I conveniently forgot that

No I'm not joking. I believe we in the UK usually fail in extracting maximum value from our IP, it's kind of endemic, pointing maybe to the way that we run our educational and research institutes. At least part of it must be the educational system, that's why I think government needs to be involved. This is something that applies across all industries in the UK.

I visited our most famous fruit/tree research organisation last year, they were in pretty bad financial shape (have subsequently got rid of loads of people and now merged with another institute) the leader of the broadleaf timber development programme told us about their successful introduction of Europe's first cherry bred for timber, I asked what royalties were being generated, they said they didn't charge any on it. As far as I know there is no longer any public sector research into new orchard varieties in the UK, by contrast WSU in particular and a few other US institutes are investing heavily, but then they're good at exploiting their IP commercially.