With all the discussion around the new Industrial Strategy Green Paper and our response, we’ve realised many of you are joining us for the first time. Therefore, we at the RDS thought now is the time to take a moment to look back through our history and explain how we have evolved with the country as the challenges have shifted.
The Research & Development Society (RDS) was founded in London 1962 as the London Group for the Study of the Administration of Research and Development (LGARD). In 1964 the name was changed to The Research and Development Society and in 1971 the Society was incorporated as a Company Limited by Guarantee without any share capital: the RDS is now over 60 years old!
The RDS in its first 20 years reflected its position as part of the UK Industrial scene, with strong representation from major national ‘industrial champions’, including ICI, Glaxo, Beecham, GEC and the large government-funded research establishments: this status was cemented by the formal appointment of Prince Philip as Patron in 1971.
These early years reflected the overall political and economic climate, irrespective of the government in power. However, as Richard Jones notes in his magisterial review, Industrial strategy, as a strand of economic management, was killed by the ‘hard’ commitment to market liberalism in the 1980s, where the Thatcher Government regarded industrial strategy as a central part of the failed post-war consensus that its mission was to overturn: the accompanying rhetoric was about uncompetitive industries producing poor-quality products, kept afloat by oceans of taxpayers’ cash.
The following 25 years, including the early years of the Blair Government, built on this neo-liberal agenda, which meant that the RDS focused largely on supporting leaders in research and development departments in the larger corporates (consisting of the dwindling band of national champions now augmented by the UK operations of fast-growing multi-national corporations). The RDS tried valiantly to facilitate dialogue and influence the environment in which science and technology-enabled innovation is commercialised.
All this changed significantly in 2004, when the Technology Strategy Board was created in the Blair-Brown years of the Labour Government. In this new initiative, innovation was defined as the successful implementation of new ideas (i.e. commercialisation of ideas for new products and services). In response, the RDS initiated several significant dialogues about the future shape of UK S&T Innovation. This fresh burst of more active state involvement, however, was curtailed by the effective ‘down-grading’ of the TSB agenda to focus on R&D grants, not commercialisation. This was first signalled by separating out the TSB from the DTI into an Agency under the Research Council umbrella and then in the re-naming of the TSB as Innovate UK in 2014.
Most of the departmental policy team moved into the Agency group with the remit on execution but this left a void in policy making , And this policy shift with the emphasis on early-stage science and technology innovation, with a deliberate decision to only intervene in commercialisation in the event of ‘market failure’ (not easily defined) was cemented by Innovate UK being incorporated into UKRI, alongside the various research councils covering different areas of science, in 2018.
While some parts of the UK Government have been pre-occupied with these ideological considerations, as the RDS has noted, the world has moved on.
These global changes in science and technology commercialization cover three main areas:
- Geopolitical considerations, where the overall mood music changed from decolonisation to globalisation to the now new world of protectionism, tariffs and trade wars
- Structural changes in funding and investment, re-arrangement of market-space-centric value chains (which, for example, determine the geographic distribution of research vs manufacturing), and confusion of the role of the state vs private markets
- Major shifts in key technologies, especially in digital (e.g. AI), renewable energy (e.g. fuel cells), and lifesciences (e.g. new gene therapies)
In a major change of direction following the UK General Election in July 2024, the new Labour Government has now explicitly acknowledged the critical importance of industrial strategy for their growth agenda.
As a result, the role of the RDS is now changing in a fundamental way. While the overall mission remains the same, the RDS now needs to tackle the following areas head-on, for its wider audience of innovators, SMEs, larger corporations, investors and policy makers. In particular, the RDS needs to re-focus its support to address the following areas:
- Understand how growth happens, based on a meso-economic analysis
- Engage with innovative SMEs in the key UK clusters, not just the big players
- Provide a pro-active forum for discussion with policymakers
- Help to design the shape of future interventions
- Support the allocation of resources to the right areas and measure the impact of these interventions
Our response to Invest 2035 is just the start of achieving these objectives. Join us now to stay up to date on the latest developments in UK Industrial policy and hear first about the events we will be holding in clusters across the country next year.