Excellent. Welcome back, everybody. I hope you had as good a discussion in your group as we did ours.
So what we're about to do now is invite the leaders of the focus groups to come back and give us a summary of of the discussion.
And if we've got time at the end of those summaries, what we'll just do is invite a bit of Q&A with the panel if it's all possible.
So if you want to put any comments or thoughts in the chat as people are speaking, we'll do what we can to bring it together.
The purpose of this, don't forget, is to inform the report writing at the end, so the facilitators will be capturing all of the richness.
And if you've got more to say, put it in the chat. We want to capture everybody's opinions and thoughts.
But you've heard enough for me, so I'm now going to hand over from Amanda to Amanda, who's got a feedback from her group.
Thanks, Amanda. Thanks, Bill. Yes, I still said we had an extremely good discussion in our group.
We covered a whole range of topics.
I think what we felt was that that COVID gave us what we heard in the very first talk this afternoon that one goal, one vision.
And that was probably something we have within the kind of scientific academic in the business in the area had before.
So it was a single goal and that single vision. And because of this, there was a very clear focus that allowed government funding to be sent out it.
It facilitated the development of an environment of open science, of trust,
of transparency and for the development of relationships in a much speedier way than would normally have happened.
So we felt it was it was a unique situation that COVID initiated.
Many of the people talked about the fact that we'd had to change the approach we did to do things, to move things faster.
So we talked about kind of IP free relationships.
So when academic endeavour was going on, research was being developed.
Then actually relationships were often formed very quickly to weeks to work on those areas without long,
drawn out, protracted contracts being developed. And it was very much done, and this is the this is for the public good.
So therefore,
we will just get on with it at the moment and we'll come back and sort out the details and the commercial outputs come from these activities.
Then at that stage, we will start to have those those discussions.
But there was very much a feeling from from all the participants in our group that it was very much about, Let's get this going.
We need this to work. We've got to work together. And only by working together to achieve something.
One of the things we were looking at was how how can we do this in the future?
So what what framework would we need in the future to tackle other global challenges?
Because it's very unlikely that in the future we would have that mass of investment, financial investment fund resource investment.
So what sort of framework do we need to to do?
And also that the other thing that could get because that environment of fear, sorry, is a physical asset.
And so because the the ultimate impact of COVID was so severe and people got it and infected individuals,
then that also helped drive that speed and that vision.
But we've got to solve this problem. And I think we started to talk about climate change as another example of a big global challenge.
And at the moment, how how would we develop a framework that would allow us to to work with the
same sort of speed and output as the COVID challenge has provided us with?
And we thought things such as. And maintaining those those approaches to cooperation and collaboration, the development,
a kind of global challenge funding, trying to identify how we can be more strategic would be would be helpful in Ireland.
One of our one of our participants was from Ireland. And they've got a great example of setting strategy and focus from the top down.
Now that they're engaging with the public, asking the public what they want R&D to focus on in the future.
The idea being that the public will help drive drive research in certain directions where the public feels is a real benefit
and that we thought was a really interesting approach to kind of engage the public in those conversations with obviously,
Toby has been a great opportunity to raise the value of research in the public's eyes never before.
I think if we heard government and business and senior people across across the world talking
about the value of science and research and development in order to solve a challenge.
So I think one of the things we wanted to do was maintain that sort of interest and focus and support for research by the public.
And so we can engage the public and develop that sense of urgency for some of the other challenges that the world is facing.
Then maybe we can move on with some of the other areas.
We had a very brief chat about whether the virtual world has actually helped speed up the response to COVID, and we felt very much at first.
It probably did because it opened up those those communication channels very quickly.
Although because it was such an urgent situation,
people would have probably have made themselves available for conversations even if it hadn't been working on in a virtual world.
So it was hard to to pull out whether the virtual world that we've been working in facilitated and speeded up massively or only in part.
But I think there is some concern now that if we move to the kind of more of a hybrid world, kind of some virtual, some face to face,
whether we're quite ready and able to move at such pace for other challenges because
I don't think we've quite worked out how the hybrid world will work in the future. I think those are probably the top top ones.
Oh, there's one lovely phrase that somebody mentioned,
which is about in the past we've been letting a thousand flowers bloom, so we we haven't prioritised.
Everything's been great, everything's been supported.
And actually, we probably need to become more strategic in how we identify what things we're going to be working on in the future,
as he said right in the beginning. But one vision, one one focus really galvanised our approach to solving this problem.
You can't solve a thousand problems, but you can probably solve it doesn't.
So that's probably one of the biggest things as we develop frameworks going forward.
