Examination of Witnesses (Questions 60-79)
PROFESSOR CHRISTOPHER
SNOWDEN, PROFESSOR
DIANA GREEN
AND DR
BOB BUSHAWAY
15 MARCH 2006
Q60 Chairman: Do you think they should
put more emphasis on knowledge transfer?
Professor Snowden: Some of the
research councils already do put a high degree of emphasis on
knowledge transfer.
Q61 Chairman: Like?
Professor Snowden: An example
I would give is that if you are in industry one of the most important
areas of knowledge transfer is the people. If we look at, for
example, the CASE schemes which have been running for many years
and are still very popular today, the knowledge transfer partnership
schemes which have been very successful—and as an example
you started off citing the issue of chemistry—at Surrey
we have had four Knowledge Transfer Partnerships in the last four
years in chemistry which have been very successful. That is an
example of how to help sustain important areas of activity successfully.
If we look at other areas, there is a greater interest now in
embedded activities where, for example, companies can embed small
teams in universities. That is a relatively new process but one
which we would all welcome because it allows real interaction
in a very successful environment.
Chairman: Is it knowledge transfer that
saved your chemistry department? I do not want you to answer.
It was a facetious comment.
Q62 Dr Harris: You said it is about
people. If a large number of university researchers go into industry,
is that therefore, on that measurement, a good thing?
Professor Snowden: I think it
would be a good thing because today we now see a greater level
of exchange. In other words, researchers do go into industry and
they often come back from industry.
Q63 Dr Harris: Do they?
Professor Snowden: Yes, they do.
Q64 Dr Harris: I think there is good
evidence that universities are not retaining good research staff.
Professor Snowden: In some areas
that is correct but at the same time let me emphasise that you
have to fundamentally ask what are we here to do. The flow of
good researchers into industry must surely be regarded as a success
as well. Some of those very successful researchers do come back
to universities and add a great deal in value in that process.
Q65 Dr Harris: There is data on people
taking a pay cut to come back from industry into academia?
Professor Snowden: I did.
Q66 Dr Harris: You are a very good
person but that is what we would call a small sample size.
Professor Snowden: I cannot point
you to a specific study in that respect but I can point you to
many examples in real life that would illustrate that.
Q67 Chairman: In terms of this general
issue of the research councils' role in knowledge transfer, do
either of your colleagues have anything to say?
Professor Green: It is dangerous
to over-exaggerate the dichotomy, to assume that it is an either/or.
As Sir Keith said, this is really about balance. It is entirely
right and proper that the research councils should be concerned
about the practical applications of the research that we are all
being funded for. The argument, it seems to me, is about where
that balance lies, particularly if the core issue is not the balance
within that budget but the amount of funding that is available
in general terms. If there is not enough to go round, it becomes
much more important to argue about where the cut-off point is.
Q68 Dr Harris: It is a balance but
this third stream funding and other stuff is a top slice for money
that would otherwise go to the best research generally speaking
in terms of responsive grant giving. Is it right for knowledge
transfer to have two bites of the cherry, if you like, getting
this third stream funding so-called and then getting what we just
heard from Sir Keith O'Nions is an increasing proportion of research
council funding when other necessary parts of scientific research
activity which are not knowledge transfer but are not just pure
research—like, for example, the need to communicate—are
not getting their, arguably, fair share? Why should there be two
bites? How can you justify it?
Dr Bushaway: If I could comment
on the third stream, that is a very new development over the last
five years or so and is only just beginning to see the benefit.
As far as the research councils' role is concerned, I think they
have always had a role to play in generating successful knowledge
transfer. I would quote from a report that the research councils
funded that the University of Birmingham undertook some research
on, People, Partnerships and Programmes. It is those three
things which the research council contribution is so fundamental
to. The pool of knowledge that is generated in UK universities
and part funded through research council grant awards is part
assisted by the role that the research councils play with other
stakeholders in bringing about collaborative partnership, in funding
programmes. For example, the one I would cite is the longstanding
Link Programme scheme which brings together on a match funding
basis, research council funding and private sector funding, to
pursue particular projects; and the funding through case awards
and other fellowship schemes, industrial scholarship schemes,
the transfer of people between industry and universities. What
HEIF does is accelerate and add to the benefit of that relationship.
