Examination of Witness (Questions 600-619)
MONDAY 17 MARCH 2003
RICHARD LAMBERT
600. So it is not pre-empting what you are doing?
(Mr Lambert) I do not think so at all, no. The emphasis,
for instance, on the role of the RDAs I think is really interesting,
and one of the things we, our little gang, have to understand
is the effectiveness of RDAs in technology transfer, what skills
are required within the RDAs to make that work, which ones do
a good job and which ones do not do a good job. So I think that
is really helpful.
601. So, in terms then of the overall development
of policy, you feel that your review will be able to inform that
policy, despite the fact that some of it is already, perhaps,
up and running a bit?
(Mr Lambert) Yes, I do think that.
Chairman
602. In terms of comparison, I have always thought
the easier job is to run a private sector commercial company,
because the disciplines are well known, if you do not make a profit
you go out of business, certainly after a reasonably short time;
whereas, you are running something like a university, there are
so many constraints on you, you do not have that simple discipline,
you have got to please a large number of government departments
and all sorts of people. And, yes, you do not want to go bust,
in the UK, universities can go bust, as we know, but do you think
it is going to be difficult to take, for example, the Royal Society
of Arts' work on tomorrow's company; bits of that I have always
thought were applicable to university management, yet if you talk
to most vice-chancellors that has not really swung across their
consciousness, they do not see it as appropriate?
(Mr Lambert) I think your next witness will have more
authoritative views than I do. I start off by thinking that over
the last many years I have been aware of many companies which
have been spectacularly mismanaged and have gone out of business,
I am not aware of many universities getting into such a mess.
So either they have better safety nets or fewer risks, but there
seem to be fewer catastrophes in the university sector than there
are in the business sector.
603. In the Co-operative movement, which I have
some knowledge of, no-one ever went out of business, they "transferred
their engagement", which only meant usually another, stronger
society would take them over, they had gone out of business but
they had transferred their engagement. Universities are a bit
like that, are they not, if you think back to some of the examples,
like the University of Cardiff, University College Cardiff, and
so on?
(Mr Lambert) I think it will be interesting to see,
and I do not think this is my remit particularly, so perhaps I
should not say it, but the development of the White Paper seems
to me to suggest that stronger institutions will become stronger
and weaker institutions might become weaker, just looking at the
way the policy is moving.
604. Why; because of the changes in research
funding, or what?
(Mr Lambert) Yes.
605. Because that will be one of the implications,
you think?
(Mr Lambert) It might be.
Jonathan Shaw
606. Will that be a good or a bad thing?
(Mr Lambert) I do not know. I am at a very early stage.
My assumption is that it will be a good thing for research-based
universities to be encouraged to do great research work, and that
it will be a good thing for non-research-based universities to
be incentivised and rewarded for other things, like playing an
important part in their regional economy.
Chairman
607. So York, Warwick, Bath, 15 years ago you
would have said "Stick to teaching and forget about the research"?
(Mr Lambert) I think, again, it is off my field of
knowledge. I think it will be a serious mistake to do that, I
think it will be a serious mistake to say, "This is a small
category, these are their names and here we are going to bat for
ever," because that would run against everything that one
knows about economic efficiency.
Mr Chaytor
608. Can I bring you back to something you said
in your opening remarks, because you have not been terribly forthcoming
really, because you have said, "I don't really have a view
on this," or "It's too early to say." During your
period at the Financial Times you must have formed views about
the relationship between education and business. In your opening
remarks, you talked about productivity in the context of British
universities not being terribly good at translating ideas into
commercial reality, but do you think those are absolutely interrelated,
if we improve our ability to translate good ideas into sellable
goods and services, will that automatically solve the productivity
problem, this 20, 25% gap between Britain and the USA that the
Chancellor is always talking about? Are the two things the same,
or are they different?
(Mr Lambert) I think there are many other components
in it, I do not think it would automatically solve the problem,
I think it would help resolve the issue but I think there is a
lot more to it than that.
609. But, in terms of this translation of ideas
into commercial reality, are there examples you can quote, or
is this just a myth that has tended to develop over time?
(Mr Lambert) There are lots of examples I can quote
of brilliant ideas being developed at universities and turning
into commercial successes, both in the UK and internationally.
610. But is this a British characteristic, or
does not this happen in all countries? Presumably, all universities,
in all countries, develop good ideas; they are not translated
necessarily into something you can sell in that country?
(Mr Lambert) The White Paper seems to me to spell
out this issue reasonably well, where I think it says that, talking
about this issue, fewer than 1 in 5 of British businesses have
any relationships with a university and university knowledge,
and that if that proportion could be increased that would be to
the advantage of the UK economy.
611. But if those 1 in 5 businesses are operating
in a fairly routine, mundane, everyday sort of field, why should
they have to have a relationship with a university, if they are
not operating in a high-tech field, or an advanced field?
