"Stop whispering about picking winners": Dr Robert Sorrell on why UK R&D needs to be open about difficult choices
Dr Robert Sorrell sets out his tests for difficult R&D choices – and why we must protect curiosity-driven science and core skills at the same time
‘Picking winners’ is one of those phrases that instantly puts people on edge. It sounds arbitrary, risky even. But in research and development (R&D), everyone is making choices all the time – government, industry, start-ups and academics alike.
The problem isn’t that we pick. It’s that we don’t do it openly, consistently and strategically.
If we’re serious about the UK delivering leading R&D in the next decade, we have to get comfortable with choiceful investment. Spreading money across everything might feel politically safe, but in practice it starves genuine opportunities of oxygen and confuses the very people whose capital we need. Investors look at us and ask a simple question: what does the UK actually want to lead on?
How to pick winners well
For me, the basis for making these hard choices rests on three straightforward principles.
First, distinctiveness. Can we be distinctive in this space, or build that capability? If we’re just following the pack, we shouldn’t kid ourselves we’re going to set the pace.
Second, competitiveness. We need a cold‑eyed view of the global landscape. If someone else is ten years ahead, does it really make sense to try to catch up? Or is it better to build a strategic alliance where we have something they want, and they have something we need?
Third, sovereign capability. There are some areas – brutally exposed in recent years by COVID, conflict and climate change – where, as a country, we simply must have capability in place. You cannot outsource everything that is critical to your resilience.
Apply those principles and the UK’s potential R&D strengths become clear: sectors such as artificial intelligence, quantum, life sciences, engineering biology, advanced materials and more.
Public investment should bring greater certainty, not control
These principles are useless without the right actors and relationships. It’s here that public funding has a very particular role to play – not as a central planner of research topics, but as a partner that provides greater certainty.
Let me be clear: I am not talking about breaching the Haldane principle. The government should not set the detailed research agenda. But it should set out a coherent industrial strategy, make its long-term priorities clear, and align regulation, policy and funding accordingly.
When government does that well, public money has a powerful leverage effect. It signals commitment, de‑risks first‑of‑a‑kind plants, and crowds in private investors who know that if they sink serious money into feasibility studies, there is likely to be a market at the end of it.
Drive innovation into impact
We are very good at investing at the early technology readiness levels. Where the system creaks is at the handoff into proof of market, proof of concept and prototypes.
The investment needed here is often not £millions, but tens of thousands. What matters most is agility. Early-stage innovators need fast support. If you are a spin-out company, you shouldn’t be waiting months and months to hear if you’ve got funding. At the same time, projects need sensible milestones so we’re not just accruing grant after grant without progress.
Stronger collaboration with industry will help address more real‑world challenges. In my corporate life, I often saw a mismatch between what companies actually needed and the solutions being developed in universities.
The most productive conversations come when industry frames its issues as challenges, not prescribed technologies. I’ve seen academics listen and then say, “You describe your problem like it’s this; to us, it sounds more like it’s that.” That’s when genuinely innovative answers appear.
Make large infrastructure more accessible to small businesses
We also need to think carefully about physical infrastructure, particularly for deep tech. Testing and validation in these sectors can often be expensive. We can’t build synchrotrons all over the country.
Certain facilities should be treated as shared resources, not just assets for a few large organisations. That means avoiding the ‘batteries not included’ model where we fund the shiny kit but not the people, operating costs and access schemes that make it usable. If small businesses and start‑ups – the lifeblood of innovation – can’t reasonably access these facilities, we’ve missed the point.
Don’t erode our capability or curiosity
Crucially, this agenda does not mean abandoning the foundations of our R&D strength. None of this works if we don’t protect our core scientific capability and curiosity‑driven research.
In areas like advanced materials, for example, there is an enormous amount still to do to meet future challenges. Think about flying planes with liquid hydrogen sloshing around at –253°C, or running fusion reactors: these are extreme environments that demand both new materials and clever use of existing ones.
That, in turn, depends on keeping a skills base in subjects such as metallurgy and chemistry to name just a couple. Once you denude those skills, you are looking at a decade or more to restore them. We need to look at things from a system rather than individual component perspective. In areas like power, for example, we dismantled national expertise decades ago and now find ourselves scrambling to rebuild it just as we need to redesign the grid for a distributed, low‑carbon world.
At the same time, ‘bucket one’ of the UKRI strategy – protecting curiosity‑driven research – is non‑negotiable. It is absolutely critical to driving the system. Many of today’s strategic technologies have their origins in work that was not originally aimed at a particular application. If we weaken that, we undermine the foundation of future innovation.
The UK can reap the rewards of bold choices
The UK is extraordinarily good at coming up with ideas. Where we have been less successful is in capitalising on them. If we are not careful, we become the low-cost route for technology development for the rest of the world with others capturing the value of our early-stage thinking.
My argument is simple: don’t be afraid of making bold choices. Be open and principled about where we choose to lead. Get the collaborations, critical handoffs and infrastructure right. And never neglect the core sciences that underpin everything else. That is how we deliver the next decade of R&D on our terms, with benefits that accrue here in the UK.
Dr Robert Sorrell has more than 30 years of R&D leadership across the UK’s industrial, academic and government sectors. He currently serves as the Chair of Trustees of the Campaign for Science and Engineering (CaSE), Chair of the Science & Technology Advisory Council for the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) and Strategic Advisor to the National Centre for Universities and Business (NCUB). He is also the Hydrogen Challenge Lead for the Henry Royce Institute and CEO of the Royce Hydrogen Accelerator. He was formerly the Vice President for Public Partnerships at BP and a board member at Innovate UK.