Examination of Witnesses (Questions 60-79)
Q60 Margaret Moran: Coming back to knowledge
transfer, you indicated earlier on that you felt there was room
for improvement in PPARC on this, and you have also said previously
that you think there is a need for more "joined-up thinking"
along the "science food chain". Where in the science
food chain do you think things have not been functioning as they
should? How do you think that PPARC can help to encourage that
joined-up thinking?
Professor Mason: The most glaring
example of the break in the food chain is between the research
community and industry; there is nothing very profound in that
statement, it is something that people have recognised for a long
time. That is where we are working to build the bridges, to put
the links back into the chain, and there are a number of things
that we are doing in this regard. I strayed into this area earlier
and I will just repeat myself for completeness, but one of the
important things is to advertise what we have so that people know
where the opportunities are. The other thing we are doing is to
involve industry at a much earlier stage in the R&D process
for these missions. The Aurora programme is a perfect example
of that where, right from the outset, we were talking to industry
about what the requirements were, what their capabilities were,
how we might match those, how we might make a credible bid, as
I was saying earlier, into this programme, where we not only had
the desire to do it but also the capability to do it so those
things are joined-up. What we intend to do is to do that much
more widely for all of these programmes so that industry is then
geared up to take advantage of the opportunity, rather than you
get an AO from ESA saying they want this and that and then they
suddenly start to have to think about it, which clearly is not
good in a competitive situation. The other thing that we are doing
and we are accelerating on is developing knowledge transfer networks.
I think networks are a really good vehicle, and basically what
they are is that you get to know the people involved with the
various parts of the network, you have the contacts in place,
so that when an idea comes up you know exactly who to call or
you know who to talk to, you know what their interests are. That
is a crude way of describing how the network works, but what we
are doing is to encourage people to come together, we are running
seminars; we are disseminating the information that we have in
order to advise people of where they should be working and how
they should take advantage of things. The fourth step that we
are taking is to embed knowledge transfer—I said this earlier
but I will just repeat it—into our whole process, so that
people do not think of knowledge transfer as an add-on, but it
is there from the very beginning. So we are requiring our proposers,
when they make a proposal for a scientific investigation, to provide
a knowledge transfer plan alongside that. If they do not have
the expertise to generate such a plan we will help them do it,
we will provide the assistance that will raise the awareness in
this area. Once they have approval for a programme we will work
with those investigators to essentially broker contacts with industry
that might be interested in what they are doing. A combination
of all those factors—I can summarise this by the words that
we are embedding this in our organisation and I think we will
do a lot better as a result. We are also planning to increase,
incidentally, the amount we spend on this sort of brokering, network
activity, we are going to double it by 2007 compared to 2004.
We are doing what we can, therefore, in this area, but as I said
at the beginning it is not all under PPARC's control, we can do
our bit but we require the rest of the system, the rest of the
chain, to respond accordingly, but there is every prospect that
people want to do that.
Q61 Margaret Moran: You talked about
brokering partnerships with industry. Unusually, you use an industrial
co-ordinator to do that; what are the costs and benefits of doing
that and how can you measure the effectiveness?
Professor Mason: One of the jobs
of the co-ordinator is to come up with the metrics whereby you
can do the measurement, but clearly the most effective measurement
is by tracking the number of activities that they get started
and how successful they are, and that is what we are doing. It
is important to make these quantitative metrics, but it is also
important to just take the temperature of the community at various
times. One of the programmes we have pioneered a lot of these
ideas on is Aurora, and I was impressed, when we set up these
meetings where people were invited, just at the level of response
from industry, from the academic community and the enthusiasm
that you could just feel within the room for this activity. I
think that really is the measure of success and we need to keep
that spirit going, it is really an entrepreneurial spirit, it
is a can-do spirit, and we need to make sure that that is embedded
in the system that then gets perpetuated.
Q62 Margaret Moran: Do you think the
effectiveness of using an industrial co-ordinator is particular
to PPARC, or is it something that other Research Councils could
learn from?
Professor Mason: It has been very
effective within PPARC and I see no reason why it could not be
equally effective in other areas, but of course each Research
Council has specific focus, specific requirements, they are all
different from one another. I would be surprised if a different
Research Council could implement it exactly the same way as we
do, but it is the principle of having a facilitator—that
is what I like to call these people. They are the people who make
the links, so they go out there and do the legwork and actually
make things happen. Having such a person is always going to be
valuable in my book.
Q63 Dr Turner: You have refocused your
Industrial Programme Support Scheme (PIPSS). What made you do
that and how are you going to assess the new version?