I would not see them as mutually exclusive so that we either have
one thing or the other. We need to have both. It is vital that
we continue that.
Professor Snowden: You touched
on this point: how do we attract staff back into academia or indeed
retain them. This is precisely one of the mechanisms which allows
that because a lot of our most innovative staff want to achieve
that balance between being successful at enterprise and innovation
whilst retaining a role in universities. This helps facilitate
the generation of new activities, new companies, whilst allowing
those staff to be part of that process. It has been a longstanding
desire amongst some of our very best academic staff to want to
engage with business and indeed to start some of their own and
this helps facilitate this in universities in a way that was not
quite so easily done historically.
Q69 Dr Turner: How do you feel about
the coordination between the research council support for knowledge
transfer and government measures to promote innovation? Do you
think it is effective?
Professor Snowden: There is still
a high degree of disconnect between the very many different groups
involved in this. Earlier on you were talking with Sir Keith about
European funding schemes and Framework 7. I think that is a particularly
good example where we nationally could make better use of the
knowledge transfer element if we could connect that up with our
own internal research council funding schemes and other schemes
in the DTI, for example, more effectively.
Professor Green: More could be
done. I am very encouraged by some of the recent progress in terms
of trying to make those linkages. A case in point is the new AHRC
and the extent to which it is now getting involved in knowledge
transfer partnerships. It seems to me that is a move in the right
direction but there is a case for more joining up. You spoke earlier
again about joining up with the RDAs and there is a huge area
where their purposes are different but nevertheless where there
is a common purpose. There is a great opportunity for some joined
up thinking. The difficulty, as Sir Keith rightly pointed out,
is that the science councils in the regions have grown at a very
differential rate. The one in Yorkshire has only just got off
the ground. It is finding its feet so the extent to which you
can form those relationships and start getting best value out
of them is going to take some time to sort out.
Q70 Dr Turner: Do you think this
coordination would be helped if you were to reduce the proliferation
of different government and other sources of funding and support,
many of which on the face of it just do not look big enough to
be that effective? Do you think there are some useful gains to
be made from streamlining this lot?
Professor Snowden: It is quite
a difficult question to answer. In some areas, those relatively
small pots of money are quite highly focused and do touch on activities
that historically have not received support. They are doing a
great deal of good in that respect. The question is whether we
end up with getting higher gearing on this, perhaps better advantage
from the way these might interact than whether they should all
be put into one pot, because they often work completely independently
without reference to each other, so you do not necessarily get
the extra added value out of that process.
Dr Bushaway: In the week of the
Cheltenham Festival, it is a case of horses for courses, exactly
as Professor Snowden suggests. Over the years, through engagement
with the stakeholders, the research councils and other sections
of government have listened to what is a complex relationship
between the generation of knowledge and its application successfully
in commercial or other social value activities. They have put
in place a series of funding programmes which support that process
on the so-called triple helix very successfully. I would think
the real remaining problem is the complexity between the short
term and the long term. Many programmes focus rightly on short
term gains and yet it is sometimes quite difficult to assess where
contributions are being made in research and where those gains
are going to pull through in five, 10 or fifteen years. If you
take any particular technology we are familiar with today and
track its history to the market place, what goes into it across
20 or 25 years are some quite bizarre byways of knowledge generation
that you would not at first think would be relevant, the mobile
phone being a good example. I think it is important that we not
only have short term gains in these programmes but longer term
gains as well. One of the areas that AURIL is most concerned with
is the generation of the people who have the expertise to stay
with these things and take them forward into the future. We would
like to see the research councils more engaged with longer term
programmes, longitudinal tracking studies, for example, where
people's careers take them; and this switching from industry to
university to maybe a third party like an RDA or a government
agency switching back into university. We do not have the information
to show how that really works.
