I recently attended The Innovation Edge, the flagship conference of Nesta – the lengthily-named National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts.

By IT industry standards it was a pretty star-studded event, with speeches by the likes of web pioneer Sir Tim Berners-Lee, Bob Geldof – and some Scottish chap named Gordon Brown. For some people, that's a better line-up than the one for this year's Glastonbury Festival.

They all put on a pretty good show: Berners-Lee spoke on the importance of online civility (lol) and the threat of web spam; Geldof delivered a charismatic call for the UK's entrepreneurs to take more risks – in an ethical manner, of course; and Brown paraded the stage of the Royal Festival Hall, offering jokes and enthusiastic support for the industry, if nothing particularly concrete.

I'm not sure how many people attended the event, but if I was pushed for an estimate, I'd say there were somewhere between "loads" and "wow, it's absolutely packed in here." There was also a huge array of topics up for discussion – from the need to drive green technology, to the battle for fuelling venture funding – with some topics receiving far more detailed handling than others.

Variety is a good thing, clearly, and it's great to see Nesta attempting to cover as wide a field as possible. However, I am inclined to agree with the body's own recommendations (as outlined in its report) that the UK needs to tighten up its focus on innovation policy.

There's been a lot of recent talk of "encouraging innovation" in political circles. Again, any support for the UK's entrepreneurs and inventors is a good thing – but it needs to be specific. Nesta believes the UK is doing well in bolstering its position as a creative centre for new ideas, but that we need to set specific goals for separate parts of the industry – whether it be telecoms, clean technology or anything else.

The Technology Strategy Board's establishment of separate Knowledge Transfer Networks (KTNs) is certainly a step in the right direction. Even within these, however, it is quite mind-boggling how broad the area of focus can be. For example, the recently-announced Creative Industries KTN describes its interests as:

"Advertising; architecture; art and antiques markets; computer and video games; crafts; design; designer fashion; film and video; music; performing arts; publishing; software; television and radio."

That's a long list, and one with a huge amount of internal variation. There is potential for problems here: the government has been very vocal about reviewing the protection of intellectual property protection – but there's no one-size-fits-all approach when it comes to such matters.

Discussion of software protection has been comparatively limited so far, as better-looking poster boys such as music and film hog the limelight.

Never mind software – what about those poor antique markets? Will they get their IP protection too? Ming vase piracy is an increasing trend among young file-sharers, so I hear.

By Neon Kelly