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Funds amounting to £1bn for Arrow Projects – this is the specific requisite of Sir Andrew Witty’s “Encouraging a British Invention Revolution” report.
This request for funding is in line to a measure, which as Dr Wendy Piatt of the Russell Group described, was to serve as a bridge between “idea to implementation and from prototype to profit.” The final end of this bridge is envisioned to see universities, its “groundbreaking discoveries” bolstering forward UK’s economy.
The findings and recommendations of this report had been well received by these two major entities: the Confederation of British Industry and the UK government.
The Gap
Sir Andrew’s report and consequent call is indubitably the ricocheting effect of January’s “graphene global race.” The discovery of the world’s thinnest material had been borne out of Manchester University’s labs, garnering Nobel Prize and knighthood for scientists, Andrei Geim and Konstantin Novosolev.
And while this discovery was a huge blast, observers are afraid it will only be up to that. Instead of UK’s industry (and economy) benefitting from this discovery, foreign companies are foreseen to reap its prospects. In the scheme of things, the blame is placed upon the existing gap.
Andrei Geim, for one, characterised this as follows:
There is a huge gap between academia and industry and this gap has broadened during the last few decades after the end of Cold War…
Drawing the significance of research institutes in the present technology’s game, Geim brought forward the story of Bell Labs and of Korea’s Samsung (ie, this tech-giant have its own institute).
The Grant System
Apart from revitalising the commercial interest in research institutes, another solution is anticipated to cut the gap between universities and businesses: a better funding system. As of the present, research funding isn’t considered to be ‘pro-researcher.’
GlaxoSmithKline CEO and University of Nottingham Chancellor, Sir Andrew Witty, described the funding system as being a “thicket of complexity.” Working on a better arrangement, funding may come in the “form of block grants” – a combination of “public and private money.”
Fuelled by a better funding system, the “British Invention Revolution” may indeed become a nearing possibility. It will incentivise creativity and stir competition among UK’s top researchers. If Manchester University scientists were able to come up with graphene amidst the current funding scheme, how much more could you expect scientists to discover – fully knowing that support and funding is a tap away? The likelihood of seeing more comes with the funding tag.
On the industry’s perspective, which option will bring this patent game closer to reality – the grant or the research institutes? Will these ‘linking attempts’ really make a difference to UK’s economy?
