I wrote this short piece for the online magazine The Conversation as a comment on the government’s response to the Witty Review on universities and economic growth. It was published there as Budget 2014: cash for research set against an overall story of long-term decline; as the new title suggests it was edited to give more prominence to the new science-related announcements in the Budget. Here’s the original version.
Current UK innovation policy has taken on a medieval cast; no sooner do we have “Catapult Centres” for translational research established, than there is a call for “Arrow Projects”. This is the headline recommendation of a report to government by Sir Andrew Witty on the role of universities in driving economic growth. The tip of the arrow, in Witty’s metaphor, is world-class research from our leading universities – behind this tip we should mobilise research institutes and private sector partners to develop new technologies that would drive new economic growth, involving British companies, big and small, in new supply chains.
Last week saw a government response to this report, which warmly welcomed its recommendations, while making few actual new commitments to support them. But last week also saw the publication of the latest set of national research and development statistics. Total R&D expenditure – in the private sector, in government laboratories and in the universities – has fallen in both cash and real terms, and in proportion to the size of our economy is now substantially lower than both established economic rivals such as France, Germany, the USA and Japan and emerging economic powers such as Korea and China.
Our continuing economic problems, with stagnating productivity and a continuing inability to produce enough tradable goods to pay our way in the world, suggest that we should worry about how effective our innovation system is for translating science into economic growth. Continue reading “On universities and economic growth”