Research & development policy

The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland enjoys a long tradition of excellence in the field of scientific and technological research, especially for its innovative contributions, the list of which would be too long and would take up most of this page which, instead, means to provide a brief description of the modern organisational structure that promotes and supports British science and technology. The political project started in 1993 with the publication of the Science and Technology White Paper entitled: Realizing Our Potential, followed in July 2002 by the Science and Innovation White Paper entitled: Excellence and Opportunity- a science and innovation policy for the 21st century.

To give a general idea of the importance of British science in the world it is useful to remember that the country can count among its citizens as many as 76 scientists who received the Nobel Price (in 2001 two British and a US scientist were awarded the Nobel Price in Physiology and Medicine), second in number only to the United States of America. Moreover, despite the fact that its population represents only 1 percent of world population, its researchers are involved in 9% of the world’s most highly rated scientific publications and in 20% of the European publications, which is more than any other country in the EU. UK research represents 5% of world research.

Political trends
The 1993 White Paper was motivated mainly by the widely shared perception of a huge gap between the country’s scientific and technological excellence and its inadequate ability to use the deriving advantages in industrial and economic terms, according to the report on industrial competitiveness published by the World Economic Forum in 1995, the UK, compared to 23  other countries,  had the lowest mark for the added value per worker in the manufacturing sector. Moreover, a classification by the OECD ranked the UK almost last out of 17 countries (14 European countries, Canada, Japan and the US) for investment in manufacturing. In both classifications, Japan ranked first.
The 1993 White Paper thus represented a framework programme based on the following principles:
- the critical assessment of the priorities in allocating resources, giving prominence to those projects which, deemed intrinsically valuable in the scientific sense, achieve results usable on the industrial field;
- the promotion of a closer relation between the research users (industry, trade, government and services) and the producers of research (universities and other institutes of research), thus incrementing  public funding in the research areas of main industrial interest and orientated at improving the quality of life;
- the reduction to a minimum of accessory expenses in the projects financed with public funding, the eradication of overlapping and the enhancement of synergies;
- the circulation of information, to make the criteria in the allocation of public funding more explicit, and the promotion of a continuous debate between the scientific and the industrial communities.

 

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