The executive director of HDFC and the Science and Technology Facilities Council, so, yeah, thank you.
Let's make sure it still stands for what I thought.
And it's based down the road at Harwell, so we've worked together on many things around Oxfordshire as well as things on science.
So I'm going to allow you to take over now. I'm going to sit down and leave you to it.
So thank you. Thank you. And so I have to say initially when when Phil and Helen told me about this conference, I thought it sounded really exciting.
And then they said, we'd like you to cherish a session. And it's what our intermediaries for.
And I thought, Gosh, that's a little bit provocative.
And then I looked at it again, and it turns out what intermediaries are for was actually the title,
so perhaps slightly less combative than than than I initially thought.
So this afternoon, I'm joined by Stuart Martin, who's the CEO of the Satellite Applications Catapult.
It's also based at Harwell, Simon Andrews, who's executive director of Fraunhofer UK,
and Jay Walsh for his vice president for research at Northwestern University.
So I'm going to give everyone the chance to introduce themselves briefly and then
given that I thought this was going to be quite an interactive and combative session.
We're going to open the discussion up for questions or challenges or comments from the floor.
So as Jill said, I'm from the Science and Technology Facilities Council, so we're part of the relatively recently formed UK research and innovation.
And our role is really to fund big science. So whether that's particle physics, nuclear physics,
astronomy in the U.K. universities or international facilities, and we also are the stewards of the national labs.
So these are the big national science infrastructures, which are too large for any one institution to to own and manage.
And really, the formation of U.K. cry for me where we were bringing together all of these organisations who were going to have a single voice for U.K.
science and threw up some really exciting opportunities and gave us the opportunity to potentially tackle some of these big challenges.
So one of the first things that that we started to think about was, well, how how can you describe, you know, a single voice for UK science?
So that sees that opportunity to talk to our international colleagues about how
you describe the U.K. landscape and you sit down to do that and you think,
gosh, it's actually quite complicated. There's lots of bits to it.
How do they all linked together?
And I suppose when you're on the inside of these structures, you often don't don't see how difficult that can look from the outside.
And we also talked about developing a roadmap on the floor for the research infrastructures in the U.K. across all disciplines.
So again, how can you bring that complexity together?
And one of the other opportunities that we looked at was, Oh, we we can we can talk to big corporates about what we can do with them.
And very quickly, we started to realise actually that these are very meaty questions to to to to try and represent in a coherent way.
And for me, it really started to highlight some of the benefits of working with intermediaries because they can
act as a focal point or a beacon in a particular sector or in a particular area and help cut through,
I think, some of that complexity. I think there's also that sense sometimes of of shared mission within a particular area,
which is very hard to to bring when you're when you're trying to get people from very
different disciplines to work together and have that sort of single coherent voice.
So for me, that that that that changed my thinking about intermediaries and how we could perhaps better use them.
So with that, I'm going to hand over to T.J. to to help to for him to introduce his role and and also
maybe give us some thoughts on how he thinks the intermediaries fit into this ecosystem. Sure.
So I'm J. Well, I'm certainly at Northwestern University,
but part of the reason to be on this panel is I'm on the board at Annexe D, which is a manufacturing by times.
Digital is what it stands for. It previously was called the Digital Manufacturing and Design Innovation Institute.
That was a pretty big mouthful. So in the branding exercise more recently, it's been changed to just max.
So that's the intermediary I'm going to talk about here. I would also say that I'm also I've been on the board for you, mentioned national.
Labs have been on the board at Argonne National Lab, which is one of the Department of Energy National Labs.
I've been on that board for about 12 years now and that's another intermediary that, you know, if we if we have time later, we can talk about.
So what Copan Copeland talked quite a bit about the manufacturing, the Manufacturing USA institute, which one of them is next.
The concept in the states is certainly that manufacturing affects every sector of the U.S. economy,
and I would say certainly for this audience, it affects every sector of the global economy.
And Steve focuses on advanced manufacturing and the whole actually the whole system of of institutes across manufacturing.
USA looks at advanced manufacturing as the engine for economic prosperity and as the foundation for national security.
So those are the two sort of driving positions for this entire endeavour,
and they're looking for new manufacturing methods and production of new products.
So processes and products, which is what engineers do, which is my background originally and in all, I'm for all of these institutes.
The idea is to increase productivity, to enable new products and actually to create new industries.
So there are three goals. New technologies workforce development is an important part of this and recognise
the importance of having people who can actually drive this manufacturing. And there's a significant component of supply chain.
So if you're a major manufacturer,
oftentimes you're an assembler and you have this deep supply chain and you have to have your new processes, your new materials.
And in the case of next, where it's very digital, you have to have the digital technology to drive down through the entire ecosystem.
This started in 2011.
This whole system started in 2011, when the President's Council and Advisors on Science and Technology, which is known in the U.S. as PCAST,
came out with a report on advanced manufacturing partnerships that eventually
led to a network which eventually led to the Manufacturing USA initiatives.
And I've skipped a whole bunch of steps in there. There are now 14 institutes.
Eight of them are funded through the Department of Defence, hence the national security component.
Five of them through the Department of Energy and one of them through the Department of of Commerce.
There's been about $3 billion of investment in the last five years in that
one billion from the government and two billion from companies from industry.
