Comments on: Slouching towards an industrial policy

By: The Keystone Garter

The Keystone Garter — Wed, 15 Feb 2012 16:57:41 +0000

Relating to the closed CIGS thread….
My government fought a carbon-tax, de facto subsidizing (themselves to hell) coal tar and oil for tens of billions annually. I begged them in 2007 to hit up a company, Gold Canyon, for a few tens of millions. They had a large Nevada CIGS deposit back when CIGS was cheap….any government that is formed out of the hatred of gov (Canada’s present arose paradoxically out of a lack of enough Great Depression gov), or unthinking maximizing of rich net worths…is inefficient.

Given the lack of carbon prices or any tempering of emissions, until the Holocaust at least, I wonder if CVD furnaces will share this fate? If the hydrocarbon feedstocks, maybe CO2 is more plentiful, for CVD become too expensive, will that mean processes like laser ablation to create CNTs and nanohorns, will be favoured? Should laser ablation, where hydro or renewable utilities, be favoured now?

By: Andy Parnell

Andy Parnell — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 15:24:30 +0000

Dear Richard,

having heard Lord Mandelson on the radio this morning http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_9687000/9687064.stm it seems that there is now broad political consensus about having a more interventionist policy in the future of a high tech UK economy. He comments that he could have written a speech that David Willets gave the other day. His take is that we are just not spending enough on innovation as we should be spending.

By: Richard Jones

Richard Jones — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 18:03:43 +0000

Mark, I do agree that generating a financial return isn’t the primary reason for Universities to protect IP (which is just as well as as an income stream it’s pretty much negligible even in the most successful institutions). But to do it to protect the interest of the exploiting company only makes sense if there is an exploiting company; if we can’t find a company with enough interest in it to license the IP, and we can’t put a plausible enough business plan to attract backers for a spin-out, then it’s not going to get exploited. Given the way patent costs escalate with time it makes sense to have a fairly clean and focused approach to deciding what’s worth sticking with and what isn’t.

Stephen, I don’t doubt for a moment that all sorts of useful discoveries – patentable and otherwise – have arisen from blue skies research, in the sense of research motivated by the curiosity of the researcher. But how effectively this transition happens depends on the way an innovation system is arranged around that blue skies research. Many great and useful discoveries were made by physicists working in the 1950′s and 1960′s in environments that gave full expression to those scientists unbounded curiosity. But those environments were closely integrated into the wider military and industrial structures of that particular cold war world, and it was those very instrumental and utilitarian needs that ultimately provided the justification for giving those scientists that freedom.

By: Stephen Moss (@stephenemoss)

Stephen Moss (@stephenemoss) — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 16:20:09 +0000

I agree with your point about the problem of defining blue skies research, and as I mentioned in my blog it appears that ministers and research council heads are just as unclear as the rest of us. In fact, it may well be that blue skies means different things to different disciplines. But I did not intend to give the impression that the purpose of blue skies research should be the generation of patents, and I’d stand even further from the suggestion that patent counting would serve any value.

For many of us doing blue skies research the motivation is curiosity, and most of the basic research I have done has not led to patents. But I do argue that patents frequently emerge as a bi-product of blue skies research, and that if Willetts wants to see the UK share of global patents increase, then it would be constructive to devote as much attention to this end of the research spectrum as he is clearly giving to the more applied end.

By: Mark Claydon-Smith

Mark Claydon-Smith — Sat, 14 Jan 2012 12:00:47 +0000

I almost agree with your comments on patenting. I am also not surprised that you are effectively rationing your patent budget – I think this is prevalent. However, I thought the strongest argument for university patenting and IP management is that it protects the interest of the exploiting company – not to raise institutional funds. Unfortunately current metrics (eg Hebci & HEIF) seem to reflect income generation and not consideration of potential market to exploit.

The recent IPO report on Graphene implied that the UK was failing to patent, in comparison with overseas competitors. For an emerging technology where the UK started with first-move-advantage, this seems worrying. However, I think it says as much about the indiginous capacity to exploit, as the entreprenuerial inclinations of the universities.

By: Richard Jones

Richard Jones — Sat, 14 Jan 2012 09:59:23 +0000

Stephen, of course I know that many people share your worries about the lack of support for blue skies research. But the more I think about it the more difficulty I have with the term “blue skies” itself, and what it might mean. You could argue that blue skies research is what you do if you are motivated purely by the desire to find out how the world works, and applied or goal-directed research is what you do if you want to make interventions in the world, through making new devices or guiding action or policy. But then the question comes, whose motivation are we talking about – the motivation of the scientist or the motivation of the funders? There seems to me to be a bit of a paradox in your position, which is to say that we will find out more useful and patentable things if scientists get more money to do blue skies research – you could argue that if the result of the funding is to produce patents, and that is its purpose, then its not blue skies research, but goal directed research. Then you’re arguing not about the best balance between goal directed research and blue skies research, but about the best way of funding goal directed research. In other words, your saying that if the goal is to produce more likely drug targets, the best way to do this is just to give talented scientists unrestricted money (i.e. from the point of view of the scientist, you’re funding blue skies research because their motivation is curiosity, but from the point of view of the funder this is goal-directed research because you’re expecting to get more patents out of it). This, of course, is quite a popular position amongst some influential people and can frequently be heard in the vicinity of Carlton House Terrace; and through things like the Wellcome and ERC schemes more funding seems to be going into this direction. I’m not sure that this is an unalloyed blessing. I wonder also though whether your complaint about not being able to get money for “fishing trips” is simply a reflection of a much more local problem, in that BBSRC’s view of what good science is seems occasionally to be one underpinned by philosophy of science that’s about 50 years out of date.

Since you mention patents I should also say that I’m not at all convinced that counting patents is very relevant. The number of patents coming out of Sheffield’s research is controlled, above all, by the size of our patent budget. If we wanted more patents then we could increase the size of that budget. I don’t think there’s a strong case for doing that because I don’t think this would bring a return, given the current difficult conditions for raising venture capital and finding licensing opportunities.

By: Andrea Haworth

Andrea Haworth — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 10:35:08 +0000

Thank you for such a succinct and simple explanation of the state of play and how things might start get fixed (despite being longer than you intended). I hope it gets widespread attention.

By: Stephen Moss (@stephenemoss)

Stephen Moss (@stephenemoss) — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 09:13:23 +0000

Willetts’ speech covered too many areas to easily discuss in a single blog, but I agree with your overall view of where science policy is heading under the coalition. He does seem to be feeling his way and, in defiance of the laws of physics, heading in several directions at once. Some aspects appear solid and reasonably well thought through, like the leadership councils and catapult centres, but others such as new universities for postgraduates seem utterly fanciful. And there is a clear disconnect between blue skies research and commercialisation that I blogged briefly about here. http://blogs.nature.com/binocular_vision/2012/01/12/willetts-and-the-problem-of-blue-skies-research