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Lord Sainsbury of TurvilleOpening of the Wolfson Institute for Biomedical Research, UCL - "Knowledge and Technology Transfer" |
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Knowledge and Technology Transfer Introduction I would like to thank Chris Llewellyn Smith for inviting me here this morning on the opening of this outstanding institute. It is particularly impressive to see such a successful refurbishment of a historical building. I am confident that the scientists based here will be as innovative as the architects have been. I would like to congratulate UCL on raising the funds for this state-of-the-art facility, and express my appreciation of the generous contributions from the Wellcome Trust and The Wolfson Foundation. The strength of our biomedical research in this country depends to a great extent on the support of our charitable foundations. They can be extremely proud of the work they do, and I would like to say how greatly the Government values not only the money they give but also the extremely effective way they allocate it. This Private Finance Initiative reflects the institute's strength in the development and exploitation of research - an attribute that has led to the formation of companies such as Eurogene, CereXus, Inpharmatica and Arrow Therapeutics Limited. Investment in science and technology is fundamental to future success and economic growth in the UK. We have a strong science base in the UK, made up of world class universities and research institutes. In the past we have been extremely successful in turning our scientific excellence into profitable innovation in a number of industries which depend on elite science such as pharmaceuticals, aerospace and biotechnology. But the current period of rapid and discontinuous change in many branches of science provides British industry with a unique opportunity. Therefore, following the Spending Review 2000, I will be publishing a White Paper on Science and Innovation to help British science create the high-skill, high-wage jobs of the future. The White Paper will be about how we maintain and enhance our outstanding record of scientific discovery, and how we enable and incentivise our scientists, engineers and business men to take advantage of it to create wealth and improve the quality of our lives. The White Paper will promote university-industry collaboration, help scientists develop business skills, and encourage small companies to undertake more research and development. But today I want to discuss the action we have taken both to improve knowledge transfer in the British economy and also the quality of the research infrastructure which provides the basis for successful innovation. Exploitation Policy In the Government's Competitiveness White Paper in 1998, we put universities at the centre of the productive economy. They are rightly increasingly seen as agents of growth as well as creators of knowledge, trainers of young minds and transmitters of culture. The process of innovation itself is changing in the knowledge-driven economy. This transformation is being driven by the increasing pace of technological change, the rise of new technology intensive sectors such as information technologies, biotechnology and advanced materials, the greater knowledge intensity of industry, the globalisation of technology and the increasing pressure on companies to shorten their development times for new products. Companies have responded to these changes by shifting the focus of their innovations from Central R and D laboratories to global R and D networks. Whereas in the past they would have done the research they needed in-house, today they are reaching outside the firm to partnerships and alliances, looking for technical knowledge wherever it may be found. As a result, there has been an expansion of university-industry relationships and universites are becoming an increasingly important part of a country's innovation system. The Government's vision is for the universities to be both stimulators and facilitators of knowledge transfer to business and society. Furthermore, we aim to maintain and indeed improve the quality of both teaching and the research base. By these means, the whole of the nation will benefit. We want to see universities adopt a diversity of missions so as to excel in their chosen areas of strength - in research, in teaching or in knowledge transfer. In particular we want to provide incentives which make it as attractive for universities to excel in world class knowledge transfer as it currently is to excel in research. There are many excellent examples of UK university-business partnerships. We need look no further than the industrial collaborations and spin-out ventures visible here at the Wolfson Institute. Fruitful collaborations with pharmaceutical giants GlaxoWellcome and Pfizer, and the birth of Eurogene and Inpharmatica highlight the centre's industrial awareness. However, we still have some way to go before knowledge transfer is as prestigious for a university as research and teaching. To address this challenge, the Government has introduced a number of initiatives to promote knowledge transfer in its many forms. It is notable that UCL has been very successful in many of these activities. Reach-out Fund The new Higher Education Reach-out to Business and the Community Fund was launched last June. It will incentivise universities to diversify into knowledge transfer and to reap the economic benefits from their research and teaching activities. UCL were, of course, one of the successful applicants in the recent first call under the Reach-out fund. They received one of the highest awards from the £60M awarded in the first call of the fund. The £1.1M award to UCL will fund an innovative four-year programme. It will enable the university to build on its existing base of professional support services, and to take a more proactive approach to marketing its expertise. I look forward to making further awards to universities under the second call of the Reach-out fund this summer. I hope to see even more universities follow UCL's lead - to `reach-out to business' in order to contribute to economic growth and competitiveness. University Challenge Fund A second initiative is the University Challenge Fund which we set up in March 1998. Its aim is to create seed capital funds to help encourage the exploitation of research by funding the early stages of project commercialisation. Last year, I was delighted to award a total of £45M to fifteen university-based consortia spread across the country. In addition, each successful bidder was required to bring in an additional 25% in matching donations, raising the total value of the seed funds created to £65M. A year later, all the seed funds are now in place and operating, quite an achievement given the timescale. To date, the fund winners have made over twenty investments in potential new ventures such as funding scoping studies, market research, developing prototypes and setting up spin-out companies. We will be watching the germination and growth of these seeds with keen interest. Indeed, UCL is heavily involved in