Analysis and news


“It is critical that the definition of impact continues to favour the existence of an entrepreneurial state”


back a shorter-term development based on research from the public sector. This balance is important, since it ensures that a large proportion of long-term ideas are available to the widest possible set of people to commercialise. This tends to mean that wealth creation has the opportunity to be spread more evenly. However, over the past decade some


concerning trends have emerged that threaten to upset this balance. From the public sector we have seen the implementation of Research Impact in evaluation, in grant awards, and in university research strategies. This has tended to pull research in academic institutions away from blue skies research and to increasingly align it with industrial and applied research. From a study carried out by Digital


Science for Higher Education Funding Council for England in 2016 (https://dera. ioe.ac.uk//26933/), we can see clearly that the timescales associated with research impact reported in the REF 2014 are, on average, significantly shorter than the allowed timescale from original research to impact of 20 years. There could be many reasons – better recent record keeping, and the effect by which most recent work is most easily recalled and described are just two. However, let us assume for a moment that the effect of


38 Research Information October/November 2020


the rise of research impact has been to hasten the need for impact to occur, then this means that universities are starting to move into the territory historically inhabited by companies. At the same time as these public


sector developments, the private sector has been moving increasingly into basic research. The field in which this is most evident is AI, but it does not stop there. There is a significant brain drain from the public research sector in areas such as aeronautical engineering (SpaceX) and battery science (Tesla). Not only are these companies allowing researchers who choose to join them increased pay, better conditions and the ability to afford to pay their mortgage, but also a significant latitude in what they research, and the timescale over which that research will pay back or have a practical application. At a time when university budgets are being stretched, the level of academic freedom in publicly funded institutions is decreasing. There will necessarily be a flow of good people to the private sector. The side effects may be alarming as, in some disciplines, there may remain few academics to train the next generation of undergraduates and PhD students. More broadly, if a state is truly to call


itself entrepreneurial, it has a responsibility to take the long bet, not only because it


has historically been the only actor willing to take on those long bets but because, if it does not, the fundamental balance between the public and private sector in research will be upended. It is not clear that this will be a positive development. Should the majority of basic research in important emergent fields, such as AI, be done in a corporate context, there will be a fundamental shift in the playing field for opportunities to create wealth. Some of the world’s largest companies are now, financially, as large as small states and have begun to act in similar ways. Corporate investment in basic research at the same time as developed knowledge economies shift toward applied research, has the potential to allow a few companies to build up an unassailable technological lead. Rather than publicly-funded basic


research to be commercialised equitably to generate wealth in many places, a few companies could develop solely proprietary technologies, accelerating the accumulation of wealth with the tiniest fraction of the one per cent. Perhaps an even more concerning aspect could be the level of insight and influence that these technological Goliaths could gain over our lives. Ri


Daniel Hook is CEO at Digital Science @researchinfo | www.researchinformation.info


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