Nancy Rothwell says the discontinuity caused by the pandemic offers chance to rebalance R&D
The upset to the higher-education sector caused by the Covid-19 pandemic provides an opportunity to shake up the R&D system in the UK, the co-chair of the prime minister’s Council for Science and Technology has suggested.
Nancy Rothwell, vice-chancellor of the University of Manchester, said the sector is facing difficulties “not least because we expect to lose a lot of international students—and they massively subsidise research in this country”.
“But we also have an opportunity because there is always a tendency to tweak things round the edges,” she said. “Covid has given us real discontinuity. It’s given us the opportunity to think about doing things differently.
“That, combined with apparent government commitment to levering R&D… gives us a big opportunity.”
She was speaking on 2 June at a virtual launch of the Nesta innovation foundation report, The Missing £4 Billion, which estimated that large parts of the UK, including the north of England, the Midlands and south-west England, together with Wales and Northern Ireland, are collectively missing out on £4bn a year in public R&D investment.
Commenting on how the government’s “levelling up” agenda might be achieved, Rothwell said the level of investment was an important factor. However, she warned that the right balance between research and development was needed.
“The UK is brilliant at the ‘R’ bit of R&D, and without that we won’t have anything to develop or translate. I do think we need to make sure we protect that research base,” she said.
“But clearly a lot of this is not about research excellence in its classical sense,” she added. “It’s about making sure those discoveries are translated into regional benefits.”
She also warned against investing in areas without the sufficient skills base and infrastructure.
“There is no doubt there are certain parts of the country, where if you dropped a research institute into it, it would simply not succeed.”
However, Rothwell said, “The benefits of that have to spread out more widely so they are not just concentrated in a small space.”
Ravi Gurumurthy, the chief executive of Nesta, said he was struck by how little hard evidence there was on the levelling up agenda, such as on the benefits of allocating money to businesses versus universities.
“If we are not going to have this same conversation in 10 years’ time, with a similar level of detail, we need to actually build the evidence base and experimentation over the next 10 years,” he said.
Commenting on the impact of Covid-19 on universities, Gurumurthy said it was going to “hugely hit their capacity to do research”.
However, he added, “It’s also an opportunity to reconfigure the relationship, so if government does step in and actually support those universities, what do we want to do with those institutions to try to pivot them to support R&D better?”
A version of this article also appeared in Research Fortnight