There are about six hundred thousand six hundred companies, universities and not for profits involved and important in the United States.
Is this forty four states that are involved in this whole process?
So we had a few senators along the way. Not that that's important.
Just saying there are three major goals and I could go into deep detail on this given the time I'm going to cut it short and
just say the first goal is to develop the new manufacturing technologies that involve significant public private partnerships.
And when I say significant, I can say for the case of my study that was started by universities.
There were three universities in Chicago, the University of Chicago and University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Northwestern.
We got together as a consortium to put together the proposal that brought in those digital manufacturing institute,
and I would say it's been if I wanted to be provocative, I would use the word hijacked.
If I wanted to be collaborative, I would say it was now being driven by by industry.
It is really industry driven at this point.
The academics are in there for the research side of things, but industry sees the huge value in bringing together a consortium of of industries.
And in particular, each of those major players has supply chain folks who are common to to themselves to each other.
So they're really helping to build this consortium across this.
So there's these new manufacturing technologies. They recognise that workforce development is absolutely vital,
especially as you drive it down through the small and medium sized companies that are very important to that supply chain.
And talking about that supply chain, there's been a recognition by the federal government that.
Frankly, we lost a lot of manufacturing capabilities in the 80s and 90s and early 2000s, and we really want to build that back up.
That's important not only for prosperity, but frankly for national security.
It's important that some of these products are not in the supply chain or not produced by,
let's just say, certain companies or countries across the aisle across the globe.
So it's a matter of pulling the supply chain back in. There's also a cybersecurity component to this.
This is digital manufacturing.
You can imagine somebody hacking in and changing a widget that affects your aeroplane engine, and that wouldn't necessarily go too well.
So the small companies do not have the infrastructure to be able to do the cybersecurity
that is necessary for digital manufacturing to be driven down through the supply chain.
The big companies and the government recognise this and are putting in a lot of effort for that supply chain.
So what are intermediaries for the intermediaries?
Pull together this consortium and recognise common needs across all of the components of the consortium and have in certainly in the case of MSD,
have added significant value by bringing together these companies who are now frankly really running the show at in the next day.
So my short version? Great. Thank you very much.
And this, I'm sure, is a lot in that that people will will want to pick up on one hand over to Stuart to tell us a bit about the catapult.
OK, thank you very much, Kate. Someone named Stuart Martin. I'm the chief executive of an organisation called the Satellite Applications Catapult.
As Kate said down in the hall, well, just about 20 miles from here, we will set up just over six years ago as part of a network of catapults,
all intermediaries in different technology centres and different technology sectors.
And they couple things from life sciences through to digital technologies, offshore wind energy and, you know, complete range of activities.
And our mission. So in a sense, you know, what are we for answering?
The question is to ensure the maximum economic benefit derives to the UK from these new technologies as they are starting to emerge.
And that's, you know, in our case, it's satellite applications making sure that we are as a nation taking as much
advantage as we can from using satellites to deliver services right across the economy,
and also that the nascent industry delivering those services gets anchored here in the UK.
So that sort of our mission. So I'd just this by way of introduction,
I was going to make just sort of three top level statements about what I think the role of intermediaries are.
And then I'll reference the catapult in particular to to to illustrate those points.
And so the first of those conscious of who my audience is,
so bear with me for for a moment is that actually the intermediary intermediaries are the only organisations
who are actually motivated to maximise the amount that is invested into the commercialisation of research.
And that's not to say that sort of the business end or the so the university end, they don't see that activity as important for us.
It is our reason to exist, and I think that's actually quite an important role for intermediaries that we all know.
All the economic analysis tells us that the more a nation spends on on this research on that, the sort that the military innovation,
commercialisation research, the more the economy will benefit from it, and that's a core purpose for the intermediaries.
And so I think that's an important thing to recognise.
The second point I was going to make is that innovation is not just about technology, either, it's not just about commercialisation of research.
The barriers to taking up the technology or the reasons why technology don't find a market are many and varied, and they can vary by sector.
And they include things like regulation, access to finance, behaviour of incumbents,
the way that people do procurement or the way the industries are organised.
These can all be impediments to to the to the take up of technology and to technology finding a market.
So whilst on the one hand, supporting the industries, providing the technology is important.
All that sort of market shaping the environment, shaking, shaping,
which is creating an accepting environment for those technologies to arrive into is is a really important piece of work that the intermediaries do.
And the most important part of that is so important have kind of made it.
My third point is in the challenge of innovation adoption.
We tend to think about innovation and commercialisation as happening entirely on the supply side,
it's all about helping companies take new products to market and then the market itself will take care of itself.
Certainly, our experience is that it doesn't work like that. You need to work equally hard on the demand side of innovation as well.
Working with those organisations who can potentially take advantage of the new technology,
helping them become aware that technology is coming through that they can use,
helping them become aware of how they can use it and and particularly in the space sector.
Now we find that obviously this is something that businesses try and do, that they'll market their new technology.
But there is quite a lot of suspicion, sometimes on the demand side towards technology coming through,
particularly when they're talking with the businesses that are trying to sell it.
And the intermediaries can act as a as a helpful friend in helping them understand, helping them get ready for it,
make sense of what they're being sold and whether or not it really is going to deliver the benefits that they're being told about.