But we need to get much better at strategic priorities and in order to address these global challenges.
So I will now hand on to Carla. I think what Christian, Christian and your.
Hey. So mine is is a bit shorter.
There is a couple of things that we figured about the actual impact on our day to day work.
We figured that it was positive that we can reach.
A lot larger audience by video conferences as they've become ubiquitous during the.
So we're we're going to have five times more participants from all the continents,
whereas in the old days there would have been just the audience but would physically move to the conference room.
Also, especially in the beginning of the pandemic,
many managers and busy people were much more approachable because they weren't travelling all over the globe.
We figured that it was a lot better for certain people and for certain tasks to have virtual meetings and virtual conferences,
especially in terms of efficient management of a meeting, very target oriented, generally punctual by the start.
And we're hoping that we're going to take out of the pandemic is some of the learnings regarding unnecessary travelling,
which would be beneficial for our schedules and for the environment,
and also for the travel budget of the company in terms of the impact of the pandemic on on our resources.
We knew we we found that it is.
It has been difficult with funding being reallocated to COVID related things and therefore other
topics of general interest and urgency were funded less because you can spend a dollar only once.
This hopefully is going to be balanced out in the future.
There has been a lot of research put on hold and obviously these these the shifting of money was positive for certain target
groups and others were really having to identify new topics and new things to to occupy themselves in terms of industry.
There has been and there is still some disruption of the supply chains and we're seeing
a need to build more resilient supply chains and infrastructures in the future.
This, I think for decades had been neglected on a higher level.
We found that the virtual tools are an additional tool in the toolbox of communication,
of managing your working day and of organising meetings with benefits and drawbacks.
And it's it. It's been a tremendous exercise to learn how Home Office can can be valuable for achieving certain tasks.
And also, we thought that the overarching challenges remain.
Communication will work better for certain individuals in the virtual world and for other individuals.
It will be a drawback. But also the overarching balances with respect to climate micro-plastics to feeding a growing global population.
Those will remain and we will need to, regardless of the pandemic, find ways to tackle these.
The tackling of of these things will, as as highlighted by you, Amanda,
will really depend or could possibly benefit from the sense of urgency from this feeling of a community, as also heard in the in the keynote.
But. The. Difference for these longer term threats and these longer term challenges is that the individual doesn't feel an immediate threat,
and it's going to be the key challenge to translate these longer term issues into the mindset
and the emotional approach that our our societies took as a community in times of the pandemic,
for example, the first lockdown period in March last year.
That's about it. OK, I will go next.
OK. So, hi, everyone. My name is Carla. We also had a great discussion in my group.
We had a mix of industry and academia,
but found we all had very similar challenges and even similar findings to what you just heard from Amanda and Kristian.
We talked a lot about the pace for the purpose.
What's the balance between the wellbeing? How do we remain the urgency without burning out?
I think someone mentioned, you know, now we we basically live at work and, you know,
challenges ahead of how to adapt again to now moving into this hybrid model with different technology
and behaviours and the fear of losing some of the advantages that the digital world has brought us,
but also the digital world challenges they've brought us around on boarding, getting accustomed to culture hands on for supervisors and labs,
the how to expand networking beyond the team and our own peer networks when it's all a
digital world and learning and adapting and how it's being required for four new hires.
A clear need to innovate and respond to changes and impacts on the business models, so how do we do that?
How do we deliver on these plans and resources? And how do universities and businesses and government turn this into action?
And then we also touched upon the challenge of co-location and clustering.
So finding allocated space for the project, maybe not necessarily a desk for a person.
How do you mix these capabilities around a challenge and also form an emotional connexion and trust?
And, you know, doing this in this hybrid space or online space as well?
That was the main points from our group.
So I believe I pass it to Rebecca.
Hello, everyone, hear me, OK? Excellent, OK, I'll report back.
My name's Rebecca Wilson, I'm the head of strategic partnerships at the Crick Institute.
So what we discussed and kind of what wouldn't have been possible without the crisis in
picking on many of the points that were in the keynotes and all of the previous speakers,
we talked about creative construction, construction and collaboration, which arose due to people kind of galvanising around that common need,
identifying those the complementarity where they could work together to solve the kind of global problem.
And someone mentioned this earlier, you know, the level of collaboration were high and they could set up very quickly.
And I think it's to kind of pool their expertise and resources.
And the second point was around access to funding this kind of rapid response funding that
enabled many projects are running parallel and some of them being more risky than others.
And the point was made You know this, this might be something that we could do around antimicrobial resistance.
