Advanced Research and Invention Agency Bill (Sixth sitting)

Debate between Stephen Metcalfe and Aaron Bell

Thursday 22nd April 2021 Public Bill Committees

[Aaron Bell (Newcastle-under-Lyme) (Con)]

rose—

[Stephen Metcalfe (South Basildon and East Thurrock) (Con)]

rose—

Advanced Research and Invention Agency Bill (Second sitting)

Debate between Stephen Metcalfe and Aaron Bell

Wednesday 14th April 2021 Public Bill Committees

[Aaron Bell]

Perhaps we need someone with particular expertise in portfolio management as well, because it seems the risk/reward of these missions is so key. I will leave it there.

[Stephen Metcalfe]

Q Good afternoon, all. I have a quick question for Felicity. We heard earlier from Dr Highnam from DARPA about the high level of churn among the project managers and that they move between academia, business and, in their case, DARPA and that creates the right culture. Presumably it requires flexibility from the businesses themselves. Do you see your members embracing that kind of secondment into a research body such as ARIA, even though it may not lead to anything?

Felicity Burch: I have not talked to them directly about this in the context of ARIA, but I can reflect on conversations about business and university collaboration more generally. I think our members do see value in seconding people to research teams to learn new skillsets. Likewise, we would love to see more people from university sectors being seconded into businesses. Were there a world-leading agency like ARIA, being able to say, “My people have worked on one of these teams” would be quite a prestigious thing for businesses. I guess the flipside of that is this: how do we make sure that we build ARIA to be that prestigious body that businesses feel comfortable seconding their people to?

I think that time and again we hear businesses saying that that fluidity of people between the business sector, the university sector and the research sector more generally is really important for successful innovation and building an ecosystem. I am sure that if any business pointed to any one individual, they might not want to lose them, but I think this is much more about how we build a really flexible and really brilliant innovation ecosystem, and to that extent I think that businesses would be really happy to see those moves.