And so we can sort of de-risk that whole migration process on onto new technologies for for new for customers who are taking advantage of that.
I mean, one example that I'll give for where that's been particularly important for us is that we've been working on for a long time.
And in fact, now we've we spun out a company that focuses on it using satellite data to help tackle illegal fishing going on all around the world.
And so it's quite it's quite a straightforward system to actually monitor what's going on on the oceans and using machine learning.
You can, you know, you can quickly derive a lot of information about behaviours of vessels, what what it is exactly that they're doing.
Do they have licences for it? Are they fishing in the right locations? All those sorts of things.
But the challenge is the regulatory environment that that all sits in and can provide all this evidence.
But if you haven't got the regulatory environment,
there's going to be able to use that evidence to support prosecution or remove licences and all those sorts of things,
and it's not delivering any value. So we spend a lot of time working with the Thai government in particular.
The Thai government was yellow carded by the EU about five years ago, which basically telling them unless you sort out your fisheries industries,
you're going to be banned from selling your product into European markets.
And this is a major part of the Thai economy, and obviously it was.
They are some of the biggest producers of a fisheries product around the world, so it was also a real risk to the European supermarket industry.
So we were able to corral a group of the of the the supermarket industry players in it across Europe to help fund the piece of work going into Thai,
helping advise the government about how to restructure all their regulations and all their their monitoring programme.
So they could then take advantage of this technology and then meet the European requirement to reform their industry.
And just in the last few months, they've now have that yellow card removed, so that risk is gone away.
And we have a new customer for us now.
So it's, you know, that's an example of the sort of things that intermediaries can do that I don't think anyone else realistically can.
Great. Thank you very much, Gerrit. Simon, do you want to tell us what the phone offers and thanks Kate, particularly in the U.K., I guess.
Good afternoon, everyone. My name's Simon Cowell. A lovely day to be here in Oxford and absolute delight and nice.
Nice to be able to speak to you.
I thought it was going to be quite a controversial question, so I have a very simple answer from from our point of view.
Intermediaries are there to provide professional applied research and development services for industry.
That's it. That's what we do. We provide professional applied R&D services for industry,
so we could be nice up at the top level and say that's what economic benefit and societal benefit were not for profit.
But that's really what it's all about.
So we had a particular type of intermediary where a not for profit research and technology organisation like the catapults.
But let's put a wee bit of context around intermediary if a can, a kind of case that was going last.
And I agree with everything that's been said already. So I have a little bit of latitude and there's an organisation many of you will have
heard of to the Association of Intermediate Research and Technology Organisations.
So in the UK, that covers 80 100 organisations, public sector research establishments, national labs to use some of them for profit, some not.
Some might look a bit more like a consultancy to me to get a bit fifty seven thousand employees altogether, a turnover of seven billion.
I mean, this is this is a major part of the of the UK, the complex UK innovation landscape.
You've got things in there like the welding institute to do a lot more than welding the National Physical Jobs Building
research establishment who came to the fore and Grenfell testing people who do industrial maths and nothing else,
people who have expertise in modelling what ships do in estuary flow.
So those things are all there very, very specifically for industry and industries organisations like myself that
are that deep and enabling technologies to to help a wide range of sectors.
So we should be proud of of two and the plethora of organisations we have.
One of the things that inspired the creation of the Catapult Centres is phone offer Gesellschaft in Germany and they and their model.
So whilst we have a whole Scrabble board of initials describing around two users in the UK and Germany phone offer,
Gesellschaft has twenty six and a half thousand employees spread across 72 institutes, which cover professional applied R&D services for industry.
They cover all aspects of physics, chemistry, biology, various engineering disciplines, lots of production, engineering, materials, computer science,
all the things you would imagine that have been in a university the industry wants to reach so that their vehicle is very, very targeted on that.
And that's and that's what they deliver. It was interesting in the creation of Sloane Offer in the UK.
Scottish Enterprise asked for an offering exemption for the for the evidence that there were really worth of salt.
And why did the government put so much money into this and they didn't know how to answer because over in Germany, it's been going for 70 years.
It's not a party political issue. There's an ongoing model. There's a real tension there.
If they don't deliver for industry, they will get less money in the following year and they will cease to exist.
The phone Hartford Institute for Shoe Manufacture no longer exists.
I think the Germans learnt everything they needed to know about making shoes, so they closed that one, and that's great.
Whereas the microelectronics one that we started in the nineteen fifties is not pushing forward the same technology it, then it has to.
It has to learn from the university research base, be ahead of where industry is.
So the industry wants to go there for the expertise as well as the equipment as well as the training.
Very important for us to be training for Ph.D. and engineering doctoral students for the for the next generation working in industry.
So we kicked off in 2009 with a very positive letter from a UK government bank.
Then being friendly towards Europe is very refreshing. Seeing how can how can the UK and phone offer work better together?
That led to the creation in 2012 of a first centre up in Glasgow, the Final Four Centre for Applied Photonics,
which is deep, deep expertise in a whole range of lasers and optical systems.
And we do work for industry to help them with their problems,
whether it's the next generation cutting edge laser or whether it's an oil and gas company,
a renewable energy company needs a complete system that just so happens to have a laser to enable what they do.
