For some innovation policy challenges you need to open up the ‘black box’, particularly when you are looking at the specific needs of a new research field or emerging technology. If you don’t do that, the people who are making policy and investment decisions about which technologies, manufacturing processes and sectors to support are doing it in the dark.
- Eoin O'Sullivan
There is concern among some policymakers that the UK is not as good as it might be at turning its world-class research into thriving industries and businesses. In recent years, the UK government has been looking for new and more reliable ways to ensure valuable innovations can cross the so-called ‘valley of death’ – the point at which they often fail to translate into a technology that can be scaled up and commercialised. However, for government initiatives to be effective, the people who design them (and invest taxpayers’ money in funding them) and the people who put them into practice need to have a better understanding both of the technologies themselves and of the industries within which they are deployed.
Which is where Cambridge’s Institute for Manufacturing’s (IfM's) Centre for Science, Technology and Innovation Policy (CSTI) comes in.
Before coming to the IfM, its founder and director, Dr Eoin O’Sullivan, was part of the team that set up Science Foundation Ireland. Encounters with research councils and government agencies informed his view that much of the R&D and innovation policy research coming out of universities was ineffective in informing the strategies and programmes of innovation agencies because it was not getting to the right level of detail with regard to technologies and manufacturing systems.
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Image: 121.365 Innovation
Credit: Reilly Butler
Reproduced courtesy of the University of Cambridge
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