Placing universities at the heart of our innovation system
By Will Hutton, Chair of the Big Innovation Centre
Today the UK economy faces unprecedented economic challenges and real risks to its prosperity.We have committed to a sharp retrenchment in public spending at a time of high unemployment, sluggish domestic growth and an alarmingly unstable global economy. The UK can only weather these storms if it continues to develop innovative new products and services that are valued internationally.
Over the next three years the Big Innovation Centre will be working with universities, businesses and policy makers to consider how we can build a system in which all areas of our diverse university system can flourish.
The 21st century will witness more transformative innovation than the last five centuries put together – such is the pace of scientific and technological advance.We need to find ways to create value from this change. If we want to maintain our prosperity and living standards, doing the same as we have in the past simply won’t be enough. The UK has worked hard to establish itself as a knowledge economy – our economic growth is now driven by activities which create value from exploiting knowledge rather than physical assets or manual labour. We have developed many world class knowledge enterprises and leading research institutions. But, we know that true value in a knowledge economy only comes from innovation – we cannot compete on price, low¬wage labour, or physical assets. So we need to invest in knowledge and compete by inventing and innovating new products, processes and services which will be adopted by global consumers and global businesses.
This presents a real challenge.We understand too little; not just about the innovation processes, but the ecosystem of people, businesses and institutions in which risks are taken and innovation prospers.With the stakes so high and no available resources to gamble on speculative projects, this ignorant position has become untenable. The Big Innovation Centre wants to put this right.
The Big Innovation Centre is a major new initiative to understand how the UK innovates. Led by business, it is drawing in the best from the university and research world to become a unique British-based network for the promotion of innovation and investment. The Centre seeks to understand how UK institutions support and develop this ecosystem. As you might expect, we view universities as a pivotal institutional block for our new economy. In common with all knowledge generating institutions, not all of their impacts can be fully quantified but it is clear that they play a number of special roles within our economy.
The number of graduates we produce each year has increased dramatically in recent years, keeping pace with the growing demand for these skills in the economy. Any further growth in our economy will create an urgent need to expand our graduate workforce. A degree teaches how to assimilate, analyse, synthesise and communicate complex information. These are vital skills for anyone who is trying to do something different or new. A key strand of work at the Big Innovation Centre will be to better understand this notion of skills for innovation – what capacities do individuals need to create or to apply new knowledge? What mix of skills do innovators need? And how can these be best delivered?
Our universities have also embraced their role as producers of new knowledge and their position as key links to global innovation networks is well understood. Great successes have been achieved in knowledge transfer. Any business which takes in sandwich year placements or sponsors MBA students will testify that learning in academic environments is invaluable for bringing new ideas and knowledge into their businesses. But, barriers and confusion about how best to engage in the wider economy still remain. The challenge for higher education institutions must be to maintain their world class position while strengthening these relationships.
Looking to the future, our universities will be more important than ever. It is simply inconceivable that the UK economy could develop a world class innovation ecosystem by 2025 without universities fulfilling and developing in their role as true interactive partners in our economy. Our universities must play a role in helping to rebalance our economy away from its unhealthy dependence on debt. Their role will be even more significant in less prosperous parts of the UK. In many of these locations, universities are the only credible knowledge-based institution on which lasting economic growth can be built. This means that our universities can’t risk resting on past success, or becoming too inward looking.
Research needs to be inspired by the needs of our economy. Results and messages from research need to be communicated directly to businesses. This isn’t just about bright research ideas generating a few billion dollar businesses, although we will need a few of these. Genuine academia-industry relationships must become business as usual across our economy. A small catering company should be totally comfortable asking their local university how to make their products go off less quickly. A struggling online content provider should know how to access the UK’s experts on business model research. Productive, flexible relationships of this nature will take major investments and will often take years to develop. Too often academia-industry connections happen in a fragmented way.We are too reliant on a few self¬selected enthusiasts. This quality connection needs to be the institutional norm, not the exception.
Over the next three years the Big Innovation Centre will be working with universities, businesses and policy makers to consider how we can build a system in which all areas of our diverse university system can flourish.
If we can get these types of relationships right and if we can find new ways to fully immerse and embed all of our universities as true interactive partners right at the heart of our innovation system then we will be a long way towards cracking the innovation puzzle. So I find it incredibly encouraging that so many of our brilliant universities are keen to work in partnership with the businesses in the Big Innovation Centre.Working together like this is the only way we can answer these and many other big questions.
Will Hutton is one of the pre¬eminent economics commentators in the country. He is Chair of the Big Innovation Centre which will research and propose practical reforms with the ambition of making the UK a global open innovation hub as part of the urgent task of rebalancing and growing the UK economy.