So that's not what we're all about, and I'm guessing as well that this audience is a special audience.
We've got experts here from the university side in the industrial sector who knew how to collaborate together.
You're probably the ones who are doing it well, and you're probably the ones that didn't feature in the Dowling review,
which adds to the incredible complexity of the UK landscape. We didn't even get a mention, and that was terrible.
But there's so many things in there that our barriers, our gaps that we can help with, we can help get things between universities and industry.
University of Strathclyde, I hope you might agree,
has a reputation of being more applied and more focussed on industry than than some other universities aim to be.
That's right up there in the mission. I had a I had a role within the Institute of Photonics within Strathclyde University.
It was a research institute. It didn't teach undergrads.
It was very much focussed, never to do blue sky, but always to do things that were going to be useful.
That was the origins of the phone hoeffel centre. We have, so we could say, Well, we aren't you doing it already?
Why don't you doing it well enough? Well, there's only so much you can do in a day.
Some of us, when we left there were concerned that the new phone Hoffer Centre would soak up all the
industry activity and perhaps the Institute of Photonics within the university might decline.
Seven years later,
I'm delighted to tell you the institute is bigger and better and stronger than it ever was by bolting on the phone off of centre to the site of that,
they have more time, more energy, more latitude to investigate things that they knew will be important to industry.
They apply for episode grants. We don't. We do a lot of work with Innovate UK.
We do a lot of work directly with industry. I think what intermediaries are for have that real clarity and of the of the mission.
We don't take part in the rest of the team for the cash or anything like that. We talk about repeat customers.
If we never published, it wouldn't matter. If we didn't patent, it wouldn't matter.
But if industry wanted us to, we would patent and then make sure they had the access they needed to the IP.
So I think intermediaries of the sort that I work for, I was asked to provide professional applied R&D services for industry.
Thank you very much, Simon.
So I guess there's some different perspectives and obviously some quite different institutions that we've that we've talked about,
but I'm quite interested to get some views and some questions from from you guys as to whether you agree, whether you want to challenge any of that.
Malcolm. How is the national standards drive your activities in your respective fields?
How much competition is there across countries to make sure that their standard is the one that sticks?
Well, I can. I can give an answer. I mean, across the catapult network, and it varies a lot depending on which industry you're in.
So obviously the in the health tech catapults standards are absolutely vital,
and they're all working to the and they're all developing new standards and particularly for standards for the new generation of cell therapies,
which aren't going to be delivered in blister packs. But you know, a new industry needs to be created.
That's actually going to figure out how to deliver those therapies and new standards need to be developed for that.
We're working quite closely on the 5G standards, and that's that's a big international effort.
There's a there's a well-established community that's working on those,
and obviously our interest is to make sure that the satellite element to that is well represented.
And we we want to make sure that satellites can provide that ubiquitous communication element in 5G that's been missing from the previous generations.
But but it does vary, but I think clearly standards are an important element of many highly regulated industries.
A tip typically the companies we work with say that the focus on the standards is something that they're already absolutely expert in.
So we have an awareness of. We're working in defence, but no specs. This thing has to survive minus 40 plus 80 degrees Celsius, that sort of thing.
And medical devices as well. We do design with those standards in mind, but truth be told,
we are taking that material view and the companies will then be the experts to get things through the regulations.
So it's important we're aware of them, but we are not involved in driving them.
The only thing I would, I would agree, and the only thing I would add is the major companies that are driving throughout,
you know, the the Manufacturing USA institutes, their global companies.
So the standards are that that we talk about are global standards.
So I'm going to East Terrace. I'm sorry, Mr. Kim is going to be next.
So I mean, it's interesting you made the point that you don't apply for kind of research council grants and the university does,
you know, I think one of the, you know, if you were to have a more combative session,
one of the questions that was asked when the catapults arrived is these smaller organisations that
are ultimately going to become competitors with universities and industry for research grants.
So do you feel that that tension should,
should was a mistake or was it something that has been fixed or is it something that needs to be an ongoing concern?
Was what he views on that kind of particular worry?
I mean, I think there are, you know, there were there are different types of funding, some of which are aimed at the research institution,
some rhythms around the industry and some of them are sort of aimed at the sort the,
you know, the crossover points, the distance or the commercialisation elements.
And I don't think we've quite got that landscape well-organised yet is would be my view.
And I think the diagram on the Down from the Dowling review would probably support that assertion.
I mean, I don't mind a bit of tension. I think a bit of tension is a good thing.
I mean, it's not like there's no tension in the university network, I think.
And, you know, healthy competition between universities, I think is part of what makes the university so strong.
And, you know, back in the day when so you know,
in the early days when Google were being asked how and why they been so successful as well, because we up Yahoo just down the road.
And you know, and that's that's that's sort of Spurs industry on.
And, you know,
part of the reason for creating a cluster of well of space industry to go to 100 companies there now is that they're all spurring each other on.
They're all driving each other forward. So a bit of bit of healthy tension in this is not not a bad thing.
So in the US, is the funding landscape much clearer and it's obvious?
Well, I would say the answer to the question is, you know, I think academics write proposals to funding agencies as a business.
This is what we do. And you know that that leads to the product, which is graduates and new knowledge.
