Last week saw the publication of two long-awaited and crucial Government strategies: the Innovation Strategy, and the R&D People and Culture Strategy. I’ve provided a summary of them for colleagues at the Eastern Arc universities, but here are the four key messages that came through the strategies.
- Innovation will be central to the R&D landscape as never before. The Government sees it as crucial to the UK’s recovery from the pandemic and succeeding after Brexit. Previous government’s have emphasised the importance of innovation (such as in the Industrial Strategy), but this is something different, and gives a much stronger steer, and more detail, about what can and should be done. The research landscape – and particularly funding for it – will, therefore, be quite different from hereon in.
- The way we currently work will be reviewed – and possibly overhauled. The two strategies promise significant reviews into long-established tenets of the R&D landscape, including peer review, innovation (and research) structures, full economic costs, the dual support system, and future assessment of research.
- There will be more regionality in funding. The IS highlights funding from the Strength in Places (SPF) and Connected Capabilities Fund (CCF). It’s no accident that the IS specifies that the £127m provided by the SPF will go to the North of England, the Midlands, Scotland and Cumbria, Wales, and Northern Ireland.
- There is a clear focus on specific areas of strength. The seven ‘technology families’ set out in the IS show the areas of interest for the Government. That’s not to say that other areas are excluded, but it indicates where its ‘portfolio of bets’ (as it described investments made by the Vaccine Taskforce) will be.
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