Mission Possible
Former DSIT policy adviser Ben Johnson on bridging government and innovation networks to seize the UK’s edge in science and technology
Former Science Secretary Michelle Donelan used to say that the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) has a “start-up mentality.” Naturally, we at The Entrepreneurs Network are watching this entrepreneurial corner of Whitehall with keen interest and, like many, are wondering what the science and technology community can expect from the new Labour Government.
To help answer this question, we spoke to Ben Johnson, former senior policy adviser to DSIT Secretary of State, and Professor of Practice in Research and Innovation at the University of Strathclyde, to discuss how the Department might evolve under Labour’s mission-oriented approach, and what is needed to build a relationship between DSIT and the science and technology sector where both sides are partners.
What we discussed
What the new Government’s five missions mean for DSIT and its interaction with the sector
How to better deploy expertise and evidence into government
What needs to happen to make UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) as effective a delivery partner as possible
Stakeholder engagement beyond public consultations and roundtables
How the science and technology community can get the Government excited and compelled to invest resources
Moving from being comparatively good to objectively good at research commercialisation
Strategic advantage in science and technology beyond economic growth
Lessons for a relationship between DSIT and science and technology community
For the sector:
Describe the prize. Ministers want something to feel positive about and to champion, so articulating the opportunity is important. The sector needs to show how it can deliver on the Government’s aims. The five missions will be an important framing for making a compelling case.
Be a partner. Don’t just go to the Government with problems. The quid pro quo of asking the Government to fix a problem is showing what you can do to help fix its problems.
Prevent gerontocracy. Give the opportunity to voices below the C-suite level in companies and senior academics at universities to inform the Government’s thinking on policy.
For the Government:
Allow some white space. While reframing existing activities to better align with delivering on the five missions, remember to maintain flexibility for innovation outside mission boundaries. The Government needs to listen to what the sector’s wants and needs are too.
Make it easy for innovative start-ups to engage. Processes need to be quick, timelines short, documents brief and easy to read. Contact details for people working on issues that affect companies need to be easily available.
Seek out disruptive thinkers. Focus on senior stakeholders means that the Government doesn’t always have access to fresh or disruptive thinking. The civil service has lots of brilliant people, but it doesn’t always find it easy to come up with ideas on its own.
Get under the bonnet of what’s going on in the real world. Ministers, advisers and civil servants need to get out and see things, to weigh up the opportunities and challenges for themselves. They need to understand these things in a real way rather than just as a one-line description in a written submission.
Build networks. Government won’t be able to talk to everybody, but it can facilitate connections. It should collaborate more with trade bodies and other network organisations that can help engage wider groups.
De-silo UKRI. Focus on making UKRI a genuinely additive and integrative intervention across the spectrum of research and innovation.
Geopolitical context hasn’t gone away. Science and technology are key elements of how the UK builds its supply chains, resilience and international alliances. The Government needs to work out how the strategic advantage framing fits in the missions beyond economic opportunities.
Full interview
To begin, let’s set the scene. You left DSIT in the early days of the new Government. We have five missions that Labour has committed to: economic growth, the NHS, clean energy, safer streets and opportunity for all. Does this renewed policy backdrop mean anything for DSIT immediately?
Yes, I think it does change things. The missions are going to be a really important frame for the Department's strategy work, particularly with the Spending Review next year.
Some parts of DSIT already have experience working with missions. The previous industrial strategy was framed around a set of missions and four grand challenges, with lots of funding attached through the Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund. More recently, DSIT has been operating the Technology Missions Fund, designed to push forward strategic advantage in five critical technologies through R&D funding. That's probably more mission-oriented in name than in nature, but there's some muscle memory in the Department for doing mission-oriented work. It's not going to be completely new.
Labour clearly wants the mission-oriented approach to be much more ambitious and embedded across Whitehall. So DSIT will have to do a lot of significant framing and reframing of its activities to position itself as delivering on the missions. There's going to be impetus to act quickly and show the transformative work that will allow the Department and the wider sector to rise to the challenge.
