Select Committee on Education and Skills Minutes of Evidence


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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