Another thing that would have been possible was the kind of levels of flexibility and
ingenuity we saw people and normally used to direct to research being put into operations.
We saw researchers coming up with completely novel, innovative ways of doing things, and it was very kind of open science approach.
Overall, the kind of public engagement piece is what was relevant. This the various examples A-Z.
The oxygen on the BioNTech example showed the essential role that universities,
research organisations and industry can play in facilitating, facilitating and access to innovation and saving innovation.
Whether that's vaccines, whether that's supporting clinical trials, that engagement piece is a very good thing, people.
So I made the point that, you know,
the family actually understands what they do with that job in university industry partnerships actually means and the implications of that.
But that also comes with the risk that people need to understand that science is not always black and white.
And then the other other examples are in logistics.
So it was it was very simple to kind of set up meetings with multiple partners that was more easy to do in digital platforms.
It meant that meetings did take only a couple of hours.
You didn't have to travel for a day. The downside of that is that there were less spontaneity in terms of discussed discussions.
So what we thought would be useful to capture afterwards is what should say was an efficient kind of business travel approach,
which also has implications for various budgets and the environment as well and for people's wellbeing.
What else should stay with the need to have an advocate for the kind of good non-profit work the industry has done?
So again, the A-Z Oxford example was given, you know, and that kind of, you know,
the public good that it that it wasn't making a profit should be advocated for is very senior levels.
And the other aspect was that organisations were really listening to their scientists and also listening in industry,
listening to their innovation groups. I mean, that was so important is those groups who acknowledged what we don't think could happen and going
forward is that kind of intensity so intense that people were running and running and running,
and it's not feasible to always work at that pace. And also, the industry will not always be so flexible.
So again, that kind of the third example was given that there would be, you know,
quite you regular for a company to do that kind of activity without expecting some kind of commercial return.
What has completely changed in terms of the sector?
So we had most people were working in the industry, we had people working in industry as well as efficiency in business travel.
That's completely changed. Many projects got stopped due to pivoting,
and a lot of kind of internal research to tacos are going to be Christian picked upon that to lots of other projects got dropped away.
Embedded new ways of working new kind of organisational structures. But we talked about how we don't know the social implications of that, how people,
different types of people and even ages of people want different things and how they interact.
And that turned into a discussion on kind of relationships, how the pandemic and the digital platforms enable partnerships to set up quickly.
But often that kind of relationship that you can build in person and that trust that that can enable can be more difficult to establish in the UK.
There's another couple of points we talked about the importance of science and innovation and around the government launching
the innovation strategy and bringing science closer to the cabinet with the launch of the Office for Science and Technology,
the National Science Technology Council, and how that could have implications on a greater push for impact and consideration of the housing principle.
And in the US, it seems that the term there's a new terminology to, instead of basic research kind of uses.
But basic research uses inspired research and that may have societal benefits.
And the NSF has set up a kind of translational office and and key questions around grand challenges that are kind of slightly more applied.
So the final question was kind of how would we how would you translate that urgency from the.
Over the pandemic, two other challenges, how do we draw everything together and I think someone else picked up on this,
we need to prioritise what we want to address. We need to consider a really lovely time and the burning platform that was covered
versus the smouldering platforms that maybe other activities we have to consider,
which are the most urgent and related to that is the funding.
Obviously, a lot of countries that are in debt, a big challenge is addressing how we can prevent that chasm being so deep.
And there's a discussion there when it comes to Iran, the triple helix for other players that could that could be involved in that in terms of
the role of non-profits and philanthropic foundations and have people like the gates,
the Chan Zuckerberg essentially could potentially address those other those other challenges.
And that was the summary hopefully captured all of the discussion.
Chair of the Oxfordshire Local Enterprise Partnership, which is a pro-bono role I have.
And for those of you not familiar with local enterprise partnership, where a local,
county based economic development organisation that works with university authorities business, I'm a business person.
So in the session we've just had, I was also reflecting some of what we've been through as one of the public transport operators here in the UK,
and we had a very interesting group, a mix of other academics, those with research backgrounds,
including an international context in what we were talking through.
And I'm going to try and add because it could very easily just reinforce many of the points that were already been made.
But let me try and add perhaps two or three points that haven't already been raised in those that the other speakers have put forward.
And one of the things I think came out from our discussion was at the beginning of COVID.
What it required us to do in many cases was to take back procurement decisions that would otherwise be made in normal situations,
further down our organisations and to take back procurement decisions being made amongst senior
managers in order to accelerate the decision making process over things that were being done.