So it's very natural for the academics to write these proposals,
which is why the whole manufacturing USA network of institutes really got driven not just ours, but most of them by by academics.
So, you know, and yes, there's a lot of tension between them.
You know, I I hear from a number of faculty about their internal competitions as they move between the institutes.
So, you know, I think that and I agree with you totally that is absolutely healthy.
You know, those of us who try to run universities, it drives you nuts a little bit,
especially when they want some of my resources to help them with each of those institutes.
But you know, that's I think that's a really good way, especially if you're pulling industry in,
which is certainly what has happened here in industry is is driving a lot of this.
So it's my thoughts on that. It does.
Does everyone use the word collaboration? I mean, that's nice.
Last quarter, as the university said, very, very close beside each other. You could, you could argue and you could think of it.
The funding is finite. So maybe we are all competing to some extent,
but there's there's much more to be won by those that collaborate together and are focussed on the endpoint of what we're all trying to deliver.
You won't find me arguing for any reduction in the research budget. I'll certainly argue enormously for an increase in the budget.
There's so much more to be exploited.
We have such a fantastic research base in the U.K. we don't we don't have anything like the vehicles to exploit it properly.
We're not even close. Innovate UK is no part of UK array,
having invented the catapult doesn't even understand in its own competitions
how best to fund those competitions that involve universities and how to use.
If I can say to you instead of intermediary because they're limited to typically limited to 30 percent of a project,
and that's for all the art teachers and universities that are involved. So if you get near, say me and we do an awful lot to help SMEs,
they don't want to take on 70 percent of the road and the project on their own shoulders.
They come to us and they say, Well, we'd really like, you know,
this guy in South London to draw some fibres and the NPLW to take this measurements and you guys to make a system in a box,
and that's about 80 percent of the project. So I might argue that the universities have a very healthy our budget.
But in terms of Innovate UK, if Stewart and I want to collaborate, we almost impossible.
We're looking at.
Very small part of if it's going to deliver, especially for the small market, especially for the smaller companies, so we're not there yet.
If we find the small companies actually are not putting a whole lot of money into it, they put other resources in, but they don't have money.
It's the biggies that are putting the money and they, you know, they share the supply chain, so they share the same ease.
But those are the folks who are putting the funds into, you know, into the collaborative projects.
Yeah. And you know, if you had told me five years ago that we would have major companies collaborating and you know,
they're there across a number of different sectors of our economy.
But if you had told me that all those major companies would be collaborating,
I would not necessarily agree that you were saying it's so effective in the space of its manufacturing and its processes they have in common.
They get so much value for their money. We like it as well the launch of the companies that come through and the end users,
because that really builds through the supply chain that pulls the same ease.
I do hope we can continue in Horizon Europe projects because for me,
that's a fabulous opportunity for the smaller companies to be involved in a big project that's got a BMW to Bosch or someone at the end of the chain
that's through that project that they're designing and developing their next generation projects into that supply chain and getting great value.
Yeah, exactly. And you you were desperate to ask something before.
Yes. What's again? I always defer to my friend Phil. So two questions.
Simon for you. First, about Fraunhofer as in general.
Um, you know, I think the front after modelling Germany's incredible success, I think people look at it with envy.
You know, in talking to my friends from the UK, the catapults were, you know, Fraunhofer is a great model in the U.S.
People say the national labs are the closest thing we have to front office.
We really could use Fraunhofer. There are Fraunhofer in the U.S., but they're they're under the radar unless they're in your your area.
I think if you ask most academic researchers in the U.S. are small and mid-sized companies.
They don't know about it. The MEP programme that you weren't here yesterday, but both Copan talked about the MEP programme,
which is really set up to help small and mid-size manufacturers with technical issues that they have.
And so, you know, and I hear a lot of other places talk about the need for a Fraunhofer like organisation, so I guess.
And of course, I know you represent all of Fraunhofer throughout the whole world, of course.
Why do you think it's it's worked in Germany? There are ones in the U.S., but they haven't.
I would say it's matured or evolved to a level of robustness that they're clearly, I think.
And you know, GE may want to weigh in or may not.
But I mean, I hear people all the time say it would be great if we had Fraunhofer in the U.S. or, you know, the national labs, our Fraunhofer like.
And so what do you think that is? And so that's my question for you.
And then and then I have a question for Jay, so I'll hold the mic if you want to answer that.
OK? I couldn't tell you exactly why it doesn't work in the US.
I do know that they have a number of different states, and every time there's an election,
they're trying to renegotiate funding with a new senator and it's blue and it's red.
That's blue and it's red, and that's a big problem for them. I know that they're funding structures are very different from Michigan to California.
There's about seven or eight. So. So I think they don't have that.
The ongoing basis core funding signed and sealed, not politically contentious.
Every few years, they have to go and introduce themselves again to the local local senator.
So I think that that might be a fundamental sticking point. The success in Germany is very, very easy to look back on.
I will never, ever share a platform with my lovely Counterplay colleagues without doing them one favour and saying,
Can we please stop producing the catapults every year? Right? The Germans took about 30 years to work out how to do it.
I really took it, started in late 1940s. It really took off in the 70s.
They get into that mode of doing it and doing it properly,
and they have thorough reviews about every three years of themselves, of different institutes.
