Research and innovation: systems problems require systems solutions
Dame Tamara Finkelstein DCB, Chief Executive, Royal Academy of Engineering
In over three decades as an economist and policy adviser to government as a civil servant, one of the most important lessons I learned was that all interesting and challenging public policy problems are systems problems - how do we drive up growth, how do we improve health outcomes, how do we tackle climate change?
That’s what took me back to my background training as an engineer and my current role at the Royal Academy of Engineering. We are leveraging the expertise of our Fellows - industrialists, academics, often serial entrepreneurs and deep tech investors - to contribute to improving citizens’ lives.
UKRI’s new strategy starts with the premise that the question of how to invest public money in R&D to advance knowledge, improve lives and drive growth is a systems problem, which requires a systems solution.
Interconnected investment that supports curiosity-based research and meets public needs and priorities, building the growing companies and great jobs that create the wealth in order to invest further and sparks the questions that research must answer. We must have the confidence to embrace system complexity if we are to have a chance of delivering ambitious outcomes.
Mapping out a system identifies connections and feedback loops but it also identifies the gaps, and we must embrace those too and seek solutions. I suggest three:
Where is the scaleup funding?
The UK has a strong startup culture and our universities produce more spin outs that any other EU country. But we have a large late-stage funding gap. We see companies with strong growth potential moving overseas as a result.
The Mansion House Compact and Accord, in which major pension providers agreed to invest in UK private companies to support growth, has promised more than it has delivered so far.
British Business Bank is a reason to hope but is still scaling up its approach for innovative companies. Work is in train to help UK investors understand deep tech and take the managed risks we need them to embrace. But it’s too slow and too complex.
For the companies we support the system can be opaque and demoralising to navigate. Who is going to step forward, map the system in a way that helps busy founders find their way and make sure that every part of the system is playing its part? We need this now.
Where are the women?
Only 31% of professors in STEM subjects are women, men are nearly three times more likely than women to work in R&D, and women earn less on average when they do, as reported in the government’s recently published Women in Research Charter. And our work on UK spinouts shows that 83% of them have all-male founding teams.
When you only access a limited proportion of the talent pool you are leaving innovation and growth opportunities on the table. The Charter requires better data to be collected and flexible working policies to be in place to support different career patterns.
It also calls out that women report persistent issues of bullying, harassment, and sexual misconduct across many parts of the research system. This is our system and we have to fix it.
Where are our local communities?
Research and innovation activity happens in places, companies grow in places, good jobs are created in places. So our system needs to be rooted in those places, and the communities that live there and their local democratic and civic institutions.
If we want public consent to invest in research and innovation, we must connect people to the work and the impact it has.
At the Academy we have developed a distinctive approach to support public dialogue on emerging technologies like safe and responsible AI and addressing increasing occurrences of high temperatures, drought and flooding. These events bring researchers, engineers and entrepreneurs together with local communities to listen to and learn from each other.
The system is not complete without the public voice being listened to and heard. Yes, that means embracing the devolution agenda as a means to reach the public, as well as the mayors.
So I welcome the new UKRI strategy that takes a systems approach and uses that to make bold choices. Let us also use it to spot the gaps or broken connections and fix them.
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author, and do not necessarily represent those of UK Research and Innovation (UKRI).
Dame Tamara Finkelstein DCB is Chief Executive at the Royal Academy of Engineering .
I don't disagree with the point about funding, but the research and innovation system exists to serve and support people: the researchers, the developers, the innovators, the entrepreneurs, the investors, the taxpayers and the public at large.
Let me mention some of the obstacles that are put in the way of the researcher. They have little to do with money. The typical STEM researcher is not the same sort of person as the typical entreprener or business leader. The system, such as it is, expects the researcher to suddenly be good at doing things that are completely different from what they have been doing before, with little to no training, support or infrastructure. It's as if the newly qualified lecturer were expected to recruit their own students from schools and build their own lecture theatre and lab to teach them in. Then, after five years spent entirely doing something quite different from research, either their business fails or they succeed in selling it to a conglomerate. What do they almost certainly want to do next -- return to academic research and resume their research career. At this point they will have a five-year gap in their knowledge of the advancing edge of their subject and a five-year gap in their publications. They simply will not get another university position -- the REF would actually penalise a university for employing them. And this is obvious right at the outset. Why would anyone do that unless they explicitly intended to switch from a research career to a business career? And how many star researchers want to do that?
No, the system is set up to repel the very people it claims to want.