(Mr Lambert) You are going to be sad, because I am
going to say again these are very early days for me, but I was
struck by a chart I was looking at the other day, produced by
the OECD, which measured research intensity of different sectors
of business and industry in different countries, and it was a
pie chart, and in the centre of the pie-chart was the OECD average
for research intensity for those sectors, and what that showed
me was that a country like France more or less hit the average
on every point, the OECD average of research intensity. If you
looked at the UK, by contrast, the UK was out of the chart on
pharmaceutical, the emphasis on pharmaceutical was vastly greater
proportionally than anything else in the OECD area; but if you
looked at the segments which covered the process industry, metallurgy,
the older industrial sectors, the UK research intensity was much
less than the OECD average, and then the countries you would think
of as our particular competitors. That struck me as being quite
interesting, to the extent that the UK has become less competitive
in those industries over the last 20 years. I am a bit nervous
about saying there is a kind of cause and effect there, but I
think it is quite an interesting observation.
612. So there is a direct link between the extent
to which the university reaches out to industry and the strength
of the manufacturing industry?
(Mr Lambert) I do not know if there is a direct link,
but it seems to me there might well be a link, and I think it
is a two-way thing as well. I think that there is a question about
how far business reaches out to the university sector; one or
two people have suggested that an issue is that business is not
dynamic enough in approaching the university sector for ideas
and knowledge, and that the communications between the two are
not clear enough, so that it is quite hard for a business person
to come from scratch, as it were, and to know who to call and
where to call and when to call within the university system. That
is something that a number of people have said.
Valerie Davey
613. I am interested in this communication,
how we get these two bodies, which apparently are separate, one
doing pure research and one doing applied research, I am caricaturing,
of course, to come together. Another interesting thing we learned
in America was that the university staff are not paid for a full
year. Now I told my brother this, he is an academic here, and
he said, "Yes, but you tell me what they get paid for the
proportion of the year." But the interesting thing was that
the part of the time they were not paid by the university they
went out to get work from business and industry around them, in
other words, they were doing the research for the companies in
the two or three months that they were not being paid by the university.
Now this overlap of people working in both sectors seemed to me
quite a challenge and an interesting way of dealing with it. Do
we not need an overlap such that no-one would ever have a communications
problem of 'phoning up or finding out who on earth the person
was, they would say, "You know so-and-so, he did the work
for us here over the summer, let's ask him about. . ." Is
this communications not an absolute farce that we have got ourselves
in?
(Mr Lambert) Was that a state university in the US?
614. As I understood it, this was part of the
set-up.
(Mr Lambert) I do not think it is in the private universities
you would find that happening; but anyway that is by the by. Personally,
I think it is horses for courses, I think that what is appropriate
for—
Valerie Davey: It was Princeton.
Chairman
615. A lot of the Ivy League have eight-, nine-month
contracts.
(Mr Lambert) I am afraid I do not know, but my thought
would be that, as I say, it would be horses for courses. I think,
for research-based universities, there is enough to be doing within
their own mission to be at least a full-time job, and my prejudice
is that there are things that research-based universities should
not be doing for industry. I do not think that it is the job of,
say, Imperial to be the product development fire-fighter for a
manufacturing company that is having problems with a product,
it is not their job to sort it out, it is their job to get new
knowledge. So I am not sure that I think that would be a way of
solving the problem. I think one of the issues that people are
talking about, and I think is really interesting and I aim to
find out about, is the world of RDAs as being intermediaries between
the different universities in a region and the business within
that region, and I think that is something really important and
worth exploring.
616. Why does anyone want an intermediary?
(Mr Lambert) I think—I think I think—because
the business of technology transfer seems to me to be quite a
demanding and quite an expensive exercise, and that if you are
not one of the top, whatever X number of universities it is, you
are going to have to think very hard about whether you are going
to deploy resources into an office of half a dozen people, or
however many it takes to do this work, and that it would be better
to get scale, if you could, on a regional basis than on an individual
basis. I do not know if that is the case or not, that is what
I would like to find out.
Valerie Davey
617. I am interested in this, "I do not
think Imperial should be looking after, probably." I think
the Chancellor might question that, and say, "We've got a
manufacturing industry here with a real technological problem,
which for its next stage of development needs sorting;" then
why not Imperial, actually to sort that out? What is so special
about Imperial which says it cannot deal with a problem, we are
not asking them to put in the pipes, down the road, what I am
saying is if we are going into the next design and technology,
computer design and technology for, you know, getting the next
tube under the river, or whatever it might be?
(Mr Lambert) I think I think that there is a difference
between research and development, and that research is about what
you have just described, it is about developing new knowledge,
developing ideas for their own sake, because they will be of economic
and commercial value. The development is about taking those ideas
and turning them into usable products, and my assumption is that,
as I say, different universities will have a particular emphasis
on research and some will have a particular emphasis on development.
618. The implication of that is that business
and industry itself is not doing the former, research?
(Mr Lambert) As it happens, I have just come back
from Japan, where I had time to look at how things work there,
and, there, all the research until now has been done by the companies,
and the universities had no role in it at all, and that is one
of their problems. Because, the nature of knowledge, in a knowledge-based
society, it seems the range of technologies that you need to have
access to product development is much wider than it used to be,
one, and, two, that companies cannot afford it any more. So I
think that it is important that universities should be encouraged
and properly financed to develop great research.
Jeff Ennis
619. I would like to ask a supplementary to
a question that David pursued earlier on, Mr Lambert. You mentioned
the fact that there appears to be an overemphasis on pharmaceutical
research and a move away from manufacturing type research in this
country. Have you analysed what the reasons are for that?
(Mr Lambert) No.
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