There's a tension in the financial model that incentivise them to do the right sort of work.
About half of the workers earlier stage and collaborative. Half of the work is industrial.
That financial tension?
The third is not some magical thing in itself that the magic thing is the tension that they don't become a blue sky research institute
by doing too much early collaborative and they don't become an industrial job shop or consultancy by only doing pure industrial.
So if they got a pound of fruit from government for every pound industry gave them, they would rush off and become a consultancy at a job shop.
But there's a complex algorithm in the funding that keeps that attention and the success.
Looking back now is because they have unlike Air two in the UK with all these acronyms and different organisations,
there's a consistency there of the branding, something Carter felt were very wise to adopt.
There's one name. So if you're an industry in Germany and you have a problem and you don't know if it's the
manufacturing of the plastic or the injection moulding or the the laser ranging of the ink,
you know who to call. I have this problem. Who's going to solve it?
So they've now got that the other guys to go to brand and reputation has taken a long time to build up.
And I couldn't tell you exactly why they've not cracked it in the US.
OK. Thanks, Jay. We talked yesterday about sustaining consortia and models.
The Manufacturing USA had a tremendously large cost shares.
I remember it was three to one or something like that based on the cash that the government gave.
And I think it's a 10 year cap right on the on the programmes from the feds in theory, right?
Yes. So and the one that your involvement in Chicago has been around now, it's in its second five year, second five year.
So how often are you all talking about the need to think about sustainability beyond the federal funding period?
Is that is that business model being discussed in terms of how you're going to evolve to get to that?
And and is that something that was thought about early in the process, like in year two?
Or is it just now getting on the radar? It seems to me like a lot of time.
It's like you're seven when people have a spiffy like, Oh, we have three years of funding,
like we need to do something, we started talking about it year one sustainability we recognised.
We weren't sure we were going to get the second round, you know, the second five year round.
Let's just say there are times in the United States when there's a change in the
administration and sometimes things don't move from one administration to the next.
So this was started under the Obama administration and has continued with significant funding and then into the Trump administration.
So to answer your question, we started at the very beginning looking at sustainability because we were concerned that this would be an issue.
You know, I just want to riff a little bit on your comment about the geopolitical issue here.
The geo being our states and not the world, but in the politics being, you know, whatever it is,
if you look at the funding for the manufacturing institutes, aid from the Department of Defence and then the rest of them except one of the 14.
So you know what's at six five, our Department of Energy, most people in this room,
if you're not from the United States, think of the Department of Energy as dealing with energy.
Half of those labs run our nuclear weapons programme,
and that's how the Department of Energy started with Fermi saying, Geez, you know, doing a critical mass critical,
you know,
the critical pile in and underneath the stadium at the University of Chicago is probably not the right place to be developing nuclear materials.
So they moved it 15 miles outside of Chicago and then quickly realised they needed to go to Los Alamos because they needed to be really secret.
So the Department of Energy is very closely linked to the military in many ways.
And if you look at the United States and you look at the funding of these major and the major labs,
there are either defence labs directly through the Department of Defence or indirectly through the Department of Energy.
There is a reasonable fraction of what the Department of Energy work now that is related to basic research that has a commercial impact.
So a dual use component, but we have had great success in the development side of R&D when it's linked to national security and defence.
There hasn't. And then we have had great success in finding funding for, you know, what I would call tier one really fundamental research.
So the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, that's where funding goes.
But once you start moving up to your own levels, there is a sense within the country.
And certainly when I go out and talk to alumni,
they're wondering why we're getting money from the federal government, why we don't get money from companies.
So if you've got, you know, reasonably well, at least educated folks coming out of major universities who are asking me this,
the populous very much feels that development belongs to industry, and that's how it ought to be driven.
So, you know, you ask Tony and you know, there's sort of this conversation,
you know, what's the difference between the United States relative to Fraunhofer?
My sense is that it's that the US public very strongly feels the development is
within the domain of industry and research is they're very willing to fund research,
fundamental research through the federal government and into the universities, which is where we get the vast majority of our funding for research.
I think that's that I would love to hear if somebody disagrees with that.
Can I just make another point on that?
When when the catapults were set up, they were set up in response to a study done by a guy called Hermann Hauser.
If anybody's familiar with Hermann is sort of the closest we've got to Steve Jobs,
I think he's sort of one of the founders of AAM and and he was looking at the what is the
challenge of the of the U.K. was that we have some of the world's great research institutions,
but we don't have the same record of translating research into economic output as other countries do, including the US in Germany.
So he did a quite a detailed review of all the different, you know, our major competitor nations, if you want to put it that way,
who were doing this better than we are and what they had that we didn't and they obviously picked out the Frauen office in Germany.
But he was, you know, and he was pointing out things that you talked about important in the role, the daughter plays things like the Draper Labs,
a number of the universities who have privately funded institutions who act in this place,
like the Dutch Fondé Institute, the Media Lab at MIT, and developed them this time.
And these kind of places that provide this intermediary function,
though perhaps we don't really think of them as intermediaries, necessarily within the university system.
And so, you know, clearly that was something that the US had that we didn't have, and it was the cannibals that came out of that.
