Engineering Professors' Council Congress 2013

Hosted at the University of Portsmouth, 2012/13 will be the academic year in which we will see the announcement, if not the outcome, of the next Comprehensive Spending Review (CSR). This will influence the amount to be spent on publicly funded research and education in our universities for the medium term.

Senior figures at the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) have made it very clear to the science and engineering community that it will be essential for us to communicate our case for investment in a way that “appeals to the rational and emotional decision-making reflexes in Government”... Evidence of how funding can be leveraged, examples of how we can address the perceived under-utilisation of expensive capital facilities through collaboration, and putting a value on the positive “spillover” effects of investment are of utmost importance.

As we prepare for the next CSR and enter the final furlong in our preparations for the Research Excellence Framework, which now seeks to measure the impact of what we do, Congress2013 will take, as its theme, how engineering in higher education “ticks all of the impact boxes”.

But what are the “impact boxes”? HEFCE and the Research Councils define them in slightly different ways and universities across the sector deliver very different kinds of impact, depending on their mission and history. In 2006, two senior academic members of the science policy community, Professor Ben Martin and Dr Puay Tang of the University of Sussex, published an independent report: “The benefits of publicly funded research”. This was in response to a review of innovation and enterprise issues by the Office of Science and Innovation, DTI (now named the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills). While topical at the time, its introduction seems all the more prescient now given economic turmoil that followed.

“Government... faces numerous competing demands for public funding. For some of these... the economic and other benefits perhaps seem to be more immediate and obvious. Nevertheless, as we shall demonstrate, there is now an extensive body of study on the economic and social benefits of publicly funded research, and we can begin to see some of the benefits that accrue...”

The work identified seven distinct mechanisms or ‘channels’ through which benefits of publicly funded research and education flow into the economy and society:

• increase in the stock of useful knowledge
• supply of skilled graduates and researchers
• creation of new scientific instrumentation and methodologies
• development of networks and stimulation of social interaction
• enhancement of problem-solving capacity
• creation of new firms
• provision of social knowledge

This work has received much attention in recent years, from first stages of development of the impact criteria for the Research Councils and for the REF through to the June 2012 publication of the Council for Industry and Higher Education's (CIHE) report by Alan Hughes and Ben Martin entitled “Enhancing Impact The Value of Public Sector R&D” which used some of its themes.