A British former air force base seems an unlikely place to find the birthplace of one of the most important elements used in today's Internet. So unlikely, in fact, that it took the site's current owners at British Telecommunications 14 years to start exploiting the discovery.
News this week that the BT research lab in Martlesham Heath - now called Adastral Park - had originally invented the idea for hyperlinks came as a surprise to everyone, not least the millions of people who rely on such technology to jump between pages on the World Wide Web.
Patents outlining the concept were filed in 1976 following research by a now retired Post Office scientist, Desmond Sargent. A routine sweep of BT's portfolio of 15,000 patents stumbled across the long-forgotten paperwork two years ago and BT has now engaged QED, an intellectual property specialist, to pursue royalties from the invention.
BT refuses to go into details of how the patent was rediscovered, claiming the circumstances are "not interesting". But credit for the discovery has been overshadowed by the embarrassment of such an important patent gathering dust for so many years.
The former state-owned utility is not alone in neglecting priceless intellectual assets. British electronics group General Electric Company, now renamed Marconi, was described by one employee as "absolutely awful" at exploiting its inventions during the days when it made everything from railway locomotives to power stations. Many discoveries were never patented, while dozens more unexploited breakthroughs are thought to have been passed on free when GEC's defence business was sold to BAE Systems.
Such neglect can be costly. An early pioneer of telecommunications technology has shown just how much value can be created when research and development is properly exploited.
Like BT and Martlesham, AT&T, the US telecoms company, has a famous heritage to live up to through Bell Labs, the former research arm that conducted the first public test of a telephone service between New York and London in 1926.
The difference is that Bell Labs was spun off from its slower-moving parent and has been free to concentrate solely on innovation.
Lucent, as Bell Labs is now known, is valued today at $194 billion (€207 billion) compared with only $115 billion for AT&T and $89 billion for BT. Last year, IBM claimed the record for the highest number of patents issued in a single year (2,756).
