Examination of Witnesses (Questions 149-159)
SIR JOHN
CHISHOLM, DR
MALCOLM SKINGLE,
TONY MCBRIDE
AND DR
IAN RITCHIE
29 MARCH 2006
Q149 Chairman: Thank you very much indeed
for coming. I do not know whether all you were sat riveted to
what in fact the External Challenge Panel had to say about the
Research Councils. Just to repeat, we are looking across the board
as to whether, in fact, the Research Councils are delivering,
in terms of knowledge transfer. I think that is the question the
Committee wants to know the answer to. Thank you all very much
indeed for coming. I wonder, Sir John, if I could nominate you
as the head of your panel.
Sir John Chisholm: What an honour.
Q150 Chairman: Seeing as you are
a knight of the realm I thought that was a fitting position.
Sir John Chisholm: I was wondering
when it would come in useful.
Q151 Chairman: What I would like
to do is basically say could you introduce yourselves very briefly
and, Sir John, if you feel a question should be diverted somewhere
else, it is important that we do that.
Sir John Chisholm: I will do my
best. Very quickly: I am John Chisholm and I am Chairman of QinetiQ.
I guess we have been in the business of research and knowledge
transfer for a little while.
Dr Skingle: I am Malcolm Skingle.
I am Director of Academic Liaison for GlaxoSmithKline. Just listening
to the last session I scribbled down what I am involved in, things
which come up in conversation, not to show off but to show you
that I am active at this interface. I sit on the BBSRC strategy
board. I sit on the BBSRC appointments board where I make sure
that we have an industry person on every one of the BBSRC panels
and committees. I chair the BBSRC's BioScience for Industry Panel.
I used to sit on the EPSRC User Panel for four or five years.
I sit on the MRC Sub-Committee for Evaluation. Because I whinged
so much about lack of performance I was encouraged to join the
EEDA Science and Industry Council, which I now sit on. I chair
the ABPI Academic Liaison Working Group. I chair the Diamond Industrial
Advisory Board. I am a trustee for Praxis who train industrial
liaison officers. I sit on the CBI Working Group that John Murphy
just mentioned. I chaired the group that put the Lambert Agreements
together. I am a peer reviewer for the EU, Wellcome Trust and
Leverhulme Trust, and I see the kids every other weekend.
Q152 Chairman: I am amazed you found
time to join us this morning. We are very grateful.
Dr Skingle: I felt it was important.
Mr McBride: I am Tony McBride
and I am a policy adviser at the CBI on technology and innovation
issues which means I look at broad policy areas including research
and higher education. I am the secretary of the CBI's Technology
and Innovation committee and also the CBI's ICARG Group of which
John Murphy is chair.
Dr Ritchie: I am Ian Ritchie.
I am a technology entrepreneur. I have started, or helped to start,
over 20 technology businesses. I have been a member of PPARC and
I am currently a member of the Scottish Funding Council. I have
been a member of the Scottish Enterprise Board for a number of
years, I just stood down in November. I am also chairman of a
thing called Connect Scotland which aims to help researchers on
commercialisation areas get together.
Q153 Chairman: Thank you very much
indeed. My first question is I think we would all agree that knowledge
transfer is absolutely crucial to the nation's economy in the
21st century. Is funding it through the Research Councils the
right way forward?
Sir John Chisholm: I will start
by making some comments on that. As the previous speakers were
talking about you have got the pull and push issue. The Research
Councils are largely invested in the push end of that, as people
have said, indeed because the people who Research Councils fund
are people who generally create technology and, therefore, the
whole focus of that is push. Now that works differently in different
parts of the science base. In the life science the invention captures
much more of the eventual value of the project and, therefore,
a lot of investment in invention is much more obviously connected
to where the value will eventually be created from that invention.
In all the physical sciences there is a much larger process to
go through, the innovation process that you have to go through
before you get to where the ultimate value is. That can take decades
and it can go through many, many stages to get there. The pull
end of it tends to be more remote from the push end of it. Therefore,
my guess would be that the appropriate balance of investment will
vary across the Research Councils from, in the Medical Research
Council, invention being a very important part and there being
a pretty close relationship with particularly the pharmaceutical
industry and, on the other hand, in EPSRC that is a much more
difficult arrangement to put in place.
