The jokes stay in. The work still has to be right.

The people, the kit and the money are all in the country already. What is missing is a plain sentence that says what the job is, sent to somebody capable of doing it.

Everyone involved knows this. An academic with a well-equipped laboratory spends a surprising amount of time unaware of the firm eight miles away with exactly the problem her group is best at. That firm, meanwhile, has concluded that universities are slow, because the one approach it made went to a central address and produced a meeting about a memorandum of understanding.

Both parties were reasonable. The mechanism was the problem. Blighty Boffins is an attempt at a better mechanism, and a deliberately unambitious one: a described catalogue, a noticeboard for scoped work, and a form that passes an application to whoever published it.

A brokerage. We do not fund research, employ researchers, own equipment or perform the work. We describe who can, we host the jobs, and we make introductions.

This is a narrower role than the word 'platform' usually implies, and we prefer it that way. Organisations that broker introductions and also compete for the work have a conflict that eventually shows. We have no position in the outcome beyond wanting the introduction to have been a good one.

There is no commission on work that results from an introduction, and no equity taken in anything. The commercial model is straightforwardly boring: sponsored listings for facilities and organisations that want to be found, and paid support for publishers who want help scoping a package properly.

It is small on purpose. We list groups, facilities and organisations that are genuinely open to collaboration and can describe what they are good for. We do not attempt to index every research group in the country, because a comprehensive index of undifferentiated entries is precisely the thing that does not work.

Every entry is written to be checkable. A facility says its lead time, its cost basis and its limitations. A boffin says what they are looking for and what they would decline. An organisation says how to approach it and what will slow you down.

Where an entry would be more useful if it were less flattering, we make it less flattering, with the subject's agreement. Facility managers have consistently told us this produces better enquiries, which is the entire object.

The language of innovation brokerage has drifted a long way from the language of engineering. One speaks of ecosystems and transformative potential; the other speaks of tolerances, duty cycles and the temperature at which the coating spalls. The first vocabulary is built to be unfalsifiable. The second is built to be checked.

We write in the second, as nearly as a website can manage. A description specific enough to be wrong is specific enough to be useful.

We are not being irreverent about the engineering, which is difficult, consequential, and done by people who deserve better than a brochure. We are being irreverent about the packaging around it, which has grown considerably faster than the work.