We need to be innovative about university and business collaboration
December 8, 2011 at 2:52 pm Liz Bell 1 comment
Since coming to power, the coalition Government has reiterated a commitment to science, ring fencing the science budget in the Spending Review and committing further capital funding to support the research infrastructure. If you looked over the Government’s announcements over the last few months, you’d see that science and research crop up frequently, with George Osborne being hailed by some as the first ‘science Chancellor’. But there was no mention of research in the Government’s higher education White Paper – an absence that didn’t go unnoticed.
Today’s Innovation and Research Strategy for growth starts to fill in these gaps. It’s good to see a clear recognition from Government of the important role universities play in driving innovation and a commitment to identify opportunities for driving innovation and business investment and support research.
Our universities are well-known for their groundbreaking research. We have evidence that shows that UK universities are global leaders in research, second only to the USA in most measures according to the most recent data. But this data also shows that the UK has comparatively low levels of R&D investment as a percentage of GDP.
A recent report from UUK showed how important universities are to innovation, and how critical it is to the future health of our economy. But it’s also the people, the graduates that our universities produce who are the lifeblood of this innovative economy.
And we know that there are other areas of untapped potential. Business and university collaboration is one of them.
Universities receive R&D income from a variety of sources. Business investment provides the smallest proportion of that income and levels of investment have not changed for almost a decade.
Source of funds for UK Higher Education R&D 2000-2010
But the data shows that collaboration works for businesses. What’s good for universities R&D funding is also good for business.
In its annual innovation survey BIS asked businesses about the importance they placed on different collaboration partners. The results showed only small numbers of businesses were collaborating with universities – they tended to rely more heavily on suppliers and customers as partners for innovation. But in the same research we can clearly see that when businesses do collaborate with universities, it turns out very well for them. It enhances firm performance in terms of product range, market share and product quality. So some companies have cottoned on to the upside of working with universities, but questions still remain. Why aren’t businesses taking more advantage of what’s on offer from universities and what can be done to encourage more collaboration?
The initiatives announced today are a start. Clearly the global reputation of the UK research base has an essential role to play, but we shouldn’t forget the equally important wider impact universities have: producing graduates, up-skilling the existing workforce and drawing in the brightest and best from around the world.
Today’s strategy doesn’t provide the nitty-gritty policy detail for universities and business. For that, we’ll have to wait until Sir Tim Wilson’s review, due to be published before the end of the year.
But we all know for sure that the challenge now is to come up with practical and innovative ideas to build on our successes.
Entry filed under: About Higher Education, Fees and funding, Research. Tags: .
1.
Neil | January 3, 2012 at 1:47 am
One of the big problems that occurs is that there are some courses at Universities that have a large take-up of courses for 3-4 years and yet at the end of it there are dozens of graduates but no jobs to go to in that particular industry, with that degree.
Perhaps more ‘sponsorship’ schemes by companies and organisations that would then benefit the newly qualified graduates and not leave them in limbo with no income.