SUMMARY OF CST MEETING ON 12/13 December
Attendees
1. The meeting was chaired in part by Professor Janet Finch and in part by Sir David King. The other members present were:
Professor Sir John Beringer, Professor Geoffrey Boulton, Professor Peter Davies, Professor Alan Gilbert, Professor Wendy Hall, Professor Alan Hughes, Dr Sue Ion, Sir Paul Nurse, Sir Keith Peters, Dr Raj Rajagopal, Dr Philip Ruffles, Professor Kathy Sykes and Dr Mark Walport
Apologies were received from Professor Michael Sterling and Dr Hermann Hauser
Ongoing work includes:
- Corporate Venturing - The aim of the project is to identify if sufficient capital investment is available to early stage UK based innovation companies through the medium of corporate venturing. Data gathering phase of the project is now complete with interviews now being conducted with key personnel at targeted corporates to back the data up. A workshop will be held during the early part of 2008 to road-test preliminary conclusions.
- Cross-disciplinary research - This project is investigating mechanisms for encouraging cross-disciplinary research and development, in the UK and abroad and identifying good practice that could be applied more widely to the large number of new cross-disciplinary research centres in the UK and elsewhere. Ian Pearson has agreed to be sponsor Minister for the project
- Water technologies - Key objectives for this project were: to establish practice in the UK; what existing technology is available and if this being taken up (and if not, why not); level of R&D in the UK and whether there should be more spend on R&D
- Since the September CST meeting, reports on Young Researchers (October 2008) and Strategic Focus (November 2008) have been published.
Other items discussed included:
- Research Metrics - CST met with HEFCE to discuss the response to the consultation on the Research Excellence Framework. It was felt that there would be limited benefit in CST responding directly to the consultation and that CST should focus on broader questions such as the interaction between academia and public policy
- Defra CSA, Bob Watson joined CST for lunch and a pre-lunch discussion. CST was interested to learn of the priorities he had for the department, which included: Defra needing world class science to meet policy needs - silos need to be broken down with cross disciplinary work encouraged - currently the right people are not asking the right questions; How to manage what is known on the big issues - even if the evidence base was not complete decisions could be made with available evidence; Eco-system management and the ramifications of decisions made need to be better understood.
- This meeting was Sir David King's last as CST Co-Chair. CST members expressed their best wishes to Sir David for future ventures and remarked how well the Council had worked under his tenure.
The next CST meeting will be on 17/18 March 2008.