Q154 Chairman: Ian, you have got
very different membership in terms of if you are representing
SMEs than the large pharmaceutical companies. Do you think the
way in which we are funding knowledge transfer through the Research
Councils is right?
Dr Ritchie: I think Research Councils
ought to concentrate on what they do best, which is getting excellent
research in the UK. I think you have to recognise that the massive
majority of knowledge transfer is bright graduates going into
industry. I believe 70% of Physics PhDs go into the finance sector.
They are not trained to be finance people but they just seem to
be bright numerate people. I think actually the Research Councils
ought to concentrate on doing really tough science and getting
the kids as bright as possible.
Q155 Chairman: And not waste the
money on knowledge transfer?
Dr Ritchie: I do not think it
is the right place for the Research Councils to do that.
Q156 Chairman: Malcolm?
Dr Skingle: I do not think they
waste the money, I think I heard them say in one of the previous
committees that the level of spend is about three%; for me that
is probably about right from pharma's perspective. I go along
with Ian, the best knowledge transfer is definitely through people.
GSK co-fund 340 CASE students, approximately 100 with the BBSRC,
100 with EPSRC and 25 with the MRC and then we have some directly
with universities, the Dorothy Hodgkin Fellowship Awards for the
overseas students. We get great value from these: a real win-win.
The student gets access to industry to see whether they want to
dip into it; the academic person also often has follow-up grants
from those and frankly we get a three month to a one year interview
for a person we might wish to recruit and we also keep a watching
brief on developing technologies. At the other end of the spectrum
we have the secondments of academics into industry, and although
we have the Royal Society Fellowships and the industry interchange
scheme that BBSRC have just brought in, I do not think we do enough
of that. We have just recently started taking on what we call
"academics in residence", to fuel certain parts of our
science base. What happens is these guys come in with a perception
of how we operate and once they are in they interact with our
groups where we are kicking ideas around and they realise what
our problems are and they go back to academia and if they cannot
solve it they know someone who can. Anything which involves people
transfer I think is the best way of getting knowledge transfer
done.
Q157 Chairman: CBI, should we leave
it to the market?
Mr McBride: We believe the knowledge
transfer aspect of the Research Council's remit is well-placed
and they are in fact well-positioned to carry out this function.
It adds value to the research which they invest in and the teaching
which HEFCE and other funding sources invest in as well.
Q158 Chairman: How do you know?
Mr McBride: Our members tell us
that they are relatively happy with what the Research Councils
are doing. We have put forward a number of examples of good practice
identified by members of our ICARG Group. It is difficult to identify
specific impacts as the previous panel indicated. This can take
time to show through and the identifiers are not always agreed
on by every party. In principle and in general our members believe
they are doing a good job.
Q159 Margaret Moran: You will have
heard from the previous session that there seemed to be consensus
that the Research Councils lack in-house skills to deal with knowledge
transfer and, indeed, there was an argument for intermediaries.
Would you agree with that? Secondly, if you were put in a position
of saying with the amount of increasing resource that is going
to go into knowledge transfer what single thing would you want
the Research Council to do differently to encourage a step change
in knowledge transfer generally what would you say?
Sir John Chisholm: Let me kick
off. I would absolutely agree that there is a huge shortage of
skills in the understanding of what makes knowledge transfer work.
It is not something which can be achieved between a chairman and
a vice-chancellor. Knowledge transfer occurs absolutely at the
nitty-gritty level of understanding what the value is, where the
model of that transfer is going to take place, the kinds of markets
it has to operate in, what kinds of funding mechanisms are appropriate,
what extra things need to be brought together in order to make
a proposition. All those things are typically sui generis, they
relate only to that particular circumstance. There is a lot of
skill which needs to be brought into that. It is very unlikely
that you will find that in a Research Council. I think the Research
Councils have an important role in understanding the problem and
making the resources available for it but I would say it is probably
unlikely that they would be typically hugely skilled. The sort
of places where such skills exist are in the venture capital industry.
Big companies have the resources to do it themselves, the pharmas
tend to be very good at it. BAE Systems, which one of the previous
speakers came from, Rolls-Royce, those sorts of big corporations
have the resources to put into it. My own company has the resources
to put into it but SMEs certainly do not.
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