Most of you will remember the Science is Vital campaign and the extraordinary result it achieved in only a few weeks. As most of you also know, work didn’t stop there, and the campaign focusing on Science careers also gathered a lot of support and attention.
Science is Vital is now an organization and it will have it’s first AGM this Thursday, 13th September 2012. Part of the main points to be discussed will be how the campaign can insure that the science budget will not be at risk in the next Spending Review. The pressure to cut funding across the board is there, as we all know. So it seems more important than never to keep the case for Science very much on the agenda.
Importantly, Vince Cable seems to agree:
[from Research Professional News, by Laura Hood, 11 Sept 2012]
This is a good sign, clearly, but we should not get complacent and must prepare to defend the science funding in UK as a major point of future growth and development.
The Business Secretary also defined the Government’s strategic areas for the future of Industry in UK:
Vince Cable’s vision for the future of British industry includes industrial strategies for sectors including non-health life sciences such as agriculture, the business secretary announced today. According to Fergus Harradence, deputy director of innovation policy at the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, the government is keen to boost the R&D performance of the farming and food industries, which lags behind that of other sectors.
Speaking at Imperial College London, Cable said he seeks to establish long-term partnerships between government and specific parts of UK industry. But while many expected a full strategy document to be revealed, he indicated only that a large number of smaller, sector-specific plans will be produced over the coming year.
The three broad areas to be targeted by the government for strategies are advanced manufacturing, knowledge-intensive services, and industries important for international trade such as energy and information technology.
Higher education forms a crucial part of the knowledge-intensive services sector, and a strategy for education exports will be developed by the spring.
Plans will also be developed for the automotive, nuclear, renewables, and oil and gas industries and for the information economy, the last of which will be based around the Tech City initiative run by the Technology Strategy Board. [...]
“Ground-breaking technologies are often too risky or resource-intensive for individual companies to nurture on their own, so government has an important role to play in accelerating the journey from pure academic research to its commercial applications,” said Cable. [...]
Explaining the thinking behind his broader vision, Cable said his plan was to follow countries such as the US, which have used long-term planning to shape their economies.
Cable also announced that in October the TSB will launch competitions on energy-efficient computing, and energy harvesting for autonomous sensing, each worth around £1m.
[from Research Professional News by Laura Hood, 11 Sept 2012]
