So I'm Simon Andrews, I'm executive director of Fraunhofer UK Research Ltd here in Glasgow.
Thank you very much, Oxford. Great Summit. Thoroughly enjoyed the discussions and thanks to everyone and my group, it was great.
We said go big and go bold. That's what has to be done.
The UK is looking at taking R&D spending up to two point four percent of GDP, and that's a really,
really significant change and that has to be done with a great attitude towards risk.
We have to set big goals, big visions and then look at funding things properly.
That's what our group said. We spend a little more detail.
We're looking at some of the barriers to the way universities operate and and industry,
and we need to be getting the rewards and the incentive incentives right for everyone.
We touched on an economic development view that universities and industry should have a focus not just on the R&D,
but also in the skills and pulling everything together along with colleges.
We talked quite a bit about skills and training meets the difficulty of training at scale.
Who ought to do that? And really, we have to apply all the resources to make that happen.
At risk was another very strong theme for us and bold leadership leadership's attitude to risk,
and that starts with government and includes the research councils UK awry,
as well as individual institutions and companies having that relative willingness to take risk to accept failure to look for really disruptive change.
I think that's a cultural aspect that's really strong there accepting failure, failing fast, failing often at things we've had before.
There are some models to inspire us there.
Eh'tai and space communities really got together and set a big, bold, clear visions and got the funding end to achieve those goals.
ARIA that's coming through in the UK, copying us that darker Howard Hughes Medical Institute,
where individual researchers are given five years and a lot of money to pursue boldly with with no admin to to hold them back.
Universities are maybe an opportunity to create special environments.
I think Phil touched on impact engineers, which reminded me of my own organisation.
Sometimes you can bolt a drone hopper onto university to do some of this stuff.
Quick idea out there. And then we looked at the people that are coming through the undergraduates.
Some people felt that just not aware of industry or the opportunities and the challenges are we need more mavericks,
be the undergrads, not just to be taught to it, but to encourage misbehaviours to encourage challenge.
Our big ask for government, I think, is in that leadership and being bold and accepting failure.
We also recommend to government that Ukraine needs to be genuinely joined up across
disciplines across the different councils and be really willing to back when I take risks,
bank bold visions and not be subjected from by government to micromanagement and over reporting.
So that's a quick, a quick rattle through a great discussion, but I think a big message is go big and go bold.
Hello, everyone. The game's my my name is Marina Bulova. I am from Schlumberger Company, which is developing technologies for energy sector.
So we had very good discussions within our group and I would like to share some of our conclusions and findings.
I will probably list five of them, so we will start first one to address the high risk projects which are usually not supported by government.
We would like to suggest to consider that option off the government Kickstarters.
So basically the government will buy something which is not created yet,
and great examples of these are coming from COVID pandemic when the government invested into their non-existent vaccines.
So they pre-purchase of vaccines and they also be paid for the tests.
And another example is the private sector achievements in the space industry.
So that goes well very well, so government might see more into those types of activities.
Another suggestion is that the technology development should be done when we are
looking into the full value chain right into the full lifecycle of the technology,
not only of the form of space technologies, but also what happens with the raw materials which comes into the creation of this technology
and what will happen with the disposal of this technology when it is not utilised.
So that's important as well. Also to to create a common platform for everyone to share their knowledge and ideas.
It's. It would be good to use the common language, which is introduced by United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.
I believe everyone is familiar with those the 17 sustainable goals.
So if we can categorise all the technologies of all the projects,
according to those 17 Sustainable Development Goals, it will be easier for us to feed the technology development.
At the same time, we still think that government should continue to support long term fundamental research, which is which we need right,
and all the sciences to drive the innovations for this so we shouldn't destroy what works already very well.
And final thing I would like to bring from from my company.
So we just finished the exercise for calculating our own carbon footprint inventory.
And we did this across all those three scopes of the national scope two and three.
And that really all of us, right?
Because very often people are driven by a perception that, OK,
let's switch from that diesel cars to the electrical ones and we will solve the climate change problem.
It's not the case, right?
So what we found out that our hotspots in the emissions in the virtual space is that this is not pretty much the diesel consumption of lithium now.
So just just to give you an example,
from our total carbon footprint of 55 million CO2 equivalent to 50 55 million tons of CO2 equivalent only one million tonne,
this comment from this one, which is the fuel consumption.
The rest is coming from this three.
And this is where we need to work, and this is where organisations and universities need to look and understand where,
where the contribution of emissions is coming from the full value chain. So understanding of the supply of the proper methodology is very critical.
So that will be probably my final point. Thank you for great discussion for the great event.
Thank you, Marina, I'll carry on next time. Simon Hepworth, I'm director of enterprise at Imperial College London.