The good news is that mission number one is to have the highest growth in the G7 by the end of the parliament, which won't be a new objective for DSIT as it was already a growth department. So I don't think there's going to be lots of ripping everything up and starting again. But the framing and justification of how DSIT has to deliver on these more ambitious missions is a new thing, and that will take some work.
Can you give a flavour of what this could look like in practice?
I suspect there will be new funding that is more explicitly mission-oriented. UKRI, as the major R&D funder and the biggest item line in the DSIT budget, will play a critically important role across Whitehall to deliver on the areas of the missions where there is a role for R&D. This ought to be quite focussed; R&D plays an important role in delivering all missions, but we need more than R&D if we are to reduce crime or increase educational opportunities for example. Those will require policy interventions across the piece.
By extension, DSIT shouldn’t pigeonhole every activity it undertakes under one of the five missions. That would be quite reductive. Nevertheless, I think there should be new funding attached to the missions, and that's what they will be working on for the Spending Review.
What are the potential challenges here?
There are bound to be competing visions across Whitehall on what these missions really mean. What the Treasury thinks about the missions is the big unanswered question. It had its own distinctive view of industrial strategy before. Is there a Treasury approach to missions that needs to be factored in? How much will they want to control things versus the Department for Business and Trade? I think there will be some Whitehall politics there, and coordinating across all of that is going to be an operational challenge for the government centrally.
Another challenge might be the need to create some white space. Lots of the magic in science and technology comes from people's creativity, out-of-the-box thinking, ability to improvise, entrepreneurship, and opportunism. These are powerful forces, and the government needs to unleash them, not try to put everybody in the service of the state.
Of course, government will need the science and technology sector’s help to deliver on these missions. In many ways, industry and government will already be on the same page. Everybody wants to see faster economic growth and a fairer, more resilient society. But government needs to listen to what the sector’s wants and needs are too. These may not always align with delivering on the missions, so government can't be too dogmatic about it. It has to also allow some white space.
In a recent interview with the Guardian, Minister for Science Sir Patrick Vallance called for better use of research to understand how to actually deliver on the missions. Do you think there is more to do on this metapolicy front?
Patrick is right about the need to understand how to deliver those missions and where the solutions can come from. That needs a much more sophisticated approach to gathering and using evidence and intelligence, not just about the UK system, but also what's going on internationally. I don't think we're there yet.
Developments like the DSIT-UKRI Metascience Unit will help with that, because it can help gather together the existing evidence and also create new evidence where needed, so the government can take properly informed, data-driven decisions on science policy.
There's also a critically important role for how government accesses scientific advice and expertise. Patrick will know from his experience running the Government Office for Science that the network of Chief Scientific Advisors is an incredibly important conduit for bringing in the latest thinking. UKRI has a really important role here as well, but it really needs to beef up its analytical capability. This means bringing together the huge range of expertise, insight, intelligence, and understanding that exists both in UKRI and in the wider community of researchers and innovators it works with, and bringing that to bear on policy decisions. UKRI does some of this already, but there is much more that can be done.
DSIT has recently reopened procurement for a new CEO of UKRI. What should the new head’s top three priorities be?
I would say the first priority is around the organisation's ability to build and deploy expertise and evidence into government. I would want the new CEO to be much more focused on that academic-industrial-policy leadership piece, building the analytical capability and the expertise to help inform better decisions about science and technology policy. This requires a different way of working for UKRI where they become a lot less process-driven and a lot more guided by talent, expertise and evidence.
The second issue they would need to prioritise is around internal ways of working. It's no secret that morale is quite low in UKRI at the moment. Some of that is due to resourcing constraints imposed by the government, but there is also a feeling that UKRI has been created as a separate layer on top of the nine councils, with lots of consequent disruption but without much benefit. There's an opportunity for UKRI to move from being a collection of vertical silos of different disciplines and domains that all fight each other or team up to fight the center, into more of a horizontal approach. We need to see much better integration across the disciplines, more focus on how different technologies at different technology readiness levels can be supported, and how the challenges are different across different levels of technology maturity. We need to properly integrate Innovate UK into the thinking of UKRI so that technologies can be supported in more of an end-to-end way, rather than leaving it as a semi-detached thing.
