Analysis and news
In search of the entrepreneurial state Institutions of higher learning have performed two core functions: teaching and research, writes Daniel Hook
Teaching has not been solely focused on creating a highly-skilled workforce, but rather has held the loftier goal of educating the populace. Research has also not focused on application, but rather on broadly expanding society’s store of knowledge. However, the move to professionalise research since the 1980s has gradually shifted the focus of both teaching and research toward application. This is not, of itself, a bad development. Sustained investment into research needs to be coupled with a payoff for those that fund it, namely taxpayers. However, it remains key to the health of the sector that national research portfolios include a balance between short-term and long- term payoffs: applied versus blue skies research. The definition of research impact and how researchers interpret that definition could be formative not only in the sector, but more generally over the next few decades. Modern academic institutions are
expected not only to educate and to carry out research, but also to be engines of invention and innovation. In tough times, governments tend to protect or even expand funding to research and development. They spend more on the research in the knowledge that these investments will bring wealth not only to the region in which the institution is located, but to the country as a whole. Thus, research is often considered to be something to be protected in lean times. The idea that governments should spend on public services to stimulate the economy when times are tough is not a new one. It was originally developed by economist John Maynard Keynes. However, a competing doctrine has held favour with successive governments since the 1980s. The last decade has been a study in the economics of austerity, a page taken directly from Milton Friedman’s approach to free market economics – the idea that the market always knows best. The effect of free market economics has not only been to decrease the resilience and scope of public services, such as national health and public health
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organisations, but also to deepen societal divisions. Some of these divisions have been obvious due to their short-term impact, and their coverage in the media, such as a marked increase in wealth inequality (
https://voxeu.org/article/asset- prices-and-wealth-inequality). Other divisions have been more subtle, such as a long-term lowering of social mobility as the bar to enter higher education has been raised, due to increases in fees and decreases in government subsidies. Some divisions have been underscored in light of the Covid crisis. Deaths from the virus in the UK, for instance, can be linked directly to post code and hence to social status (see, for example,
https://www.bbc.
co.uk/news/health-53021942).
“The expectation of government will be that the research sector will play an important role in the recovery”
The post-Covid era may be the very definition of tough times. Over the last six months government borrowing has soared to a level (and at a speed) that has not been seen in living memory. The government has been forced into adopting a Keynesian approach during the Covid crisis: funding the NHS, protecting jobs and, along with them, the economy – nothing else would have made sense in the situation. If the crisis continues with a second wave, debts will increase further. Brexit will not help. As we move into the post-Covid era, governments will seek to rebalance the books and pay down debt. There are three approaches available to them: i) return to austerity; ii) outgrow the problem; iii) ignore the problem. For the research sector, it doesn’t really
matter which of these three routes is chosen. The expectation of government will be that the research sector will play
an important role in the recovery. In the case of the UK, this much is clear from the Johnson government’s UK Research and Development Roadmap (
https://www.gov. uk/government/publications/uk-research- and-development-roadmap). The plan includes a significant
discussion of research impact and application. After a decade in which the concept of Research Impact has been introduced, honed, and enshrined in the Research Excellence Framework (REF), there are already mechanisms to track and understand the impact of research. A fundamental link between greater funding and greater impact has been established in the minds of policymakers. But, impact is a very difficult quantity to define, and here lies the challenge for the research sector: what timescale should we expect research impact to take place? Is research impact defined purely in economic and financial terms or in a broader sense? The core of what we define as research impact has its roots in the relative roles of the industrial and research sectors. As a generalisation, until recently, the public research sector has focused on basic research with a long-term payoff, and the industrial sector has sought to develop and apply ideas from basic research. This point is illustrated in Mariana Mazzucato’s The Entrepreneurial State, in which the role of the State as a risk-taking long-term investor is made, with examples such as the technologies that underpin the iPhone; and contrasts with the role of the industrial sector (in this case Apple) who have been able to commercialise these technologies, and change lives in doing so. There is currently a balanced and
synergistic relationship between the two sectors. The public sector develops ideas that are placed in the public domain for all to benefit from and commercialise, ensuring that as many people as possible have the opportunity to make those developments and hence ensuring the public good is as well distributed as possible. The private sector is, of course, equally able to invest in high-risk ventures if it wishes, but is much more likely to
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