Professor Mason: It has been refocused
into this knowledge transfer agenda essentially; it is just one
of the steps we have taken to improve the links and we will assess
that in the same way as the whole programme—that is to see
what comes out of it. In a sense the refocusing means that we
are tracking it better, we are essentially doing what I was describing
earlier: people, when they put in a PIPSS proposal now have to
have a knowledge transfer plan associated with that, so it is
something that is embedded from the outset and we will see, during
the course of assessing the outcomes of these things which we
normally do, whether it has made a difference in terms of the
volume of knowledge transfer.
Q64 Dr Turner: You have chosen to directly
fund industry; how does industry respond to this, does it show
much interest, and what percentage of the fund is going to be
coming from this investment programme? Is this reflecting the
gaps in the venture capital market in Britain?
Professor Mason: I could not comment
on the latter but first of all industry are very enthusiastic
about this but we have to be very careful to realise that PPARC
is not the DTI and we should not be doing the job that DTI is
there to do. We are very careful about the sort of schemes that
we have set up, we are focusing on research and development which
serves the PPARC science agenda, so essentially all we are doing
is treating industry like a university group. If they want to
do something that serves the PPARC agenda, that develops capability
that is important for doing our science, then why not fund them
because they have the capability to do it. Currently, the amount
of money that will be open to this scheme is relatively small,
but it is an important fraction of our money where we are looking
at future investment, blue skies research, developing new ideas.
Like I say, if an industry group can make a compelling case that
they can do this job as well or better than a university group,
then there is no reason why we should not fund them.
Q65 Dr Turner: Have you had any problems
with intellectual property in your knowledge transfer schemes
and does it raise itself as an issue when negotiating collaborative
projects?
Professor Mason: PPARC does not
hold any intellectual property so in that sense it is not an issue
for us.
Q66 Dr Turner: Is that a deliberate policy,
that you do not hold any?
Professor Mason: Yes, it would
make life much too complicated if we did. What we are about is
generating intellectual property within other organisations. When
you have collaboration between industry and a university, that
is a potential minefield, but it is not specific to our type of
science and these organisations are developing ways of dealing
with this and it has been done very successfully. So I do not
see that that is a particular barrier to doing what we want to
do.
Q67 Dr Turner: You referred to the terahertz
imaging earlier, has it been a problem there, for instance, where
the technology is actually going out to a much wider market?
Professor Mason: I am not aware
of any problems.
Q68 Chairman: Could I just follow up
on that? You said that roughly half the budget goes in international
subscriptions; how in fact does the knowledge transfer operate
when in fact you are on international collaborative programmes?
If you take the Aurora project, for instance, where bits of it
are being developed in different countries, do we get access to
that intellectual property in order to take advantage of it for
the knowledge transfer? How does that work?
Professor Mason: It is much more
difficult, and this is why we have been very careful in the case
of Aurora to focus down and to bid for elements where we think
we have a good opportunity to get the knowledge transfer benefits
within the UK. In the more general sense though, our subscriptions
to ESA, for example, a lot of that money does go to technology
developments and in fact the research that led to the terahertz
activity was funded by ESA through this route, using our money
essentially. One of the other steps that we are taking to improve
the situation is to hold workshops and to have a brokering service
that looks to see the things that have been developed within these
international organisations and make those available to the UK.
We are part of that, we have helped to pay for them, and so there
is no reason why we cannot exploit them provided we have the capability.
We want to make sure that UK companies take a European perspective.
Q69 Chairman: When we are looking at
our thematic approach to the Research Councils in terms of knowledge
transfer, this is an area where it would be well worth us getting
some response on, as to how in fact we deal with international,
global knowledge, and how we get access to that. I am thinking
of areas like materials science, for instance, where clearly there
are huge opportunities within the space programme of being able
to tap into some of that technology as far as British business
is concerned.
Professor Mason: Yes.
Q70 Chairman: Could I move on very swiftly
to science in society. Obviously RCUK have a major objective of
trying to engage society with science, and that is absolutely
right. An alarm bell rang in the question earlier about the 80%
full economic costing proposals, that scientists would be engaged
on their research and would not be taking their research out into
society. What initiatives have you got in place to actually engage
broader society?