The third piece would be around capability to lead international debates. Before UKRI was created, the research councils and their partners were leading many of the international discussions around open data, open research, research integrity, and many other globally significant research policy areas where the UK was respected and able to take a lead. I think since the creation of UKRI, some of that has fallen away, and that's a big shame.
I think UKRI has been very distracted by the business of its own creation. Rather than having the intended effect of freeing up the research councils to lead in their domains while working together more effectively and efficiently, it has instead imposed lots of confusing bureaucracy on the research councils and has impeded the relationship between the research community and government by introducing new hierarchies and new complexity. So the only way through that – and I don't think we can go back to a model where we have separate disciplines that don't coordinate effectively together – is to focus on how UKRI can be a genuinely additive and integrative intervention across the spectrum of research and innovation.
Could this more cross-disciplinary approach help with delivering the missions?
Yes. You can look at the Norwegian Research Council as a good model for this because they already did the hard work that we are doing in the UK to bring different bodies together under a single organisational umbrella. They are now organised around big strategic themes rather than disciplinary areas, and it seems to work very effectively. So I could easily see how if UKRI solved that internal challenge, they could be a highly effective delivery partner of the government.
The risk is, if they don't do that, then business as usual will prevail. It might be dressed up as delivering on missions, for example, but nothing will change in substance. That would be a big missed opportunity.
Thinking more broadly, what does government find easy and hard about science and technology?
It's quite hard to generalise, because government is a complex network of many different players with very different incentives. In general, though, government finds it quite easy to produce outputs – writing strategy documents, producing dashboards, running consultations. That writing work is core to what government departments do, and they're very good at it.
Government also finds it easy to engage with stakeholders. A meeting invitation with the Secretary of State or to attend a roundtable in Number 10 can get you access to pretty much anyone you need to talk to.
However, government finds it quite hard to strip below the layer of senior stakeholders, representative bodies, and trade bodies – the usual suspects. Many of these people are paid to maintain a good relationship with government, which can lead to a kind of symbiosis. Government doesn't always have access to fresh or disruptive thinking, which is quite important. The civil service is a fantastic organisation with lots of brilliant people, but it doesn't always find it easy to come up with ideas on its own.
The result can be blandness where you might see a disconnect between ambitious ministerial rhetoric and what's actually being done. One of the things I've most highly prized when I was in government is building a network of people who would really tell me the truth about what was going on, who were prepared to be a bit disrespectful and dismissive in private about some of the things the government was doing, but who could also bring new thinking and new ideas into government.
This brings us to stakeholder engagement – government often launches public consultations. How effective are they as a tool and what would you do to make policy development more aligned to real-world needs?
In general, the government makes an effort to listen, and there are lots of consultations that are run. But my advice to ministers and SpAds would be: you have to get out and talk to people, and not just in London. Make an effort to get around the UK and see what's really going on in the real world, what the opportunities are, and what people are facing. They need to understand these things in a real way rather than just as a one-line description in a written submission. It is absolutely essential to be able to cut through to what the real issues are. All of these things also apply to the civil service, of course.
One of the things I used to like doing when I went on ministerial visits was to leave the minister to have their photo taken and do the handshakes with the select group of people that had been safely put together, and then stay behind and have a proper conversation with the people who weren't meeting the minister. This allowed me to get a sense from them about what the real issues were. Ministers may not always have the time to do that type of engagement themselves. But they need people around them who can do it for them and really understand what's going on.
Thinking about exciting new companies in particular, what do you think the government could do to better engage with them?
My number one recommendation would be to make it easy for companies to engage. Processes need to be really quick, timelines need to be short, documents need to be brief and easy to read, and contact details for people working on issues that affect companies need to be easily available. I don't think any of that is currently the case. Government processes and timelines are far too long, documents are far too lengthy, and it's impossible to find the person who is working on a specific issue. All of that is very challenging for everybody, but it's particularly hard for companies that are very small, very new, time-poor, and cash-poor. Yet these companies are often working on extremely exciting areas.
