Comment & Analysis
Perhaps most strikingly, £800 million was made available to fund a new agency that will promote high risk, high reward research. The body will reportedly be modelled on the USA’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) and is intended to support vital research and development projects that would not otherwise be funded by the private sector.
This has been referred to as ‘blue skies’ research by much of the press, but it seems to be a misapplication of the term. Blues skies research means scientific enquiry without a direct purpose or immediate use to society. A key example would be fundamental physics. The primary aim of mega-machines like the Large Hadron Collider is to better understand the Universe. There is little benefit to society in the short term compared to the vast sums of money required to build a particle accelerator. But by pushing the limits of the possible, it clears the way for technological progress in wider fields. Particle physics has helped lead to developments in medicine, like MRI scanners and proton cancer therapy, while the need for physicists to share large amounts of data with international peers incentivised the creation of the World Wide Web at CERN.
What the UK Government is proposing seems to be more direct, mission-oriented research. An obvious question at this point is: do we really need a completely new research body to do this? The UK has many organisations that could fund or carry out these types of research projects. It has world class universities, including the innovation cluster in East Anglia known as ‘the Cambridge Phenomenon’. We have innovation campuses at Harwell in Oxfordshire and Daresbury in Cheshire, as well as the relatively recently formed Catapult Network. In terms of funding bodies, Innovate UK may be the most direct comparison. Innovate UK is part of UK Research and Innovation, which also comprises the Research Councils that fund academic research. It aims to ‘drive productivity and economic growth by supporting businesses to develop and realise the potential of new ideas, including those from the UK’s world-class research base.
Through the Government’s Industrial Strategy, we also already have the Grand Challenges programme, which is a clear example of mission-oriented research. The four challenges identified by the Government are artificial intelligence and data, an ageing society, clean growth and the future of mobility. Any new funding body would likely focus on similar topics.
Internationally, the European Research Council is another comparator. Created in 2007 by the EU to fund basic research, it provides large research grants to a small number of the most capable researchers in Europe, regardless of which country they reside.
So why does the Government want this new agency? Some clues might be found in an essay written by the Prime Minister’s adviser Dominic Cummings in 2018. He believes that small teams of capable individuals, with the right organisational structure and adequate funding, can not just revolutionise existing industries, but create new ones. He uses Xerox’s PARC (Palo Alto Research Center) facility as an example. Other historic parallels include AT&T’s Bell Labs, IBM’s TJ Watson Research Centre and General Electric’s Schenectady Laboratory.
Regardless of the details of this new agency, it could turn out to be a pivotal moment for science and innovation the UK. A key point in the history of innovation studies was the publication in 1945 of "Science: the Endless Frontier" by the American engineer Vannevar Bush. It is credited with cementing the linear model of innovation as the dominant idea in science policy in the post-war era. The ideas espoused by Bush were not completely new, but crucially he had the ear of the President who was willing to back these ideas with serious money. With a large expansion of the UK’s research budget and a Prime Minister receptive to new ideas, for better or worse, the next decade could see big changes in the country’s research and innovation landscape.