A former minister for science and board member at UK Research and Innovation has set out six challenges facing the UK’s science and technology industries as they look to pick up the pace of innovation and expansion.
Some 300 delegates from across the science, technology and real estate industries gathered in central London on 20 June for EG’s Creating a Scientific Superpower conference.
The day-long event, held in partnership with Bidwells, explored how to unlock the potential in the UK’s science and technology industries through private and public investment – as well as the real estate opportunities that can be grasped as the industries grow.
In a keynote speech, Lord David Willetts – who was minister of state for universities and science for four years until 2014, and now sits on the board of UKRI, sponsored by the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy – laid out a list of six pressing challenges ahead for the industry.
“I think we are starting from a position of historic strength,” Willetts said. “There are real challenges ahead of us. And none of [the] six challenges I’ve laid out for you is easy, but none of them is impossible. And if we really do approach that, I am an optimist indeed about our prospects of being a scientific superpower on Earth and in space.”
Here are the highlights.
1. Building up non-university-based research
“The UK has had an unusual distribution of public research spending towards universities. In the days when our research public spend was low, it was not an absurd strategy… But where we were really weak was the non-university-based public research spend. So if spend is going up, it is an opportunity to look at ways in which you can create a wider network of non-university-based research institutes.
“Another thing we need to do is, if we want to see research flourishing outside universities, give the maximum possible freedom to public sector research establishments so they can operate with the nimbleness and flexibility that people are used to when they’re outside the public sector. One of the advantages of universities [is] that they are not defined as public sector, so a lot of the public sector rules don’t apply to them… In an environment of increasing resources, can we look to create a more favourable environment for public sector research establishments outside universities? And can we also look to create and fund properly more non-public sector research institutes?”
2. The burdens of bureaucracy
“Aria [the UK’s Advanced Research and Invention Agency] is created as a mechanism which escapes some of the most tiresome constraints imposed on the mainstream funders, if you like, like UKRI. But I personally think that although Aria is a great initiative and I very much wish it well, I hope that if there are freedoms for Aria, they can also be freedoms that are spread more widely across the whole research system.
“We’re told Aria is modelled on Darpa [the US’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency]. I can still remember when [MP] Greg Clark defined the big industrial strategy challenges, which in turn were allocated to UKRI and Innovate UK. Innovate UK sent some staffers over to Darpa to see how they delivered specific challenges. They came back with all the freedoms that Darpa enjoyed, which then met the reality of Treasury control.
“Instead of the freedom to go off and do some smart things and report back every six months or 12 months, we ended up with a structure of committees which added up to reporting requirements once or twice a month. If we believe in the Darpa model for Aria, why don’t we apply some of those lessons more widely and cut bureaucracy that way?”
3. Overcoming government anxiety
“[Another challenge is] overcoming an anxiety [in] government, which is particularly acute within the Conservative Party, [over] what is the role of government in promoting science and technology?
“Every few years there’s a new range of anxiety: Why are we doing things which businesses should be doing themselves? The truth is that it’s a legitimate and important role of government to reduce the riskiness of commercial investment in R&D. And if we stop too soon, before companies are ready, and expect companies to take more risk than they are really willing and able to take on, then we create the Valley of Death. The Valley of Death is not some natural phenomenon. It’s a result of getting policy wrong and not taking policy support for science and technology close enough to the market.
“This is not some dangerous experiment expanding the role of government. This is just doing what other governments do and we should have the confidence to do the same. The role of government is to take on risk… You think of those thermometers raising funding on the side of a church spire. The church needs £1m for refurbishment. I sometimes think [the government] model is if the church has raised £900,000, we’ll put in the last £100,000. Our model should be: We put in the first £100,000 to show this is a worthwhile project.”
4. Levelling up across public and private
“By far the strongest message that one gets from the Treasury is the reminder that the 2.4% [GDP] target [for research and development spend] is a target for public and private spend combined, and they want to see public spend that leverages private spend. Co-funding anything that explicitly and directly will leverage investment from a commercial partner or internationally is very important.
“Today you may have had some discussions about the Golden Triangle and the levelling-up agenda and to what extent funding will carry on being focused on the Golden Triangle [or go] elsewhere. I have to say, if I were in your shoes, the most powerful argument that I would be using is if you look at how we secure co-investment from international funds, they know the Golden Triangle.
If one of your objectives is to leverage and bring in that kind of money in those type of partnerships with the private sector, that is an accumulated inherited strength of the Golden Triangle. And it will mean that instead of being just seen as prejudiced in favour of Oxbridge, it’s directly linked to a specific aim of government policy: co-funding.”
5. Security and strategy
“The biggest single change in the policy environment on science and tech since my time as science minister has been the rise of the security and strategic perspective. Played smartly, this is a great advantage. I did try to work with the [Ministry of Defence], I did have friendly meetings with the MoD. Aligning spending between civil and security and military was difficult and, anyway, their R&D budget was much smaller than it is now.
“There’s been a 180-degree shift. One of the reasons why my party has become more engaged with funding technologies downstream as well as upstream is they can see how much weight America and other countries attach to such downstream applications. I still remember a conversation with a Cambridge academic entrepreneur a few years back who I thought rather pithily brought out the problem. He said: ‘How is it that our technology is thought to be so sensitive by the security people? They’re absolutely concerned I should never have any dealings with China on it – but equally I can’t get any UK public funding because the Treasury insists they can’t possibly know whether it has any worth or not.’
“That argument has been won by the security people. That means that there is less inhibition in engaging with these key technologies. And it means if we are smart and access their funding alongside classic civil and commercial funding, there is an opportunity to do more and with more resource.“
6. International collaboration
“If we [as the UK] don’t associate with Horizon Europe [the European Union’s funding programme for research], or indeed with the other European research programmes, then plan B will come into effect. And a key part of any plan B will surely be that we still need international collaboration in some form or other. We don’t want to be insular and we don’t simply want research where we are marking our own homework – where we say on our criteria, ‘this is great’. We want research that stacks up on some assessment by researchers outside the UK as well.
“That will mean there will be an enormous interest in creating other bilateral and multilateral partnerships with respected partners. Obviously it’s the US for the UK, but there are others – Japan, individual or groups of European countries, exciting technology powers like Israel, emerging science and technology powers like India. The more we can show we can put together coalitions and partnerships with those countries, including their having some role in assessing research excellence and technological performance so that we are still willing to be judged by the most rigorous global standards, that will be very important.”
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