I think there's a role for government in trying to build networks. Government won't be able to talk to everybody, but it can facilitate connections. Innovate UK is a good example. They have people stationed around the UK whose responsibility is to build networks for different companies. However, there's only one person in each region. It's too much for one person.
I've encountered this in Scotland, where the person is a highly capable individual who is very energetic and spends a lot of time moving not just in the central belt, but around all of Scotland to engage with different companies. But with the best will in the world, one person is completely insufficient to ensure that the full range of exciting companies doing amazing work in Scotland can connect with policy – even just Innovate UK policy, let alone wider DSIT or wider government policy.
I also think that trade bodies and other network organisations have a really important role here to help build those networking effects for government, and could be put to better use actually. The government could be less precious about collaborating with organisations like The Entrepreneurs Network or Startup Coalition to reach a wider group of companies and make it easier for them to engage. There could be a lot more collaboration there.
Considering the volume of potentially game-changing science and technology work we see in the UK, how do we get the Government excited?
Some of that responsibility we have to collectively put on the community itself. For industry and academia to get government excited, they have to get the basics right of showing how their work can deliver on government aims. Rather than just articulating a problem for government or a funding requirement, although sometimes those things need to be articulated, there is significant benefit in companies and others showing how what they are doing or planning to do will deliver on the government's priorities.
The five missions, for instance, will be a very important framing for how companies and others interact with government. Ministers want something to feel positive about so they can champion it, so articulating that opportunity and describing the prize is really important.
Another piece of this is that many of the exciting things emerging in science and technology are exciting internationally. There's a lot of debate around new technologies like AI or synthetic biology happening globally, not just in the UK. There's a significant opportunity for actors in the UK to help shape that debate and exercise thought leadership. Take, for example, the application of AI to science and how the scientific process and methods might be transformed. This is an area that the UK can really capitalise on and shape the discussion. As a community, we should be articulating that and demonstrating that the UK can take a leading position in shaping and informing these discussions internationally. If we do that, it creates a buzz which government would find difficult to ignore. Without that, these things can just become yet another list of stakeholder demands.
There's also a tendency for our sector to go to government with our problems, and expect them to have all of the answers and solutions. I think that's unhealthy. Even if government is sympathetic to our plight, it has a specific job to do for the public and has limited bandwidth and resources. If we want government to care about something, we have to show how it is contributing to their objectives and create some excitement and thought leadership around opportunities to create positive impact for society.
The quid pro quo of asking government to fix a problem is showing government what you can do to help fix its problems. This shouldn't be a relationship where government is some rich baron that can act as a benefactor to a wider group of needy stakeholders. That's not a healthy relationship; government ought to be a partner.
What about the Government’s engagement with academia? One is supposed to support and inform the other. What do you think are the main bottlenecks here and practical solutions?
In some policy areas, government is very good at engaging with academia, and academics are very practiced at engaging with government. The way academia has informed the government's discussions around climate change has been exemplary.
I've already mentioned the Chief Scientific Advisors; they play an incredibly important role. Bodies like the Climate Change Committee or SAGE have been prominent and important. There are also lots of existing networks of evidence and powerful initiatives out there that are making a difference, such as What Works Centres and policy fellowships. In general, academics are very happy to contribute their expertise to government, and that is extremely valuable. We should prize that, and it should continue.
The last Government was fairly obsessed with running major reviews in R&D. I was involved in five or six major reviews in the last few years in different areas of research policy. Some of these reviews, led by external people, were seemingly undertaken in a way that didn't engage at all with the available evidence. In fact, I remember one major government review of R&D citing only one academic source. This seems to be a unique problem in science policy, and the government should hold itself to a higher standard.
But the academic community itself needs to be much more disciplined and rigorous about how it informs and comments on research policy. Too many of the inputs only reflect the opinions of senior figures in the sector. They're not based on rigorous understanding of phenomena, and frankly, that should be unacceptable to the research community. We need to move beyond having a senior figure appointed to do a review, which can essentially result in a distillation of other senior figures’ opinions, and into having much better data and evidence to inform decisions about science and technology policy.
