Science and Innovation Strategy

Lord Willis of Knaresborough Excerpts

Monday 23rd October 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Willis of Knaresborough (LD)]

My Lords, I too congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Patel, on securing this debate and on his introduction, which was as excellent as always. He has of course highlighted both the opportunities that arise from the science and innovation and industrial strategies, and the challenge of realising their potential. Like many in your Lordships’ House, I suspect, I was somewhat impressed by the success of Stanford, where the synergy between research and innovation is seamless, focused, well-financed and taken as part of an innovation ecosystem that delivers commercial, health and societal benefits on a massive scale. However, while we can admire what is being achieved at Stanford, Caltech or MIT, trying to replicate their models may prove somewhat challenging, so perhaps we should look at how we can utilise the UK’s own unique strengths to power our own innovation revolution.

We can argue about whether the government strategies are right, but my question is: do we have the infrastructure and, more importantly, the people to power an innovation revolution in the UK? Arguably, the setting up of UKRI was a significant response to this challenge, bringing together under one roof both the traditional research councils and the relatively new Innovation UK. On his appointment to UKRI as chief executive, Sir Mark Walport wrote a letter to all partner organisations—including NERC; I declare an interest as a council member. In his letter he stated:

“Our research and innovation landscape and funding system is world-leading”.


I do not often question Sir Mark, but although he is absolutely right to declare our research base as world-leading—a claim evidenced by the fact that we have four HEIs in the top 20 universities in the world—the global league tables for innovation tell a different story. Despite having a concentration of seven research universities in London and the south-east, our top entry for innovation is at number 13, with few HEIs in the top 100. We are good at research; we are not as good at innovation.

On funding, while UKRI has a £6 billion a year budget for research and innovation and the Chancellor has found a further £2 billion a year to support the industrial challenge strategy, such sums pale in comparison with the United States or China, which spend a significantly higher percentage of GDP on innovation—as do Germany, France and Japan. Indeed, as the noble Lord, Lord Freeman, hinted at in his excellent contribution, this lack of access to capital helps to explain why it is notoriously difficult in the UK to grow our research ideas beyond proof of concept without seeking finance from nations with deeper pockets and less aversion to risk.

However, my principal concern is the gap between research and innovation, and in particular the divide between individuals working in those two communities—that is, scientists and entrepreneurs. It is as though they have a different DNA. What we expect from each group is different and that is a very real challenge for UKRI, which must not say that it is “business as usual” for the traditional seven research councils.

The vision of and for those scientists funded by our research councils must change, and it must change significantly. My own council, the NERC, is 50 years old this year and, although environmental science has grown exponentially in that time and our scientists have made huge discoveries—from the hole in the ozone layer to the disastrous effects on health of sulphur dioxide from coal-powered stations, climate prediction and so on—only relatively recently as a council did we develop an industrial strategy looking at how the NERC science can help find innovative solutions to environmental challenges.

However, as Professor Duncan Wingham, the executive chair elect of the NERC, said at a recent council meeting and in this House last week, for too long our scientists have brought to Ministers a detailed understanding of environmental problems but have not felt empowered to take their research further to offer solutions or to see whether they have commercial or societal benefits, or perhaps have not felt that this was wanted. That is not surprising. Our seven research councils, in addition to funding research in most of the UK’s research universities, support some 18 research institutes, 32 research centres and a plethora of more localised facilities and units. If there is a new discovery, we have a new centre.

Their emphasis is on either research to support national capability or discovery science; it is not on innovation. Perhaps Professor Wingham was not questioning the value of this research—he most certainly was not—but in fact offering a challenge to all the research councils in the new landscape of UKRI not to populate the innovation space with a separate cadre of scientists or entrepreneurs but to encourage existing scientists and research leaders to take their thinking to the next level, which inevitably means working with other disciplines, using the totality of our rich research base to lead innovation and to be part of the solution, not simply asking someone else to find the solution.

If the UK is to deliver on both the science and innovation strategy and the industrial strategy, an early drive by UKRI to redefine the mission for our research communities and the people who work in them is absolutely crucial.