And it was what he described it as translational infrastructure that that that area that
focuses on that sort of the commercialisation of research to as their primary function.
And and that so I think if if to answer the question that was raised,
I think looking at that Hauser report would be a good place to start because it looks at the
landscape right across the world and compare and contrast what's going on in this space.
The only thing I would add to that is, you know, Draper was a Department of Defence.
It was defence related activities wasn't nearly as DARPA's clearly, you know,
Defence Advanced Research Projects Administration is clearly that as well.
What hasn't come up in this conversation that you sort of leaned right against the edge of it is VC funding and angel funding, which.
In the United States is certainly driving an incredible amount of activity.
And so you mentioned this Monday, and that's private money that went into building that, that part of of it.
You know, the labs also had private money donors, and we have the same sort of thing within our institution, not on that scale.
We're getting there. But you know, you grow and it takes decades. But you know, that's a component here.
That's interesting. Do you have that sort of knowledge of that scale?
We've got one or two individuals who are starting to fund more of that, that sort of thing.
You know, people like Dyson and people on that sector know nothing about the scale that you have.
In case we get into envying the US and the funding landscape too much, I'm going to go for another question.
Yeah. A couple of other thoughts. They always say what you've never thought of.
You can hardly mix, but all their intermediaries you think that I'm on.
I'm probably more talking in the UK context, but other intermediaries that we actually think we still lack in the UK,
that would make a difference to ultimately our economic prosperity here.
That would be one question. And I guess another one would be having talked quite a lot about place.
How would you kind of continue to argue for the balance between Sector Place?
One stop makes an awful lot of sense. One stop shop makes an awful lot of sense in one context, in an intermediary context.
We're looking at a one stop shop, a sector, specialism, an institution.
How would you argue for the merits and demerits of intermediaries in terms of their structure,
their specialism, their geography, their ability to attract from either end of what they're trying to achieve?
I'm just going to comment very briefly on the very first point you raised about creating new institutions,
and this is probably something that coming from you care, I shouldn't say,
but I think at the moment there's a real fashion for creating new institutions, be they research institutions,
be they intermediaries and and looking at how complex the current landscape is.
I'm not sure that the the answer to everything is let's create a new thing that's a bit different to what's gone before.
So I think that there may well be gaps,
but I'm not sure the answer is new institutions of whatever flavour I'm going to have to open that up to others for their thoughts.
Yeah, I mean, I would probably agree, although there was always political pressure.
If you're going to be spending more money, then it's much more politically comfortable to have something new to announce rather than say you're
going to give more money to some existing players so that there's always a tension in the system.
Again, that I mean, I think when you look at the talking about the the Fraunhofer Institutes and the
scale that they that they operate in Germany and compared them to what's happening,
what's here in the UK, I think there's clearly a big difference there.
And I think the other big difference is we've just been talking about the amount of investment that the Department of Energy,
Department of Defence and does in the US.
If you look at any other of the major developed nations around the world and look at how much our government spends on research, it is almost zero.
It's negligible. There's no major government R&D programme in the UK compared to what goes on in other countries, and I think that is a real problem.
We will when we're trying to,
we're working with government departments and trying to help them understand how they can use space technology in Brexit.
Looking at how we're going to do the replacement for Common Agricultural Policy, how we're going to do the new fisheries policy.
There's no competence around in government to look at new technological solutions for any of that, and that's a real problem.
And so I think that if there is a gap at the moment, that's probably it.
I mean, did you want it coming from Glasgow come at some place and all of this and how that fits?
Yeah, sure. I think there's a wide range of things to pick up on.
One of them is place.
So the typical phone Hoffman Institute in Germany will do 80 percent of its business in a circle of, I forget it, 50 kilometres or 80 kilometres.
Yeah, the cluster the cluster effect is is a bit old fashioned in time, but it really, really works like what's happening and how.
Well,
one of the reasons we are setting in the central belt of Scotland is because there are several universities very good at different types of lasers,
and there's a whole cluster of laser and optical companies up there.
We weren't starting with a blank sheet of page. We're trying to make things better.
Part of that as well is that there's the rise of the SMEs and who can't afford the corporate lab.
They can dip in and out of an intermediary when they want.
They can occasionally sponsor a Ph.D. student to come through who's familiar with deadlines and deliverables working with us.
So, so there's a wide range of things there. More and more gaps in the market.
Yeah, they certainly are with it with the demise of corporate labs. And I see the gaps in enabling technologies.
Speaking to lots of universities around the UK where they have got a deep enabling technology that they can apply to different, different sectors.
So whether that's a major electronic synthetic biology, biomass catalysts, various chemical aspects that are beyond me and there's a stack of things,
a stack of things that a cybersecurity one, again, there'll be universities who do this well and do it directly.
There's only so many hours in the day to day teaching and knowledge and understanding.
So, yeah, I think I think that I think there are gaps there. So police can be really important.
You're, you know, you will eventually have an incredible cluster of satellite applications, companies surrounding Stewart.
And I think there's there are different ways of doing this.
So some of the catapults of a very sectoral approach, transport systems is very much a sector,
is that do they do they employ a gear train or chassis designers?
Or is it all about the materials or is it all about the electronics? So it's very central, whereas very often issues tend to be deep,
enabling technologies that the car crosses all sorts of ways of looking at it, trying to judge Schwartz.
