In a study last year, researchers at Concordia University found the potential benefits of workplace autonomy to include greater employee commitment, better performance, improved productivity and lower turnover.

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Autonomy was set up by researchers at Cambridge University and specialises in pattern-recognition technologies.

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Autonomy was founded by some bright guys at Cambridge university and moved from strength to strength in analyzing data and unstructured information in ways that left me trying to figure out what they were doing, how they were doing it, and what companies could do with it.

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But in a lecture on what he's learned about innovation, Mike Lynch - who's the founder of another Cambridge technology success story, Autonomy - bemoaned the fact that all the brilliant work done by the university's scientists had failed to translate into many big hitters in the FTSE-100.

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