Scotland’s R&D should be more business like

Scotland prides itself on the quality of its universities and their research. It has also put considerable effort into coaxing academics into turning their toiling in the lab into profitable businesses, through, for example, the  Scottish Enterprise (SE) Proof of Concept programme. But it seems that for all of its attempts to stand out from its larger southern neighbour, in one area at least it has been quietly sitting on its hands.

The Scottish Science Advisory Council’s (SSAC) reckons that the country’s businesses are deficient in their R&D spending. As Professor Steve Beaumont, Vice Principal for Research and Enterprise at the University of Glasgow and a member of the SSAC, puts it “Scottish industry appears to be less research intensive than business in the same sector elsewhere. If we are to accelerate innovation in the economy, companies need more incentives to invest in R&D and this in turn will help them capitalise on the strength of our universities.”

Beaumont was commenting on a new report, Business R&D in Scotland: A Missing Link, in which the SSAC says that “Business R&D conducted in Scotland under-performs the rest of the UK, contributing only 0.56% of GDP compared with 1.08% for the UK as a whole in 2006″.

The council puts some of the blame for this deficit down to poor links between business and the country’s world class universities. As the report puts it: “The outputs of Scotland’s universities (research, consultancy, trained PhD graduates) are not being captured by Scottish industry, which in turn exerts little influence on the research undertaken in academia.”

The report goes on to say that the mismatch between supply of academic research output and demand from industrial R&D “is at least a missed opportunity whose correction could improve our economic performance”.

According to Professor Anne Glover, Chief Scientific Adviser for Scotland and Co-Chair of the SSAC, “There is a compelling argument for business to benefit from the substantial public investment in our research base and to translate this into focussed business R&D programmes in collaboration with academia. Our research base has a role to play too, in reaching out to industry to help turn lab-based developments into the new products and processes that will boost our economy.”

One problem facing Scotland’s policy makers seems to be confused evidence on the capabilities of the country’s industry. The reports recommends that, because of “mixed messages about the innovative behaviour and capabilities of the Scottish business base,” Scotland should seek to resolve “apparently contradictory findings from recent policy research on the capabilities of the Scottish business base.”

Among other recommendations, the report calls for the Scottish Government to “strengthen the pipeline of support mechanisms” including expanding proof of concept type support “to include business innovation”. The SSAC advocates looking into the idea of expanding SE’s Proof of Concept programme to “develop innovative products and processes of value from sectors of the economy other than the Universities, Research Institutes and NHS”.

One reason for advocating more emphasis on proof of concept activities is that it has already delivered results. As the report puts it “proposals seeking R&D grant support emerging from the SE Proof of Concept Programme tend in the main to be strong candidates for support – they tend to be ‘SMART-investment’ ready”.

One idea that the report floats might have come a bit too late. Scotland’s once proud financial sector now has rather a lot of egg on its face, thanks in part to innovations that turned out to be less than wondrous. However, the SSAC, which tactfully overlooks the sector’s recent woes, still thinks that there is room for innovation, especially in the sector’s use of new technology.

The council admits that it would be “pointless to expect this sector to increase its research spend to a national norm”. On the other hand, “investing in research-intensive sectors that create the technologies on which new services might be built not only creates new markets for those sectors but also enhances the competitiveness of the service sector”.

The council believes that “Scotland could enhance the competitiveness of one of its most important industries by supporting R&D in its technology supply chain”. It also says that “a better understanding of supply chain linkages between the technology and the service sectors is vital”.