two seed funds arising from this scheme. Science Enterprise Challenge Then last September we announced the winners of the Science Enterprise Challenge. £25M has been allocated to establish eight centres of enterprise in the UK. The centres will provide a focus for scientific entrepreneurship by incorporating the teaching of enterprise in the science and engineering curricula. They will also provide opportunities for networking and sharing best practice across universities. I do not think it is possible to create entrepreneurs, but these are some things that every high-tech entrepreneur should know about before he sets up his first company such as how to write a corporate plan, the importance of Intellectual Property Rights and the role of Venture Capital. And these are all subjects that can be taught. I was delighted that, UCL and the London Business School were awarded £4.6M for their Science Enterprise Centre partnership. I was also delighted that we were able to fund the new £50M link-up between Cambridge University and MIT in America. I see this as a major opportunity to transfer to this country some of the knowledge about the teaching of entrepreneurial skills to engineers and scientists for which MIT is justly famous. In all the work we do on innovation we must look to the future. Foresight The Foresight programme is about building bridges between science, business, the Government and customers so that developments can be anticipated where possible. It is identifying the drivers, threats and opportunities for the next 20 years, to inform policy and spending decisions taken today. The Foresight Healthcare Panel, is for example, addressing key issues for the evolution of health care through its Task Forces and associate activities. The Healthcare Panel is fortunate to have Sir Michael Peckham as its Chairman and also participation from other UCL departments in its activities, including that of David Delpy here at the Department of Medical Physics and Bioengineering. One of these Task Forces will be considering how we can deliver the promise of the human genome. The wealth of data flooding out of the Human Genome Project, and research into the functions of genes and their products, are going to change our approach to biomedical research. Only by developing new technologies will we benefit from these developments. I want to ensure that UK industry can exploit the growing mass of knowledge in genomics and have a firm footing in designing the diagnostic tests and treatments of the future. At present the UK is leading Europe in biotechnology. Since 1997, the number of specialist companies has increased by nearly 50% to almost 300, employing an estimated 14,000 people. Leading Biotech companies such as Celltech-Chiroscience are now appearing on the FTSE100. The UK is undoubtedly well placed to develop its competitive position in biotechnology. However, we must not assume that we can maintain this position. We must enhance the attractiveness of the UK to investment in biotechnology. Sustained growth in this sector will not be achieved without concerted improvement in the areas that I have discussed today. Only by creating the right incentives and the right climate of innovation will we be able to cultivate a genome valley in the UK. New LINK Programme Over the last decade Government Departments and Research Councils have supported collaborative research through a number of programmes under the LINK scheme. LINK has proved consistently popular with the biotechnology community and a number of very successful collaborations have come out of these programmes. Today I would like to announce my decision to fund a new LINK Programme in Applied Genomics for healthcare applications. We hope to launch this programme in the summer. It will be supported by up to £15M of public funds, - £5M each from DTI, BBSRC and the MRC. This will be balanced by £15M of contributions from the industrial participants, thereby generating an overall programme activity worth at least £30M in total. The new programme will support projects to develop platform technologies in areas such as control of gene expression, analysis of gene products and DNA-based diagnostics. The programme will help UK companies to exploit advances in genomics and contribute to translating basic research into real changes in healthcare. Participants will be small specialist companies, larger manufacturers and teams from the science base. I am particularly keen on the involvement of smaller genomics companies. If UK suppliers do not continue to offer the most effective products and technologies, others will take their place in the supply chains of the multinational pharmaceutical and diagnostics companies. Infrastructure We will be able to achieve none of this unless we maintain the infrastructure of our science and engineering base. Scientists are one of our most valuable assets, and they need funding for their research and the tools to do it with. You cannot produce first class science from crumbling laboratories with second rate equipment. That is why we established the £750M pound Joint Infrastructure Fund as part of an exciting new partnership with the Wellcome Trust and the Higher Education Funding Council for England. JIF is aimed at reversing the decline and chronic under-investment in research infrastructure, identified in 1997 by the Dearing Report on UK universities. Last week I was delighted to announce almost £130M in support of 27 projects at 21 universities across the country. This brings the total spent to date to £600M . After the announcement of the awards we had presentations from four of the winners. What these presentations illustrated very clearly is how inefficient research can be done with out-of-date facilities, how in many cases there are safety considerations, and how in some cases research cannot be done at all without new facilities or equipment. UCL itself has been a major beneficiary of this initiative with major awards to create an Evolutionary Genomics Centre in the Darwin Building and a new Department of Neurodegeneration at the Institute of Neurology. The refurbishment at the Wolfson building is in itself a welcome contribution to improving the UK biomedical infrastructure. Conclusions The Government believes that science and technology have a key role to play in our future competitiveness. To fund the initiatives that I have mentioned today, the science budget was increased by 15% in the last Comprehensive Spending Review. An extra £1.5 billion were allocated to the UK's Science and Engineering base. However, there is still some way to go in funding the science and engineering base and in providing the right incentives to create a high-tech, high-wage economy. There is already a major culture change taking place on our universities as they respond to the challenge of the knowledge-driven economy and we need to build on it. This institute is part of that exciting development and I wish it every success in the future. |
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Other speeches by Lord Sainsbury of Turville
(the following are available from the archive) |
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