Janeen Chupa from the London Business School writes...

I read with great interest a few of articles published at your site about the difficult time innovators have in places like London and how that must change. We, at the London Business School, agree and have initiated an annual competition (and to our knowledge the only competition) to try to change that; to foster innovation in at least one sector.

We started the Global Security Challenge to find and select the most promising security technology startups in the world. The goal is to uncover and promote security innovations in the private sector in order to protect critical infrastructure and make citizens safer.

My team used to work in the security-technology space before getting our MBAs from the London Business School (the British Army, US Army, IBM Global Services, NSC) and this is where we saw how difficult it is for security startups to succeed because of bureaucratic hurdles posed by governments and few large integrators dominating that space.

We are hosting a final event this October in London where we will hold both policy and technology-related panels and award the inaugural winner of the most promising security technology business plan. We are fortunate enough to have several key leaders from venture capital and industry supporting the GSC, such as Siemens, NATO, Pentagon, and Carlyle Group.