A tightly woven matrix

Levelling up. Global Britain. Net zero. Building back better. There are so many agendas flying around at the moment that it can be hard to keep up.

Perhaps that is particularly true after a year when few of us have been able to look further than the end of our masked noses. But just as health services will emerge from the Covid crisis with a battery of other problems waiting tapping their feet, so countries will emerge with many of the same problems that existed back in 2019, and plenty of new ones too.

How, then, to use this moment when the kaleidoscope has been so vigorously shaken to align as far as possible the shared goals of these various agendas?

One possible sticking point is the potential conflict between the local and national versus the global – it is not immediately obvious that “levelling up” has much to do with Britain’s ambition to carve out a new global role post-Brexit, for example, or getting serious about sustainability and reducing carbon emissions.

But they are more interlinked than perhaps meets the eye, and research and innovation can play a vital role across the spectrum.

Science is not a panacea that will on its own solve persisting issues of inequality and productivity in Britain. As the authors of a new report by the Higher Education Policy Institute on levelling up write, while there is “persuasive evidence that investment in research and innovation plays an important role in regional economic development, such investment is not a magic bullet that will automatically meet the ambitions of policymakers or the aspirations of the wider population. Wishing for regional equality is not the same as delivering it.”

One of their proposed policy priorities is to encourage even more inter-regional collaborations to strengthen the impact of research, an idea reflected in the tie-up we report on this week between the universities of Leeds, Manchester and Sheffield. A goal of this group is to attract big, international investment to fund science and tech start-ups spinning out from the universities.

The Hepi report, authored by Sarah Chaytor, Grace Gottlieb and Graeme Reid (all of UCL), also suggests a focus on building strong civic partnerships, enabling civic authorities to take more of a lead on innovation.

In this week’s Times Higher Education, we talk to Richard Jones, one of the country’s leading academic proponents of how R&D can support regional economic development, who has recently been appointed an independent science adviser to Innovation Greater Manchester, a new partnership uniting local and regional government, business and universities with an explicit goal to harness “translational innovation” to create jobs.

A third recommendation of the Hepi report is to integrate regional, national and global interests, taking us back to where we started, and the question of how these potentially competing agendas can be brought into alignment.

Perhaps the response to the climate crisis is a good case study for this. It is undeniably a global challenge, but also one in which the UK is making the running at the moment, and that has implications at every level – including regionally and locally – not least for the future of the economy.

Speaking at the THE-Huawei UK Academic Salon this week, Paul Monks, chief scientific adviser in the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, made the point that the drive to net zero carbon emissions is a “pervasive” challenge, and that achieving the goals set out will “require economy-wide transformation”.

That will incorporate transport, power, buildings, emissions and land use, with solutions ranging from technology to energy sources to behaviour.

“The R&D road map recognises we have to increase our research ambitions, that we need the right people with the right training to do that…[but also] that we don’t do R&D in a vacuum, we do it as part of a global collaboration, and that we also want to translate our outcomes into innovation and productivity.”

So it is global, it is national, and it is local – just like universities.

john.gill@timeshighereducation.com