Economic woes could fuel high-tech recruitment

After a day spent at an event in Brussels, put on by Science|Business and backed by Microsoft, where a major talking point was how industry and universities can work together, it was interesting to see the launch of yet another scheme aimed at this challenge. The UK’s Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills has just announced an initiative “to help universities and research institutions [to] fill skills gaps with scientists who have proven track records in industry and business”.

The idea seems to be to oil the wheels so that researchers with experience in industry will find it easier to change course and to work in a university. DIUS talks of making £5million available “to recruit highly qualified people into a number of senior level research and technology-transfer posts in universities and research institutions across the UK”.

If the event in Brussels is anything to go by, it isn’t just good people that the universities need if they want to work better with industry. They also need to clean up their act on things like administration.

Forget about forcing any company who wants to work with you to spend three months or more messing around with the minutiae of contracts. Don’t place unrealistic valuations on intellectual property rights and the licence fees you expect them to pay to use it.

It is interesting that Lord Drayson, the new science minister who provided the quotes to go with the announcement, sees the current financial climate as one reason for promoting the scheme. “Many businesses and industries in the UK employ first-rate scientists,” he says. “In the current economic downturn, some highly qualified people may face uncertain futures so we need to give them all the opportunities we can to stay working in our research base or in wider science based roles.”

As yet there is little sign of industry using the downturn as an excuse to lose researchers. Then again, we heard in Brussels that the OECD’s numbers suggest that the rapid rises in corporate R&D spending of recent years have levelled off.

Even if their own budgets do come under pressure, some people in industry see the economic downturn as a recruiting opportunity. This is especially true of the bright mathematicians who went to work in the finance sector, at salaries that exceeded the wallets of even the wealthiest of tech businesses.

If this tactic works, the tech sector could benefit from the collapse of the financial world. Then again,  some observers do suggest that these bright mathematicians were a part of the cause of the problems. After all, they came up with the clever “products” that even they may not have fully understood. Then there are the programs they wrote that have taken over from people when it comes to decisions on when to buy and sell.

Let’s hope that their new employers find better projects for them to work on.