Q71 Dr Iddon: Do you think government
and its agencies are putting far too much pressure on far too
many academics and really we ought to be picking the winners?
Ought we to be picking the academics who have the entrepreneurial
ability and put probably more money into fewer projects that we
feel will go straight through to the market place?
Professor Snowden: That is one
of the areas I have specifically been looking at over the last
nine months. I do not think you would find that there is enormous
pressure on the individual academics to do that. Obviously there
is at university level, to look at how you can exploit it, but
there has been greater focus on looking at innovations and new
companies that would have successful routes. There is a much better
appreciation than there was historically on how to take that through,
with the classic balance of small companies coming up with good
P&Ls and running out of cash because they did not have the
experience historically to manage that type of route. A much better
process is engaged there. Universities themselves now generally
do a much better job of managing the process of the evolution
of those companies than they did historically.
Professor Green: Universities
are much better at managing this area of work than they were when
they first started out on this journey five years ago. It is important
to remember in that respect that one of the logics of the third
leg funding in the first instance was to say that this is a legitimate
activity for universities to engage in. There was an aspiration
that many of us would organise ourselves to precisely identify
those people who were best at operating this idea and investing
in them to provide, if you like, a kind of parallel career track
which recognised and rewarded performance in this area. De
facto that has happened in many universities in a much more
managed way.
Q72 Chairman: It has happened despite
the research councils rather than because of them?
Professor Green: I think it has
been facilitated by the research councils being more explicit
about the extent to which this was a legitimate activity. It has
been reinforcing.
Q73 Mr Flello: In terms of knowledge
transfer support from multidisciplinary research, can I ask what
your individual experiences are of any problems in seeking that
support from multidisciplinary research?
Professor Snowden: I would not
say it is a problem. It is almost the opposite. There is such
a strong degree of encouragement now, from within and between
research councils and externally—for example, the Research
Assessment Exercise which we touched on earlier—that the
issue is more one now of recognising that multidisciplinary research
is a natural evolution of any single area of research going forward.
If you go back 10 years, universities initially struggled with
the idea of how they would nucleate that because of the necessity
to assign credit throughout the universities. That has largely
disappeared now and interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary working
now has become very much the norm and there is great enthusiasm
for it.
Dr Bushaway: In our experience,
the generation of knowledge works best across the borders between
academic disciplines. In other words, horizontal linkages are
more important than vertical linkages in many cases to subjects.
I would pay tribute to the research councils' efforts to not let
borders between their various remits get in the way of recognising
that. I think of work, for example, in the last 10 years carried
out by the BBSRC, particularly to watch the border with their
colleagues in the EPSRC, so that as far as biotechnology and life
sciences work in general there was no artificial barrier there
that prevented good multidisciplinary work being funded. As far
as commercialising, the problem is this one between short term
and long term. It often takes much longer to pull through those
benefits in some areas than it does in others. Some sectors of
UK industry are better geared for working with universities than
others. For example, the pharmaceutical industry in the UK is
pre-eminent in working with universities to bring forward benefits
in partnership with research council funded work; whereas in other
sectors, perhaps not naming any, it is less readily forthcoming.
Professor Green: One of the most
important developments recently is the extent to which the research
councils have facilitated that convergence between disciplines.
In passing, I have restructured my university precisely so that
I can bring about some of those creative cross-overs between key
disciplines. To take a particular example and something that we
have been very pleased with, the discipline hopping scheme is
a very good idea in terms of bringing together with a small amount
of money to really experimentally look at some of the benefits.
We have one in my institution that brings together people from
the material science area with people in the biomedical area,
which is producing some wonderful elements. Similarly, a very
good example we have is that my faculty of health is working with
people in engineering, again with an MRC funded project. There
are some real possibilities, both in terms of basic research and
also its applications that can come out of this, and I welcome
the extent to which the research councils are encouraging this
work.