Professor Mason: First of all,
to silence that alarm bell, in the same way as we are embedding
knowledge transfer into the process we also want to embed science
in society into the whole grant, project application process,
so basically in the future not only will investigators have to
come up with a knowledge transfer plan, they will also have to
come up with a science in society plan. Again, the same things
apply: not everybody is good at this work, but if they are not
good at it we will help them, or we will find people who can help
them. It is not going to be an optional extra any more, we are
going to require that people actually make the results that they
achieve known to the rest of the world because that is the right
and proper thing to do. In order to assist that process we are
also investing money in developing materials that they can use,
multimedia material for example—a film about the Large Hadron
Collider is worth 1,000 words and it is worth putting some central
funding into getting a really good film clip that you can put
on the Web or take to a presentation, it pays for itself in terms
of effectiveness. The other thing we are doing, of course, and
we continue to do, we have invested in a number of specific facilities
in the astronomy area and we have invested in the Royal Observatory
at Greenwich, they are revamping their whole display area. This
is an organisation that gets a million visitors a year so it is
a very high impact; we have put £500,000 into developing
an astronomy gallery that presents modern astronomy to these people.
We have also, as you know, put funding into the Faulkes Telescope
Project to bring astronomy to schools, which is a fantastic initiative
that really brings the thing alive. One of the things we have
done in the past is to fund a travelling exhibit on particle physics
to explain the LHC. There are some very difficult concepts, so
you really need to put the effort into getting those concepts
into a form that you can convey to the wider public, never mind
school kids.
Q71 Chairman: You have made it absolutely
clear—indeed, Bob referred to it earlier—that in schools
the decline in students after the age of 16 studying stem subjects
is a big issue for particle physics and astronomy, but it is also
a big issue for most of science. I visited the National Science
Learning Centre in York last Friday and they did not seem to have
much contact with you; if we are not educating the teachers and
developing their knowledge—what can you do more to engage
with the regional and national learning centres because you have
a fantastic tale to tell?
Professor Mason: We have an open
door. I gave a talk two weeks ago at Reading at the ASE conference—Association
of Science Educators Conference—which had about 2,000 science
teachers from across the country. We have an annual PPARC lecture
there where we bring this sort of thing to attention, and one
of the things I said there is that we have an open door, we are
there to help you. The problem is that we have limited resources,
we are not the Department for Education and we do not have the
resources to go out to every school, but what we do have is a
willingness to make what we are doing available to anybody who
wants to use it. It is quite frustrating sometimes that you send
this message and people still say we have never heard of what
you are doing, but perhaps it is just a matter of time. We are
certainly there and willing to do it.
Q72 Chairman: Could I have a candid opinion
from you about whether you feel that RCUK's programme of Science
in Society is effective, and how would you evaluate its success?
Professor Mason: This is something
we are working on and I think it is moving in the right direction.
Science in society is a very broad subject actually; it is not
only educating people in schools but it is also informing wider
society, enabling them to make decisions about technology issues
which are always important. There is also a consultation process,
so at the RCUK level you have to worry about the nuclear programme
and GM crops and the like, which are very complicated, thorny
issues compared to putting astronomy across to the public which
is quite benign in comparison. There is a lot to tackle there
and I have been impressed by the willingness of the RCUK team
to come to grips with some of these issues. I am hopeful that
we will all be very impressed by what they do in the coming years.
Chairman: I just have a concern that
your door is open, everybody else's door is open, but nobody actually
goes through each other's door in this wonderful picture you are
painting today. Evan, can you come in on science careers?
Q73 Dr Harris: In respect of science
careers, what do you understand by the term "the two body
problem"?
Professor Mason: Having suffered
from it myself I understand perfectly what it means.
Q74 Dr Harris: Perhaps you could explain
first and then say what you are doing to solve the problem.
Professor Mason: The problem is
when people have relationships with other people working in usually
the same scientific area, so a husband and wife team, for example.
The two body problem is that it has been very difficult to find
a job in the same institution, because jobs are very few and far
between, so you either face a situation where one partner has
to give up being paid for what they do—they usually carry
on doing research but on a free basis, which is exploitation in
my book—or they end up living in some cases on different
continents or in a different community. It is one of the many
disincentives to get into science, and it particularly afflicts
women, of course, since we still live in a society where, for
reasons I sort of understand but do not sympathise with, it is
usually the man who gets the permanent job and the woman has to
tag along. As an academic community it is something that we really
do need to tackle; it is not something that PPARC per se has a
lot of leverage on, it is really a matter for the universities
because we cannot control who they hire. What we can do is provide
incentives so there are various fellowship schemes for example—they
are few and far between but they do exist—which will support
a partner in that circumstance.