There is a role to play in this change for both the government and the research community itself. It's not only something the government should tackle on its own; it can't tackle it on its own. But it can stimulate the development of communities that can help, like the metascience community.
There is a common belief that the UK is good at ideas and research, but lags other countries in commercialisation. What do you think is the most meaningful role the Government can play to help here?
I think the idea that the UK is fantastic at producing research but terrible at commercialising it is a bit of a caricature. Compared with many other nations, we're actually quite good at commercialising university research in the UK, and we have a fairly sophisticated policy environment to support it.
There's a lot of support that goes into that, with many long-running initiatives like the Higher Education Innovation Fund. The government has taken steps to continually refresh its understanding of thorny issues such as the environment to support university spin-outs. We do ourselves a disservice by sticking to the caricature. But there's clearly a lot that needs to be done to get from being comparatively good to being objectively good.
State capacity is an issue – including government having sufficient understanding of where the opportunities are across different sectors, technologies, and places. That goes back to my earlier point about needing to have the networks to understand where those opportunities are. There also needs to be more ruthlessness in terms of picking some things, identifying areas where the UK has a significant opportunity to derive outsized benefits from our capability in research, and driving that.
That was the logic behind the Science and Technology Framework and the identification of five critical technologies. For me, this is a very powerful framing because it allows you to avoid creating a support system for UK R&D which is a mile wide and an inch deep.
There's also something around infrastructure where the government has an important role in trying to de-risk the scaling of very innovative firms that might need access to extremely expensive but low-utilisation infrastructure. Things like the Catapults are quite important in that regard, although they're not necessarily configured in a way that can support our strategic technologies effectively now. Also, things like compute investments and lab space are quite well-understood issues, and the government needs to be prepared to take choices to support building up capability where those gaps exist.
I think that will help to cement firms in the UK and deal with part of the problem, which is really about talent flight and capital flight, where firms get to a particular size and find they can't scale in the UK and have to go elsewhere. That, for me, feels like the largest challenge we face. But doing that through a lens of taking decisions about critical technologies is quite powerful. I would like to see that continued.
You mentioned the five critical technologies determined by the previous Government. Is that framing still there?
It's not yet clear how that will emerge as part of the new Government. Patrick Vallance was closely involved in identifying the five critical technologies, the Science and Technology Framework, as well as in the Integrated Review that led to it. We have a minister who is passionate about critical technologies, and I would be surprised if he wasn't keen to continue with that framing in some form. But how that works out and how it articulates with the five missions is currently unclear. I think that's a big challenge for the Department.
I spent some time trying to understand what strategic advantage in science and technology actually means for the UK. Is there even such a thing as strategic advantage in science and technology? Or is science and technology more of a support for other national objectives rather than a source of strategic advantage in and of itself?
I think it's real. Something that is sometimes missed when people encounter this concept of strategic advantage through science and technology is the geopolitical context in which this was developed. We can look particularly at semiconductors and telecommunications as two critical technologies where the UK can’t operate as a modern economy without sufficient access to them. There are clear vulnerabilities potentially caused by hostile actors.
The UK's interest in them isn't necessarily about generating the next generation of semiconductors and telecommunications, but it's about supply chain resilience and trying to operate in an increasingly hostile international environment. This characterisation of science and technology for strategic advantage is also applicable to the other three critical technologies: AI, quantum, and engineering biology.
We shouldn't see science and technology strategic advantage only through the lens of economic opportunities. There's a geopolitical reality that we have to face, and many of these technologies are dual-use and will have significant military capabilities that can be developed. They should be thought about as key elements of how the UK builds its supply chains, resilience, international alliances, as well as growing companies. I think it's an angle that is sometimes ignored by the research community.
For me, strategic advantage is all about the link between a specific end goal and a strategically selected technological niche which is a means to reach it. It also means accepting that the UK shouldn’t try to be a world leader in everything.
