Innovation is our passion:

Very few newspapers or magazines employ professionally trained researchers, or even fact-checkers - as the US media does. In the UK most researchers were sacked in the great flush-out of middle-ranking staff in the late 1980s.

This means that unless you are a firm which can employ a PR firm, it is difficult to get intelligent coverage in the Press. And if you can, dark hints about 'advertising with us' are often raised prior to the article being published.

Tracking these companies requires real research, and that is why 'Free Radicals' was born.

Chemicals that flow around the body disrupting the status quo are called free radicals; companies that smash conventional methods and practices cause the same heartache to competitors.

They create processes, products and systems that dynamically advance human progress. 'Free Radicals' is the place we hope you will read about these companies.

We will concentrate upon 'substance' technology companies - from anywhere we can find them. Some are in sectors such as IT, telecoms, materials sciences, biotech, plastics or opto-electronics, or they are emerging starts in nanotechnology - the core science of the 21st Century. Technologies under scrutiny could be in the arena of faraway physics and chemistry, which does not have a commercial application. Yet..

We will focus on Internet companies only when they deploy real technology, such as in sophisticated structured data applications. Unfortunately so many people still think Internet companies are 'hi-tech', when in fact there is more sophistication in my local chemist's link with his bank than in most Internet start-ups. This does a great disservice to true 'substance' companies and entrepreneurs with serious vision and serious purpose.

But we won't be pompous. We will also cover 'mittel-tech' or 'cross-tech' companies - those that have considerable potential through the clever combinations of science and thought.

Want an example? A glass scientist and a vet got together to produce a glass feed pellet for cows. Once swallowed the glass dissolved harmlessly at a pre-set rate, and the nutrients entered the beast over a period of time - and not expelled immediately. Of course, this 'simple' exercise cost £1m in development fees to safeguard animal and human health.

Here's another. In future, we'll cover pre-fab housing.. Laugh? Go ahead. Hi-tech? Yes, actually it is. There are dramatic technical developments in this area which may sharply reduce the cost of construction - the high level of which impoverishes so many people.

Soon you'll be able to walk into a high street centre, design the house yourself, and the parts - expertly built - will arrive in a few weeks. Just the thing for a Government determined to build several million homes in our countryside.

In this issue we've featured some excellent companies - CellFactors and Cognisco, for example. Our 'Readers Rant' asks why universities don't invest a small proportion of their staff pension funds into their own ventures - as the Americans do.

Finally, our 'Readers Stories' allows anyone to submit stories, story ideas, snippets, or even whistleblower's tipoffs. The barriers to Press publicity are there no longer. Help us to write about your company, your technology, your university project, first.

Please email us mystory@free-radicals.org.uk, or via our website, where we have assembled one of the best sets of links to innovation-related sites anywhere on the Web.

Marcus Gibson,

Editor, 'Free Radicals'.