Although this description does not do justice to all of the institutional infrastructure supporting German companies, these three elements have played an important role in fostering innovation and its diffusion across German businesses: by promulgating ideas and technologies (through the Fraunhofer); by recycling expertise and know-how (through the Steinbeis); and by supporting company financing and governance (through the Sparkassen, Landesbanken, KfW). If we turn to the UK, it appears to have fewer of these institutional spokes supporting technological trickledown to companies. In 2011 following a review by Hermann Hauser, the UK set up its own equivalent of the Fraunhofer – so-called Catapult Centres. The aim was to create a new innovation infrastructure across the  46 47  Though, as Haskel and Westlake (2017) point out, there is more that could be done to support intangible assets in businesses. See https://www.fraunhofer.de/en/about-fraunhofer/profile-structure/facts-and-figures.html and Comin, Trumbull and Yang (2011). 15  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/speeches  15  UK. This has been a real success. Having visited a number of them, I can attest to the great work the Catapults are doing to promote innovation, acting in partnership with some of the leading UK companies. The scale and scope of activities by the UK Catapult Centres, however, falls short of their Fraunhofer counterparts (Table 5). The Catapults are far fewer in number, at around 10. And they are significantly smaller in scale, with around 1,500 employees and an annual budget of just 0.01% of GDP.
In addition, the government is undergoing an overhaul of the legal frameworks, which need to catch up with the fast changing world, and new business practices. In my view, legal reform is the area that has not been well appreciated or perhaps well communicated to the foreign investor community. Let me take this opportunity to inform you of some significant legal amendments. In so doing, I would like to briefly categorize the ongoing legal reform into three broad groups. The first group is to improve governance and distribution of economic opportunity. For instance, the amended Securities and Exchange Act will boost governance and fairer trading environment in the Thai capital market with more effective enforcement mechanism to punish market misconduct as well as broader coverage of wrongdoings to prevent malpractices. The new bill on the governance of state-owned enterprises, or SOEs in short, aims to tackle the governance within the SOEs system, as government agencies involved with SOEs often assume multiple, and sometimes conflicting, roles – namely, being policymaker, regulator, operator, and owner at the same time. The bill will set principles to dismantle these distinct roles into separate governing entities. The revision of the Trade Competition Act will ensure a fairer and more competitive environment among business. Lastly, the Business Securities Act helps improve credit access for small and medium sized firms to funding by allowing inventories, machineries, and intellectual property as collateral. 4  The second group of legal amendments aims to enhance productivity. There are four laws that might be of your interest.