Q74 Mr Flello: It sounds as though
the current structures are working well. Are there any specific
or immediately obvious improvements that you can think of that
would make them work even better?
Dr Bushaway: From my viewpoint,
it is the supply of a new type of individual working in research,
in industry, in universities, with research councils, with other
funders. We need to do more to generate this kind of multiskilled,
entrepreneurial scientist and researcher. It seems to me that
those silent voices that are calling for UK government to withdraw
from this area are making a fundamental mistake because we must
keep up this supply. AURIL, for example, has a thriving CPD scheme
attracting individuals from all over the sector and is behind
an initiative to establish an institution of knowledge transfer
to provide standards for this area. We hope that the research
councils might join with initiatives like that and perhaps support
them into the future.
Professor Snowden: Often with
multidisciplinary work you need some elements of seed funding
and pump priming to get the project area going because there will
be both equipment and space requirements that are not easily met
from the conventional budgeting in universities. At the same time,
it is almost a precursor to successful grant application because
of the very fact that it is multidisciplinary. That is one of
the harder parts for universities to address today.
Q75 Mr Newmark: Do you think research
council information regarding transfer of funding is user friendly
or not? The reason why I ask that is that there seems to be some
confusion amongst some academics about the various schemes on
offer.
Professor Snowden: It varies from
university to university and also from research council to research
council. There is a great deal of information available and I
think it relies on the university having the infrastructure to
help academics understand the schemes that are available to them.
Q76 Mr Newmark: Is the delivery of
that information user friendly? Are you saying you need the mechanism
of somebody within the university to educate the academics?
Professor Snowden: You need both.
Some of the research councils provide it very well on-line and
it is relatively easy to find, whilst in other cases it is less
so. Again, for many academics with a traditional background, this
is still a relatively new track for them to follow so they do
need encouragement and, in some cases, guidance. I would emphasise
that is something that universities are engaged in. For example,
in terms of staff development, that is an element being addressed
in most universities today.
Q77 Mr Newmark: From your perspective,
what value added is there by the presence of RCUK in terms of
research council support for knowledge transfer?
Professor Green: We welcome the
impact. Sir Keith was, I think, modest in terms of the impact
that already RCUK has had. There is already an emerging much more
strategic approach which is extremely helpful. I think he was
correct in that more needs to be done but I think the effect has
been beneficial.
Dr Bushaway: I do not think there
is a role for extending the remit in the sense that what you might
be suggesting is that UK research councils should hold the ring
between the industry/university interface. I think that would
not be a valuable way forward. Whenever there have been hints
of that in the past, it has led to over-complexity, over-bureaucratisation
of what needs to be a very flexible and light-footed interface,
if you can have a light-footed interface.
Q78 Chairman: It works pretty effectively
in the States, having a single research council or the equivalent
of that does all its work. Why should it not in the UK?
Dr Bushaway: That is another argument,
whether the boundaries are right around the research councils.
On occasion, you have looked at that question in the past and
I think it is kept under review, rightly so, because what might
work in one decade may not be reasonable for another.
Professor Snowden: Having worked
in the States in a university and in a company, it works well
there because it is relatively simple. That is the key to success
here too. If we had to have a multi-tier structure where it filtered
from the top down to another research council to then try and
interact with a company, I think industry would find that uninteresting
and prohibitive because of the effort they would have to put in.
Chairman: A single research council would
make it dynamic.
Q79 Mr Newmark: I am assuming, in
the absence of that, it would be fragmented and inefficient. Nobody
would facilitate matters.
Professor Snowden: What we have
today is a not unsuccessful system. It has a benefit that it is
focused in relative areas of expertise. For example, in the Arts
Research Council it is very different to things you would do in
the EPSRC. It has evolved quite successfully. I could cite many
examples where that works well today.
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