased to a little under half of all companies. But there is also a large, if diminishing, tail of companies where employee use of computers is much more modest. For example, even by 2015 around 40% of companies had fewer than half of their employees using computers. And there were still 20% of companies where fewer than one in five employees used computers. This picture is patchier still for more advanced technologies. Chart 17 looks at the distribution of the proportion of employees in UK companies with access to a portable device with internet access on two dates (2011 and 2015). It, too, is twin-peaked. But the upper peak is now a very modest one, containing only around 10% of firms. And the lower peak, by contrast, is Himalayan. The fraction of companies where 50% or less of employees use portable devices is around 80%. Patterns of technological adoption and penetration among UK companies, then, tell a broadly consistent story.
Their numbers of company collaborations, at around 600 each year, is more limited, especially to smaller companies. The Catapult Centres have created a new innovation engine for the UK. This is great news. The less good news is that this engine has fewer cylinders than its Germany counterpart. Indeed, it serves more as an innovation than a diffusion engine, leaving largely untouched the long tail of UK companies. Nor does the UK have the equivalent of the Steinbeis system for recycling technical expertise and know-how between companies, which could help de-segment the skills-stratified UK labour market. The financial infrastructure supporting companies is also different in the UK. 48  New, upper tail UK  companies do brilliantly at attracting venture capital finance. And the UK has a large and liquid corporate bond market, totalling around £ billion for investment grade securities, which allows larger and betterestablished companies to raise money at long maturities in capital markets. 49  Where the UK financial system looks weaker is when serving smaller and less well-established companies, the type of which are more likely to occupy the lower tail. Most are not of sufficient scale or standing to attract capital market financing. For them, banks are a more natural source of financing. But options for bank financing appear to be more limited, certainly than in Germany with its three-tier structure. Lending to the corporate sector by UK banks, at 6% of their assets, is around one third of the equivalent by German banks (Table 6).