There Is No Plan B: Putting the “D” Back in “R&D”

There Is No Plan B: Putting the “D” Back in “R&D”

The UK generally sold out its engineering and manufacturing industry in the 1980s in the rush towards a service-based economy — it was easy and quick money. The country didn’t have to make things any more — and with a click of a button, it could make people rich. And, so, the UK lost many great R&D labs (eg Racal, Plessey, GEC, and Feranti), and have never replaced them. While there are still strong ecosystems around, such as in Cambridge, the UK is now generally dependent on services.

There is no Plan B

While the UK’s academic research is still as good as any country in the work, it lacks the “D” (Development) in R&D. And, you cannot just catch up four decades of decay in making things. We see many initiatives in the UK to get industry focused on areas such as chip design and supply chains; these often struggle from four decades of decay and knowledge. How can a country build microelectronics, while universities struggle to attract students to take electronics courses?

And, so, universities must now drive not just “R” (Research) but the “D” (Development). As much as possible, university teams need to not just stop and create research outputs and then wait for industry to adopt their methods, but push forward with spin-outs. Or, to host start-up companies within a research environment.

The wrong skills base?

The UK (perhaps) has the wrong skills base to build a future economy. Overall, the country struggles to get kids to consider engineering and the physical sciences as a future career. Why? For one, we often switch kids off the area at school. But the other is that we perhaps overproduce graduates with law degrees but still struggle to fill courses in areas such as electronics. And, for all the MBA programmes that are brimming with students, we need to have an equal (if not more) measure of graduates who will drive and build new ideas. Overal, many of the key leaders in the tech industry are engineers and not those from purely business backgrounds.

Overall, the UK needs to move fast in rebuilding an engineering/ manufacturing base — and to make things again. These days, though, it does not need to build factories anymore, but to design things for others to build. The market is thus not as much for manufacturing but for the creation of intellectual property (IP)) that creates real things that people want to buy. We thus need to better match up our intellectual property pipeline of research to a development pipeline.

Conclusions

I say again … academic teams need to push forward with their research and look to covert their work into impact, and which can provide benefits to citizens — economic growth, good jobs and a secure future.