Q75 Dr Harris: You do not offer those,
the Royal Society provides a few one year arrangements. Given
that astrophysics, for example, is the sort of area where you
may have to go to another continent in order to pursue your particular
research, or you are expected to go to the States, then surely
there is a particular onus on your Research Council, given the
specialised nature including particle physics, to provide something
similar. Is that something you are considering? You recognise
the problem, I am pleased you do.
Professor Mason: Absolutely. It
is one of the areas I do want to focus on in the near future,
but what we have in place currently is that when people do have
one of our fellowships we are quite flexible about where they
hold it. For example, if a partner was successful in winning a
PPARC five year fellowship, they could choose to spend part of
that time abroad with a partner or whatever, and we also do not
put any limitations on where they can hold it within the UK, so
our fellowship holders can move institutions as far as we are
concerned quite transparently. It then comes down to a negotiation
between individual universities, which we cannot control. We have
done a lot in the past to make our schemes as flexible as possible,
not just to address this particular two body situation, but the
more general situation. What we need to focus on in the future
is what more specific things we can do. Again, there is a relatively
fine line because we do not want to depart from our underlying
principles that we only support excellence, so we do not want
to support somebody just because they are a partner and I do not
think anybody would want that to happen.
Q76 Dr Harris: The Americans do much
more in this area and they do not seem to be backing poor science.
Most universities in the United States have specific provision
for this because they know they are not going to attract the best
if they are not prepared to move.
Professor Mason: That is absolutely
right, but that is not something that PPARC can do anything about
specifically. We need to maintain our principles and only support
excellence, but we would need to create flexibility within our
programme so that when there is excellence there are no barriers
in place to prohibit this sort of thing. One of the reasons why,
in the US, universities are able to make this provision comes
back to the full economic cost issue. The costs are upfront and
I think as we get into an upfront cost situation in the UK the
cost benefit to the university of attracting particular high-flying
individuals and therefore maybe subsidising a partner as a result
will become more obvious.
Q77 Dr Harris: The Royal Society do fund
these things and they also would say they do not sacrifice excellence,
so perhaps in a year you will be able to report back on further
thoughts. The situation around women in your studentships and
fellowships is not great, you recognise that. The figures from
your annual report show that in terms of applications it is an
expanding number—18%, then 16% and then in the last year
for which figures were available 29% of applications, but in terms
of success eight out of 37, nine out of 33 and then only six out
of 51. So you may be attracting a greater proportion of women
applicants but you are disappointing an even greater number. Do
you have a plan?
Professor Mason: This is something
that is quite close to my heart because in my previous group at
UCL we are one of the few places in the country that is approaching
a 50-50 ratio of men and women. There are various ways in which
we achieved that, but basically it is by creating the right sort
of environment for women to prosper in an academic environment.
Our experience in that particular instance is that success breeds
success, so what we need to do is provide role models for women,
and that is what we did do. We have senior academics who are women
who go out and show people what they are doing.
Q78 Dr Harris: Your Council bodies are
not overfilled with women; I made a note of a few of their ratios
again from your very useful book and they are pretty small, sometimes
it is one out of 18 plus someone from California on your Council.
Is there anything you can do to provide role models in that respect?
Professor Mason: Absolutely, and
that is something I am very keen to do. The issue there is not
that we discriminate against women, but that women are just not
available. That ratio reflects the proportion of senior women
in the subject area in the community, I checked that quite recently
because it was an issue of concern to me. What we need to do is
work from the ground up. When there are good women candidates
we absolutely put them in place.
Q79 Dr Harris: My final point—because
you are right, the number of women at the top is low—is
that there is a greater proportion lower down and some are clearly
leaving. Given that failure could be said to breed failure—because
if someone leaves and says I would not let you do this, it is
hopeless—do you have any way of doing exit interviews or
anything like that with people who have been on your grants, whether
that is doctorate, post-doctorate or more senior, to ask them
why they are leaving the field when they leave?
Professor Mason: We can do that
for our fellows and students, we cannot do it for the grant-supported
people because they are university people and we do not necessarily
have contacts. You have hit on the problem, what we have to do
is stop these people leaving, we have to actually understand why
it is that they are leaving and see if we cannot remedy that situation.
The two body problem is one issue, but there are much broader
issues of culture. A male-dominated culture works in a very different
way to a female-dominated group, and our experience in my previous
job is that you really have to work at getting that balance right
and making sure that you are proactive in listening to the female
complement that you have—just listening to what they have
to say and not just imposing a male perspective on things is absolutely
vital. I really think that the only way to solve this problem
ultimately is from the ground up because we do what we can. The
chair of our science committee is a woman, but she is the only
woman on the science committee. Nevertheless, it is a role model.
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