We had a fantastic conversation. We sold the world many times and we did so using five key principles are the first one we were thinking
about Kobe and how we all focussed on one direction and how do we achieve that for sustainability generally.
And the feeling was that could we incorporate communities more in the decision making that made around major funding and initiatives?
So we thought about the kind of community activism we've seen to influence agendas of large
companies and there that's a very positive thing and that is creating the feeling to act now.
So what can we do more to include more communities in our decision making?
And certainly universities, certainly at Imperial,
we've had great success during COVID in terms of engaging students in our decision making on on aspects that affect their experience.
So how can we augment that model? We talked quite a bit about porosity, and we actually have a very good example.
It was put forward by Greg King from Georgia Tech, which was a joint employment agreement.
So this gets over the issue of a scientist or engineer needing to reside in either a university or a company.
The fact that they could be in both at the same time.
That's certainly not something that I've seen at Imperial, so I think that's a best practise that we will look at as a model.
On funding, we had a good debate around what is the best way to fund projects,
and there was a view there that perhaps we should be better funding fewer, bigger initiatives.
And we had that view from RCA and the way that it performed.
But it was also a big question about just how do you decide then which of those
initiatives you are going to fund and just on what basis do you make that decision?
So it's not an easy thing to do,
but there is a feeling at the moment that too few projects are funded and that quite a few of them compete with one another.
So we haven't really got the collaboration that we would need to fix things in the fastest way.
I got brought up a very good point around permission to pause,
so one of the great things about COVID was when groups of people in their organisations said We've got a real opportunity here to make a difference,
whether it be making PPE equipment, working on a ventilator, working on more complex initiatives.
Everybody was given permission to drop what they were doing in their day jobs and go work on these projects and there was a great sense of well-being.
Well, at least be able to do something about the pandemic through those initiatives.
The key question is how do we achieve that same kind of permission to work on projects related to sustainability?
How how do we get to the point where employers, governments,
universities feel that that people can go work on those types of projects and use their time to effectively?
I think I will stop there, I think one final point, Robert.
I think inspired us all with his adoption of Formula One racing engineering techniques to drive academic research.
For me, that's taking a lean Start-Up methodology in a way, so it's creating a minimum viable product and testing in your marketplace quickly.
I think what everybody liked about that was you get a fast answer.
So the question was should we review all research and development projects in that way?
Should there be that kind of very early look? Is it actually achieving anything useful?
We also had a debate at the end around. Is it a technology discovering problem or is it a technology scaling problem?
So do we know all the technologies we need today? And is it just a case of working together to scale up?
And again, I think the jury's out on that one. I will leave it there.
Thank you. Hi, I'm mineral safe, I'm the energy partnerships manager at Cambridge University, similar to the previous group,
our group compared the situation to COVID because much like climate change,
it's in all of us problem and everyone pulled in together to achieve a solution.
But our group felt like there was more potential for cooperation because there was still a bit of competition,
not as much cooperation as there could have been. One thing our group missed was the role of societal behaviour, which we felt is critical.
We need to better understand how to implement societal behaviour, so we need the perspective of social scientists,
partly to help change it, but also to plan for the impact of those changes.
So in general, this feeds into the idea that we need more of a holistic view.
And maybe part of the problem is that society is informed by government who
has a shorter timescale based on perhaps election cycles than we would like.
So perhaps we need a bit more information from from industry and academia who will have a longer term view and more of a holistic vision.
We recognise that everyone's efforts are needed, including the media and philanthropist,
philanthropists and entrepreneurs, and we really need everyone to kind of pull together.
We need governments to work together as well because this is a problem that goes above an individual government.
We have a strong need to plan the education of the future.
So what's the future workforce going to look like? We need to start factoring that into early stage education now is quite urgent.
On the question of what do we want from government had three things one,
to work with industry and academia and with each other more closely to keep the
pressure on industry that that doesn't contribute to the transition or its more,
and to make sure that the right economic incentives are introduced in the design of solutions.
Those were the main things that I picked up. I think I'll stop there. Hand it back to you guys.
Thank you. So thanks very much.
Thanks very much to all of you.
So the discussion these the rapporteurs to all the delegates who've contributed to the fantastic discussions in the breakouts.
And for me, like this, the number of key messages coming out. I've got an interesting challenge now to bring it all too together into report
and try and do justice to the rich discussions that we've had over that today,
but also the last couple of days.
And I think from today, just listening to the feedback groups, I think, you know, for me, societal change, how do we change behaviours and incentives?
Go big, go bold, you know, how did governments create kick started to kick start new markets, role of procurement in that?
And the one that I really found interesting and important was how do we better include communities
in our work to try and create that sense of common purpose that might drive change as well?
So with that, I thank you very much for our session. I'll hand over to fill and and then say, thank you very much.