Happy New Year. The 15th February marks the 300th Anniversary of the death of Edward Lloyd, whose Coffee House bequeathed us with Lloyd's of London, Lloyd's Register and Lloyd's List. That’s quite an important legacy for the UK and the City.

Imagine that today you ran one of the many venues, clubs and groups for business networking that exist in London. What would they be doing now that could evolve to leave a legacy for the UK and have such a global reach in 100-300 years’ time?

I’d like to offer my “flight of fancy” that would enable the City of London to establish and maintain its global status in the hope of stimulating others to share their ideas or to steal them and make them happen!

I call the idea, the London Science Exchange.

Over the next 10 years there is an interesting range of science and technologies that will reach the point of commercialisation, such as in Stem Cells, 3D Printing, Genomics, Proteomics, and Green Technologies. Recent investment by the UK Government in Graphene is an area with UK (and Manchester!) leadership and a wide variety of potential uses. In each of these areas they will create not just individual companies, but also new sectors with significant growth and job creation potential. Looking at Imperial, UCL, Kings along with Oxford and Cambridge, there are many of these areas where the UK has a solid research base which, if exploited properly, could create a new wave of innovation and entrepreneurship. These are not point technologies, but the start of a long wave of developments. Talking to people in the stem cell field, they talk about a 50-100 year agenda. This year marks the 60th anniversary of the unravelling of the structure of DNA. Some of the commercial potential from that breakthrough is only now being realised.

The challenge for many sectors of the economy is that the business models of science and technology companies need to evolve to exploit these potentials.

Let me illustrate the problems in one field. Over the last decade R&D productivity in pharmaceuticals has declined significantly. The cost of clinical trials makes investments very risky. Many licensed drugs have secondary uses, but the current regulatory frameworks and patent protection limit potential economic developments. Many companies have closed their in-house labs and source their science globally. Pressures for access to say HIV /AIDS treatments in the third world have created reputational and commercial challenges for major pharma companies. The possibilities of personalised medicine are in their infancy.

In all of these areas, there are huge economic, social and political benefits to being the hub of the global network.

It seems to me that access to finance, legal skills, business governance and global reach will be key to taking the possibilities to market. London is one of the few cities that has those skills along with the scientific knowledge to broker the kind of new models that will be needed to commercialise many of these fields at scale.

So here’s a New Year’s challenge! If Edward Lloyd was alive today, whether by accident or design, what would need to happen to create a new wave of global innovation to support commerce and trade where London emerged as a Global Leader?

It’s happened before. From my perspective we are in the early stage of a new wave of sciences and technologies that could power the global economy. Are we ambitious enough?