FST JOURNAL

The UK has an extraordinary track record as a nation of research and innovation, across many disciplines. It is not common to have such breadth, depth and quality. We have an opportunity to use this extraordinary national strength to deliver a more sustainable and inclusive knowledge economy, one which will feed not only the wider economy, but also our public services.

The Integrated Review, and the work of the science function across Government, remind us that we will never have the amounts of money available to China or the USA. The UK is a comparatively small country, but with a very broad set of expertise and skills. Building global strategic advantage needs an holistic consideration of our resources, investing them carefully in order to capture the extraordinary bottom-up benefits of the creativity and diversity in the system.

The UK is a comparatively small country, but with a very broad set of expertise and skills. Building global strategic advantage needs an holistic consideration of our resources.

National asset

Very few countries have organisations like UK Research & Innovation (UKRI). It will be a crucial national asset in delivering on this ambition, precisely because it connects across disciplines and across sectors. It connects the extraordinary crucible of bottom-up discovery science with that of innovators across the system, joining the two to deliver value of all kinds into the economy and into our public services.

UKRI is the largest public sector funder of research and innovation in the UK. It includes Innovate UK, the UK’s Innovation Agency, and Research England which works very closely with the equivalent bodies in the devolved nations to support our extraordinary university system. Then there are the seven disciplinary Research Councils that fund a full gamut of research, from the completely blue skies open-ended kind through to more applied and business-driven collaborations. Having all of those ‘under one roof ’ allows UKRI to think much more intelligently and in a coordinated way about the overall investment portfolio.

UKRI is a public body, accountable to Government. While constituting a large proportion of the UK’s R&D investment, it is part of a much broader system of academia, business, the public sector, third sector and international partners.

UKRI has around £8 billion a year to invest. That is divided across a range of core national capabilities. Just over 10% goes into PhDs, studentships and fellowships, i.e. on specific investment in people, with many more researchers and innovators funded through project grants. Yet the research and innovation workforce is much broader than that: not just the researchers and innovators but all the very diverse technical and administrative roles too, which are essential for high quality research and innovation.

Fully-open response-mode project grant funding accounts for only about 12% of the UKRI budget, but it is a critical part of what UKRI does. This is the fuel for later projects and programmes. A further 7% is targeted on opportunities that individual Research Councils see as really important to drive up investment and interest in particular areas. Overall, then, approximately 20% of the UKRI budget goes into response-mode funding of the research base, and this is crucial also for attracting world-class talent: people can see that in the UK they can attract the funding to drive the programmes that excite them.

About 20% of UKRI funding goes into English universities in block grants, giving them the flexibility and strategic opportunity to fine-tune their research portfolios in the way that they want. This huge sum of money, that goes out in a completely unhypothecated way, is where a great deal of the system’s agility comes from. It is that open funding that allows institutions to pivot and change direction if they need to.

About 12% of the UKRI budget is allocated to infrastructure of various sorts, including big international projects like CERN, but also key facilities in the UK and the day-to-day equipment that goes into labs. A further 10% goes into research institutes and national laboratories.

Then there is funding in the innovation area. That includes the Catapult centres that bridge the gap between innovative businesses on the one hand, and Higher Education Institutions and the wider research base on the other. Response-mode innovation funding operates through Innovate UK to support mainly SMEs in driving forward their innovation projects. More recently, the Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund, challenge-led funding driven by key industrial challenges that need solving, brings together interdisciplinary teams on, for example, battery technology.

In addition, UKRI provides funding that specifically targets international activity. That accounts for about 6% of the total, although many UKRI programmes have an international element. Finally, around 5% of UKRI funding is currently targeted on COVID programmes.

About 12% of the UKRI budget is allocated to infrastructure, including big international projects like CERN.

 

A diverse range of activities

So, as a single organisation, UKRI has the opportunity to manage its portfolio across all these elements in order to deliver on a whole variety of goals. It can coordinate investment across the system, both to deliver key priorities and to balance current priorities against opportunities in the future. Through its knowledge of what is happening across the system, its analytical teams can understand what is happening domestically and use that information to tune investments dynamically and connect the different elements of the system so that people and ideas move freely through it.

I welcome the establishment of the Office for Science and Technology Strategy (OSTS) and the National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) precisely as a higher-order umbrella that allows us to understand and work within a much broader set of activities that are essential to allow us to capture all the benefits achievable.

Activities in the research and innovation base create opportunities. Realising them for the benefit of the economy and public services is really important but requires oversight of a range of other items like the infrastructure, the regulatory environment, and so on.

This is difficult; people prefer linear cause-and-effect, but that is not how the system works. Nationally, we need the intellectual infrastructure to allow us to navigate this system to deliver for the UK. I believe the combination of UKRI, the cross-Government distribution of R&D budgets, together with the OSTS and NSTC give us the capability to get this right, as a fully-wired system where all the parts work together. 

Activities in the research and innovation base create opportunities. Realising them for the benefit of the economy and public services is really important but requires oversight.