Yes, that's a very powerful framing, actually, and I agree with it to a great extent. Strategic advantage through science and technology can’t be achieved through world-leading research publications alone. In many cases, we should be looking very actively at where others have generated research capability and seeing how those things can be leveraged to support the gains that you talked about in the UK.
Some of this is about trying to join together the end-to-end process from IP generation through to market uptake of critical technologies across UK supply chains. But in some areas, we don't necessarily need to have industrial primes in the UK or even significant research capability in the UK. These are just sufficiently important areas of technology in a geopolitical context that they cannot be ignored, and they need a specific focus.
One of the aims of the Science and Technology Framework was to define how the UK might either own a technology, collaborate with others on the technology, or access it. That shouldn't be seen as a hierarchy – it's perfectly valid for us to only access telecoms technology, for example, and not feel that we have to have complete ownership of a 1980s French Minitel-style system, for example, across all areas of 21st century technology. It's unnecessary.
The same applies to semiconductors, right? It's more about collaboration and access, rather than trying to replicate the entire semiconductor supply chain on British shores. But thinking about the ownership part of this equation specifically, where can the UK realistically build capacity?
There are some areas where the UK has unique or highly distinctive capabilities in each of those technologies, and where we can afford to push those opportunities quite hard. But I don't want to be very exhaustive in my answer. You can see how the UK has amazing capabilities around chip design and how we're doing wonderful things with compound semiconductors. On AI, we've got a real niche that we're developing around evaluating models for their safety.
Another area where we have a significant edge is engineering biology. One of the questions I asked the Department when we had published the Science and Technology Framework was: given that we have such incredible capabilities and strengths here – not just the scientific pedigree, which is real with Nobel Prizes coming out of our ears and incredible facilities like the Laboratory of Molecular Biology, but also some incredibly exciting companies across the range of applications for biotech, from new materials to novel foods – how do we avoid looking back in 10 years and regretting that engineering biology had become just as all other technologies have become to the UK? That is, we had an edge, and we somehow let it slip between our fingers because others had moved aggressively into that space.
Engineering biology feels like it's the technology which is not so futuristic that it's going to remain stuck in the lab for a decade or more, but it's not so advanced that many other countries have already cornered the market. We have a very significant opportunity in the UK. But how do we seize that opportunity?
So how do we ensure that it doesn’t become a missed opportunity, especially when trying to create the right operating environment for innovative companies in this space?
We need to be thinking seriously about radically increasing the supply of highly skilled and talented people into the ecosystem who know how to operate with the engineering side of engineering biology, to help firms exploit this new technology. We just need far, far more people trained up in this area.
Secondly, we need to invest significantly in new infrastructure to support firms to scale – larger bioreactors, centres of excellence, and clustering activity as well. Facilities like the one in Ghent are streets ahead of what's happening in the UK, and there's a very real risk that they will turn the screw. Companies have already relocated, and many more will.
The Engineering Biology Vision that DSIT set out is a good one, but it's not sufficiently backed by those two interventions into talent and infrastructure. The funding commitment is broadly speaking continuing with the existing budgets for the next 10 years, which is not very ambitious.
If you were advising Peter Kyle now, what would be your top area of concern? And what do you think is an opportunity that can’t be missed by the new Government?
I think the Spending Review next year is the top priority for the Department. There's an old saying about how, when a new government gets into power, they need to realise that the enemy is not the guys that sit on the opposite benches in the House. The real enemy is the Treasury. They need to navigate a very complicated and tough Spending Review. It will be tougher than people think, and the sector needs to be aware of that.
But also, there is a phenomenal opportunity for science and technology to deliver huge benefits to the UK across all areas of life. And that's what's on offer. For us collectively as an R&D sector, the big challenge now is to show what we can do.
We ask all our guests the same closing question: what’s one interesting thing you’ve read or listened to recently that you’d like to share with our readers?
I’m a bit behind on my reading list! But this summer I finally got round to reading The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow. It is a towering achievement – one of those books that can really challenge the way you see the world, and a shining example of the vitality of humanities scholarship.
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