The the perfect missing piece of the jigsaw puzzle was not not easy.
There's a question at the back and then one at the front. Sure.
One of the roles that is going to be intermediate and very effective at all that over the last decades is helping
industry figure out how to engage with Europe and the complexities of Europe and how to really get the best of it.
So facing into Brexit now, which looks like the UK will probably come into our country.
Is there all you think there's a new role for the intermediaries to figure that out and help people to to navigate?
True. What's going to be pretty challenging times? Sure.
But for those of us that don't apply to the UK for funding,
then Horizon Europe is really fantastic and has always been much more focussed on getting things through to the end user.
So yeah, we can help against small companies don't don't always have a very, very active portfolio in the.
So we have big people knocking on door and say, should we apply to the Technology Strategy Board?
And we said, Well, when was the last time you left the factory? It's innovate UK now.
Here's here's what it looks like, and here's a list, and we guide them through that and help them through that.
So there's there's a convening and an explaining role for the complexity of the landscape for organisations like ours to do.
For sure. I mean, we've always had as part of our role helping organisations export and, you know,
as an example of how innovation is not just all about technology in the space sector.
Satellites are obviously global and you know, companies who are delivering services using space technology, their primary market might be,
you know, in the Middle East, it might be in the Far East, it might be in South America for whatever services they're delivering.
And so they're not the traditional savvy local market market first and then export type of businesses,
they go to work out how to export what they want. So.
And now with Brexit and the challenges and alleged opportunities that that creates, we've got to find find ways of taking advantage of those.
Thanks. So you started out the session saying you wanted this to be combative,
so at the risk of drawing ire of a lot of people in the audience, I'll phrase my question deliberately provocatively.
So I think we've heard from the panel that intermediaries in general are built specifically to meet the needs of industry,
while universities have a lot of other competing priorities and paymasters.
So as as a business, why would I continue to go to a university?
Why not just channel all industry activity through intermediaries? And I think Jay should go first on this because he's got a job.
You know, look, that's a great question, of course. There are two things that you I'm going to I'll I'll I'll engage in directly in a role here.
They have Phil move aside and we'll take it out back later. But there is a pub here in the there are two products that we have that you want.
You want new knowledge so that you can expand your business and you want people who come out educated so that they can work in your industry.
And if you work with us, then we can provide you a better product because we can understand your needs better and we can,
you know, we can align much better if we work together on, you know, sort of one on one basis.
The nice thing about intermediaries is that then there is a group of folks on both sides and there's and there's a conversation that occurs.
Certainly, I know what happens at the Amex boards. And that is a bunch of us who are academics usually hang out for lunch together.
I mean, you know, it's it's it's the usual human things.
You know, we have something to talk about or complain about in the industry does the same thing.
Now we do foresee, you know, we do there is a forced interaction,
but there is also a consensus that builds within intermediaries and the consensus allows alignment overall over the two sectors.
And certainly, I have seen that within the next board and within the technical side of that as well.
So there are reasons to engage with both different with industry and academia, one on one.
And there are reasons to do these consortia where the intermediaries get together, and I'm sure others will have other things to say about this.
Yeah, I mean, I was this is the first time I've come across the use of the word intermediaries to describe this, this type of organisation.
But actually, you know, to answer that question,
I think it's it's a well-chosen description because part of part of what we do is facilitate introductions between industry
and the university partners that have got the best expertise and knowledge that's going to help them solve their problems.
We don't have the detailed, you know, real core scientific knowledge that the universities have, but we can facilitate those introductions.
And if that means that, then there's no role for us afterwards, then that's fine to take credit for whatever happens from from that relationship.
But, you know, we know that we can't do everything and we do that and we do try and facilitate those relationships.
You're the customer. What do you want if you want a really, really specific piece of expertise?
You don't necessarily go to the wonderful University of Oxford, the University of Cambridge.
You go down to the individual person within whatever department it happens to be anywhere in the world to get the expertise you need.
And if that's not an offer in Glasgow, then good luck. I have a great time.
Find the right person to give you what you need so that a lot of the time, of course.
Of course, there's so much knowledge in the universities.
You won't go direct to universities for that knowledge that the number of professors who will then
want to spend the next couple of years making you a pre-production prototype is pretty small,
so you may want to get another organisation involved to work collaboratively. But in all, the universities are wonderful.
If we're not setting you up to take all the business, yeah, that's all.
It is all like that, but it's going to be about what you really need.
Some of the best experiences I had and as a real job, an industry was collaborating with universities.
And so some of the worst people that wanted to give you an enormous bill and they wouldn't
break it down for you and they wouldn't tell you what they'd delivered in the winter, we went.
So we didn't want to do is we want all the people in universities who fantastic. It gave us the benefit of the knowledge and it was so valuable.
So as a team in a place for some things, we go shopping and Sainsbury's and some things we go shopping at Marks and Spencers.
It depends what you want.
So I think on the note that it's a highly collaborative endeavour and that there's complementary capabilities in both in actually working, engaging.
If you're a university engaging with intermediaries and industry or indeed coming
from the other side is is that is a valuable exercise that benefits everyone.
I think it's probably time to hand back to Phil to thank you all very much.