UK assesses impact of spending on academic research
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UK assesses impact of spending on academic research
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n one of her first major speeches on the direction that her administration will take, the United Kingdom’s new Prime Minister, Theresa May, announced that by 2020 there will be an extra £2 billion per year of government investment for research and development (R&D) “to ensure British business remains at the cutting edge of scientific and technological discovery.” An increase of roughly a fifth, this is one of the largest boosts to R&D spending in many years. As the prime minister’s speech suggests, governments fund research in the belief that there is a direct link between R&D spending and economic growth. When trying to justify this expenditure at a time when the economy is in poor shape, the UK government can draw on the evidence of a recent exercise that
set out to determine the true impact of spending on academic research. The Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), the UK’s largest source of grants for research in engineering and the physical sciences, calculates that research it backed was behind more than 400 new businesses that employ 50,000 people and that have contributed some £4 billion to the economy. As Philip Nelson, Chief Executive of EPSRC puts it, “Research funded by the council can be associated with approximately [£60] billion of economic activity, including £16 billion of cost savings to the public and private sector.” Nelson’s comments draw on EPSRC’s analysis of the 1226 case studies directly relevant to its remit
submitted to the Research Excellence Framework (REF) 2014. REF is a series of research benchmarking exercises, carried out every five or six years since 1986. For the first time, the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE), the body that ran REF2014, asked for case studies that described the impact of their research. Previous benchmarks sought details of the quality of the research outputs, judged by international comparisons, and information on the quality of the research “environment” that universities provided. In materials research, EPSRC’s analysis included, for example, case studies that described research at the University of Cambridge on the growth of gallium nitride that, the researchers said, helped the company Aixtron sell more than £500 million worth of equipment in the three years running up to REF2014. The work also led to the manufacture of “the world’s first commercially available LEDs [light-emitting diodes] on 6-inch [diameter] silicon.” Another case study for REF2014 reported on research at Imperial College London on engineering materials that delivered international standards and codes that have, the researchers say, saved industry “many millions of pounds” in applications in nuclear power stations, in composite materials in aircraft, plastic water pipes, and wind turbine blades. Again, the researchers talk of economic benefits in the millions. In line As a part of its submission to REF2014, Swansea University described research into the characterization of metallic with REF
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