Its lack of a branch network, to compare with the big four can be a drawback, but cash or cheques can be paid in at any of the UK’s 16,500 post offices.The Co-op’s Clarity Business Banking account charges a fixed fee of £15 per month. All fees are frozen until 2007 and interest of 2.5 per cent is paid on credit balances. Cash banking can be conducted at Co-op branches or post offices. To open an account and apply for an early overdraft or loan, the Co-op bank expects to see a copy of your business accounts for the last three years, a list of debtors and creditors, copies of your last six months’ business bank statements, projected income and expenditure and an assets and liabilities profile.Accountants make the point that another reason why more small businesses are changing banks, besides excessive charges, is that branch managers now tend to change at least every three years. Where a previous bank manager might have had a good understanding with a customer, his or her successor might be less well disposed, or show less understanding of the particular business. Local managers might be up against a regional ruling to restrict lending to firms in a particular sector.

Or, there is a lack of confidence that a business in temporary distress has a chance of recovering.High charges are clearly a key factor why more customers are keen to change. The recent survey by Which?, the Consumer Association’s magazine, found that the four main banks each charge £30 for cheques that bounce and standing orders that couldn’t be paid. It also found that they take £3bn a year in charges for unauthorised overdrafts – a charge which led to banks’ chief executives being questioned and criticised by the Commons Treasury Select Committee last October.. At a time when most companies, particularly in the electronic products sector, appear to think that progress is all about adding more and more features to already complicated gadgets, it is easy to lose track of what innovation really is. In the high-speed, digital world in which we live, we tend to think of it as just coming up with “new stuff” for the sake of it.

So we should beware of sneeringly asking why anybody really needs a telephone that can take a picture. But, particularly when the technology underpinning these products is often so unreliable that using many of the features about which the sales staff are so enthusiastic can become a hit-and-miss affair, it might be worthwhile for anybody who regards themselves as innovative to take stock for at least a moment or two.Part of the problem is that innovation is so widely regarded as “a good thing” that we all want to be thought to be part of it – not least because the alternative, not being innovative, smacks so much of being old-fashioned and uncool. Cyberspace is increasingly the location of choice for many retailers It is not hard to see why Online retailing – or e-tailing – is big bucks. The e-tail market is worth £14bn a year in the UK and it is growing at an annual rate of between 30 and 40 per cent. “All we have done is to add significant functional benefit by changing the way people interact with plasters in the first place,” says May.Think of the real differences that could be made to many lives if this approach could be applied to other everyday products – and of the real differences in their fortunes companies might experience if they took it.. But, with the help of a group of disabled people who came together at the Helen Hamlyn Research Centre at the Royal College of Art, which has administered the challenge with the DBA for the past five years, Pearson Matthews, a specialist in designing healthcare products, came up with Clevername, a sticking plaster designed to be applied easily one-handed.