The R&D Roadmap gives the nation's researchers and innovators an indication of where the government wants to invest over the next few years. Here are seven key messages to take from the proposals.
I do not have a great track record with crystal balls. Each year I do a horizon scan for Funding Insight; each year I’m sideswiped by events. True enough, last year I couldn’t have predicted the Covid-19 pandemic. But, equally, I didn’t see the government’s R&D roadmap coming up on the inside lane.
This is both hefty (60 pages of excitable prose) and, apparently, sincere. It suggests we have at our fingertips a “once-in-a-generation opportunity…[to tackle] fundamental and challenging questions about our R&D priorities and address long-term problems in the system”.
But what does it mean for researchers on the ground? Here are my seven take-home messages for all those chipping away at the boundaries of knowledge.
1. Funding will increase massively.
The 2.4 per cent target is reiterated, but this is now bolstered by a sexy new headline: £22bn by 2024-25. As Ben Bleasdale of the Wellcome Trust succinctly put it: “Without doubt, the 2020s are the R&D decade.”
All good, but there’s a strong steer about accountability and systemic change. The paper suggests “a new ‘compact’ between government and universities in England [to] strengthen accountability for discretionary [or Quality-Related] funding...we will be reviewing the mechanisms we use to support university research”. Might this be an end—or a significant revision—to the dual-funding model?
2. Risk-taking will be prioritised.
The government is now keen on “recognising that ‘failures’ can be useful and further the pursuit of knowledge”. This will be welcomed by researchers frustrated by funders who increasingly seem to want the certainty of outcome before they award a grant.
However, there are slightly mixed messages here. There’s talk of “moonshots” but also the suggestion that these should “help solve an important societal issue”. The Apollo programme did many things, including putting men on the moon for a while, but it never pretended it would solve an important societal issue. This underlies the somewhat unsettling hyperbole of the paper: at times it gets tangled in its own boldness and trips on its own mixed messages.
Still, embracing risk is a great aspiration. The shiny new £800 million innovation agency UK Arpa takes pride of place on the roadmap’s forecourt, where it is hailed as “this body [that] will back breakthrough technologies and basic research by experimenting with new funding models across long-term time horizons”. The detail, though, is still to come.
3. Red tape will be cut.
As part of the desire to support risk, there’s a persistent line in the roadmap around the need to strip back the paperwork that makes the current system “risk-averse and inefficient”. There’s talk of “smarter approaches” and “modern methods”, as well as a belief in “tackling the problematic uses of metrics”.
Such changes are already underway, with the Pathways for Impact section of UK Research and Innovation applications having been dropped already and a complete overhaul of the application system waiting in the wings. It’ll be music to the ears of time-poor, frustrated applicants. There’s also an allusion to the full economic costs framework: is this due for an overhaul too?
4. Think globally.
The roadmap offers the first official signal that the government wants “to fully associate to [EU R&D] programmes”, and will “implement short-term alternative funding arrangements” if there’s a gap before it happens. If the UK doesn’t join, “we will implement ambitious alternatives as quickly as possible”—a central recommendation of the Smith-Reid Review.
Beyond Europe, the document looks “to strengthen and grow our collaborations with overseas governments and international funders”. Although it highlights links with Official Development Assistance-compliant countries, there’s a sense that the direction of travel is towards building collaborations with “existing R&D-intensive nations”.
This is given weight by “our ambition...to maximise the opportunities for UK researchers to access the best research and innovation infrastructure around the world”. There’s a faint whiff of the idea that funding should be for the benefit of UK researchers rather than the global community.
5. Act locally.
The roadmap emphasises the need to “level up” the UK research environment. This has been bubbling under for months, and both the Campaign for Science and Engineering and Nesta have published reports on what this would mean in practice. The roadmap doesn’t add any flesh to these bones, but nods to the publication of “an ambitious new Place Strategy in the autumn after the Spending Review”.
Somewhat alarmingly, it defines the ‘golden triangle’ regionally rather than institutionally as “London, the South East and the East of England”. Let’s hope the strategy will be more granular and nuanced in how it understands regions of need.
6. Innovation is central.
Like the Industrial Strategy before it, the roadmap recognises that the UK doesn’t fully benefit commercially from the outputs of its research. It seeks to address this by “incorporat[ing] strong pro-innovation voices from around the world and from all parts of the UK...to implement systemic change”.
This will take the form of an Innovation Expert Group, which may, for example, recommend “enhancing our Catapult and Accelerator Network, and investigating mechanisms to make data more available for innovation”. Interestingly, it suggests more creative ways of supporting innovation beyond initial funding, through an R&D tax credit scheme or procurement, for example.
7. People need to be supported.
Finally, the roadmap builds on the work of the Wellcome Trust in identifying and addressing the “toxic environment” for research in the UK, and on the vociferous lobbying of others to remove the barriers for those coming to the UK to study and work.
An Office for Talent will be set up, whose title sounds like it comes straight out of The Thick of It playbook. “Creating the right culture is key”, it states, and it seeks to address “bullying, harassment and discrimination” in universities and research institutes. It will also spearhead visa reform, such as allowing PhD students to stay in the UK after their studies finish.
The roadmap finishes by saying it is “the start of the conversation”. There will be further consultations in the autumn, but there is also a survey to which anyone can respond. Do take time to complete it; hearing from those who will be affected by these recommendations will add the necessary realism to the soaring aspiration.
A version of this article first appeared in Funding Insight in July 2020 and is reproduced with kind permission of Research Professional. For more articles like this, visit www.researchprofessional.com
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