Decisions were being taken in order actually a different, different aspect to be taken about risk,
which we, we all know is being faced at many, many levels, including in our national government,
taking very big decisions at the time, as we now know to our benefit in terms of where vaccines were being procured from
and the degree of over procurement that was being committed to at the time.
And that elevated procurement has existed and it is now a matter of at what point
one puts that back within our organisations to being at a at a more normal level.
But with that, recognising that with it may go more process and actually a degree of slowing down of that process.
And a second point that came out and those that were academics and actually talking, if I may,
also from my personal situation with with the student in our family and the degree
to which obviously university education has pivoted in the last 18 months,
the student in our family receiving her education for the last year almost entirely online.
But recognising from a university point of view, our academic institutions are going to have to rethink,
perhaps permanently, the degree to which curricula is delivered in a different way.
And the implications that has for teaching, for teaching staff, for material, for curriculum material.
And that being quite a considerable issue that we will all have to, I think, take forward.
And another issue and it has been brought out,
but perhaps just to to to to amplify it was the collaboration in all of us to talking about the way that collaboration was stepped up.
But in some ways, collaboration previously might have been expressed in terms of matched funding or money on the table.
And I think what absolutely is clear from the experience we've gone through that collaboration in the last year or so has also very,
very much been expressed in terms of the way that trust is developed and the
way that time and other ways of collaboration have been brought to the table.
And the value of those has been recognised in a way that perhaps they weren't valued before.
A very practical aspect that was brought out was that I think all of us in terms of our ability, both in our work lives and, dare I say,
also in our personal lives to benefit from online access,
whether it's continuing professional development material, professional material in our own work lives.
Or dare I say, and again talking personally in my own personal situation,
being able to dip into things that are available online that one wouldn't have previously been able to find or not find easily anyway.
In terms of that being a lasting benefit, I think we will all be able to broaden our perspectives both professionally and personally
through the much greater online material that we will all find much easier to access.
Another issue that came out was that from our respective points of view,
it may just focus on the survivability of the organisations that we were dealing with in my context, in a business environment.
We had to think perhaps harder than we'd ever think about the organisations we were using as
suppliers and whether or not what the what the the COVID the pandemic was doing was going to really,
really jeopardise those that we were using it suppliers in other contexts.
We heard from from other team members today that it also forced government or government
agencies to look even more closely at where grant money or where support was being
given and whether it was right and proper that those organisations were the right
place to be receiving funding and to what extent their futures were being jeopardised.
In terms of the sense of urgency and how we create that sense of urgency, I think the point's been made,
but just to reinforce it, but I think that phrase burning and smouldering platform say very eloquently.
But I think what was felt in our own group was that you absolutely have to bring it back to having that sense of immediacy.
The thing that I think was felt to be most impactful around COVID was that once it became something that the media got hold of,
it was seen to affect us all and have the capability to be affecting us all in very short order.
At the time, it felt like days or weeks that any of us in our workplaces or particularly in our family and friends, could be impacting on us.
And with that came all the responses that were sent from collaboration to volunteering to clearly feeling that within our own organisations,
we absolutely had to react. And how we get that sense of urgency for the many other challenges is I think about how we
bring it back to relatively short milestones and goals being seen to be absolutely imperative.
I will leave it there. It's been a very interesting process. Thank you. Hello and thank you, Jeremy.
And so thank you very much to all the the the leaders and facilitators of those groups.
You worked extremely hard this afternoon and everybody's worked extremely hard this afternoon and we've had such a rich source of dialogues.
It's been brilliant. As I listened to feedback, I wish I could have been in every single one of those workshops.
Fortunately, Thomas Construction is going to write up the report, so I'm going to be able to read about it afterwards.
So what we normally do in the last few minutes,
if you picture us in our normal auditorium space is just hand the microphone around for a couple of last comments.
Fortunately, we have chat. I'm just going to read out one or two comment.
Building on Amanda's feedback about examples of public dialogue encourage you to look at nanotech dialogues in participating adult met.
So Google will find it dating back to 2005. That was so interesting history there.
Thanks, Chris. Comment from Stuart clear need to innovate and respond.
The challenge is how to deliver on it and how business, academia and government work together to achieve that,
which I think is going to be the theme for the next couple of days coming from Anthony.
The need to learn is the best bits of work well from the COVID 19 response,
addressing issues of climate change and the other global challenges that climate change will come up in spades on on day three.
And the final question should there be a different, more agile funding available from government,
industry and universities to improve innovation capacity?
Well, I think given that we're going to be here from leaders of two very large funding agencies tomorrow morning,
that's definitely a question to save up and ask again tomorrow.