The High Value Manufacturing Catapult was commissioned to produce the report in December 2019, following a workshop and subsequent conversations with UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) and Innovate UK commercialisation leads.
The report
The UK Manufacturing Forum collected a wide variety of insights and ideas from communities across the UK, to identify the barriers, opportunities and consequences to strengthening the collaboration between Catapults and academia.
The collated information includes views from government (in particular, the department then known as BEIS), funding bodies (including Innovate UK, UKRI and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, EPSRC), the HVM Catapult and other research and technology organisations (RTOs), and leading academics in engineering and manufacturing-related disciplines.
Five key recommendations
According to the report, the commercial impact of UK academic discovery could be greatly enhanced through a more coordinated use of existing capabilities – in research, translation and commercialisation. This can be achieved by more effectively incentivising stakeholders to work collaboratively across different stages of a technology life-cycle, from early-stage discovery to late-stage scale-up.
The report sets out five key recommendations to increase the coherence of the research and innovation ecosystem.
The five recommendations are:
- Simplify and standardise rules for all Innovate UK projects
- Provide funding for accelerating the translation of research in joint projects between universities and Catapults
- Invest in people to build “bridges” between Catapults and Universities
- Allow Research Council-funded academic projects to include Catapults and other RTOs as collaborators
- Create opportunities for larger-scale collaborative research and development (CR&D) projects, covering a broad range of technologies and without geographical limit
Whilst there are already signs of serious change in response to the recommendations, there is an ongoing imperative to do better and more, to truly seize the opportunities granted by the UK’s world-leading research.