Some thoughts on Innovate UK and UK ARPA

I gave a comment to Research Professional on the continuing 'identity crisis' at Innovate UK - here is a longer version of my rather unstructured comments in case anyone is interested.

Innovate UK does seem to have a high turnover at the top end. It is a relatively young organisation, and there have always been different and conflicting views about its role amongst both its political masters and within UKRI and even within Innovate UK itself.

 Broadly speaking Innovate UK is stuck between a number of competing visions:

One, that it should be supporting individual businesses to be more innovative so as to improve their own competitiveness (i.e. Innovate UK should be a business support agency).

Two, that it is an ‘innovation agency’ and should be promoting innovation across the economy (and not necessarily just technological innovation, as we know much innovation in the services and creative sectors that dominate our economy is not technological)

Three, the original idea of a ‘Technology Strategy Board’, which implies a kind of research council for technological R&D, filling a gap in the UK R&D funding ecosystem.

Because UK science and innovation policy since the 1980s has been dominated until very recently by a resistance to industrial policy and ‘picking winners’ the default approach to innovation has been promoting collaborative R&D and knowledge/tech transfer between the public sector research base and industry – the idea being that the innovations are there, but they are somehow locked inside the universities and need help to get out.

This model was always wrong, based on what we know about innovation, and has clearly failed the UK. However it has provided most of the concepts and language we use to think about innovation policy. Over the decades the UK has seen the growth of a powerful tech transfer industry and this has provided many of the people working in and around Innovate UK, so of course their thinking is going to be shaped by these ideas. The other dominant view, which jostles for supremacy with the tech transfer/commercialisation paradigm is the ‘business support’ view, which in my experience tends to be more commonly held by those with an industry background, and also tends to be the default assumption about the role of Innovate UK held by most politicians.

Meanwhile, the integration of Innovate UK into UKRI has created an additional risk, that of seeing Innovate UK as a kind of commercialisation arm for research council funded science.

In this situation it is little wonder that Innovate UK would struggle to realise its potential. It probably shouldn’t have been put into UKRI in the first place, but I think it would still be struggling to make sense of its mission in any case. It is probably optimistic to imagine a single ‘innovation agency’ can adequately support innovation across all sectors of the economy: Innovation in the services sectors, which dominate the UK economy, is so different from medium and high tech innovation that it really demands different kinds of approaches. These sectors – which includes most of ‘digital’ – probably need their own innovation agencies.

So what model should Innovate UK adopt? The tech transfer model is clearly wrong, and business support is a different policy goal and one that potentially clashes with the economy-wide goal of innovation policy. We are unlikely to achieve a transformation in productivity and growth by helping one company to innovate at a time - innovations need to be diffused and widely adopted to have economy-wide impacts - so the fate of the individual companies shouldn't matter in the way they would for a business support scheme.

If these roles are the wrong ones, what are we left with? In fact we are left with the 'research council for technological R&D', a more constrained but still very challenging role. Unfortunately this starts to get close to the apparent vision for a new UK Advanced Research Projects Agency modelled on the famous US (D)ARPA, which perhaps explains the current nervousness of many in Innovate UK.