Oral evidence: Business-University collaboration
Oral evidence, 18 June 2014.
Witnesses
Professor Richard Jones, Pro‑Vice Chancellor for Research and Innovation, University of Sheffield, Professor Greg Marsden, Director, Institute for Transport Studies, University of Leeds, and Nigel Foster, Chair, External Advisory Board, Institute for Transport Studies, University of Leeds, gave evidence.
Chair
Thank you. You have been sitting and listening patiently. I will start by asking you to introduce yourself, again in case we have any problems with voice transcription, starting with you, Nigel.
Nigel Foster
My name is Nigel Foster, and I am a founder and part‑owner of an SME. I may be able to answer some of your questions on SMEs. I was formerly Head of Transport Consultancy at Ove Arup & Partners. I am also the President of the Chamber, and I am Chair of the Advisory Board at the Institute for Transport Studies at the University of Leeds.
Professor Marsden
I am Greg Marsden, Director of the Institute for Transport Studies at the University of Leeds, which is part of the university partner programme here at the Catapult.
Professor Jones
I am Richard Jones. I am Pro‑Vice Chancellor for Research and Innovation at the University of Sheffield, and I am also a council member of EPSRC.
Chair
Thank you. I will start with a fairly general question—almost philosophical, indeed. There are differing views as to whether increasing the impact element of research assessment will strengthen business‑university collaboration. We had one witness who said it would “pull universities out of shape”. What are your views? Who would like to lead on that?
Professor Jones
I would start by saying that “impact” is a word that has a number of meanings. In HE policy‑speak, it has two dimensions. One is the use of retrospective assessments of impact in the research excellence framework, and the other is in the way that the research councils think about it, in terms of enhancing the potential for future impact. I think that the inclusion of impact in the REF has been really pretty positive. Universities have responded across the disciplines. Different disciplines had various misgivings about it; I think disciplines have responded very imaginatively to it, and when those results are published in December, I think you will be really rather impressed with the very wide range of different kinds of impacts that there are. Also, it will change the way that universities will think about these things in the future. I think it has been positive. It has been a big change; I would probably suggest that it might be a good moment to let those changes work through. I would not think it was a good idea to hugely increase the weighting of impact more than it currently is until one has seen how that is assessed and how it shapes up. It would be worth waiting to see. In terms of whether it pulls universities out of shape, that, of course, assumes that universities have some ideal shape in the first place. Universities have been around a long time, and they have adapted to changes to their environment. Some 200 years ago, research was not part of the main mission of universities; research entered to be a core part of the universities’ mission some time in the late 19th century. Universities constantly adapt, and they do need to adapt to the circumstances that we find ourselves in, where we need to do more work to get the fruits of innovation and solve big problems that we have got, and lead to the kind of economic growth that has been lacking. To speak for my own university, the University of Sheffield, we have been involved very closely with the High Value Manufacturing Catapult. We have developed an advanced manufacturing research centre that has changed the shape of the university. It has made us think much more about downstream applications; it has brought us into contact with big companies, little companies, supply chains, and in very concrete terms, we have 180 apprentices starting on our site who are associated with the university. I think universities should change; I think they will change. Of course, in any kind of change, you want to make sure that you hold on to the outstanding characteristics that universities have already. The strength of our pure—I will not say “pure”; I do not really believe in that term. The strength of our basic research base is very impressive, and we ought to hang on to that. It is slightly at risk from decaying funding, but if we can hold onto the things that we are really good at and expand into new areas as society demands, that is positive.
Chair
Have you anything to add or subtract to that?
Professor Marsden
I would just add a little bit in brief. I thought that was a very clear and good summary of my view of where things are. Transportation studies is a fairly applied field, and in actual fact, a good proportion of the work we do, for example, has been for Government Departments. Often the reports are quite sensitive; they take a while to come out, and do not necessarily go through the same academic route that some of our other work does, so actually, for us, the impact agenda has been hugely positive in terms of recognising this kind of work that has been done. There are difficulties in understanding impact across the full range of different disciplines, but again, I would say it has significantly improved the quality of some of the applied research, because it is really making people think about how they engage with the end‑user communities at the design stage of the research; previously, that could be left a little bit to the end, and things fall a little bit fallow. There are some positive sides to it.
Chair
Do you want to say anything? Do not feel obliged to.
Nigel Foster
I was just going to add a couple of points. We need to understand that the research spectrum goes quite a long way from pure—as Richard was saying—to applied, and there is a gestation period. It was said in the previous questions for the previous panel that sometimes you do not succeed in the research, so there is a need to understand that. One of the examples that we have used with the University of Leeds and with the Institute for Transport Studies is taking pure research around emissions, and how they are measured, assessed and evaluated, and then applying those into real‑life applications with local authorities to understand where their emission hotspots might be and what sort of policies they can introduce to manage those better.
Chair
Can I just take it a bit further? This is quite a tricky question: do you think policy‑makers should themselves drive the innovation agenda with universities, or should they seek to create, if you like, the business‑led demand to which universities respond? Where do you think the balance lies?
Professor Jones
This is a very interesting question, and I have been thinking about it a lot. The emphasis of innovation policy has been about addressing the supply side; it has been about making sure that we have got a strong research base, making sure that we have got skilled people, and increasing the connections between universities and industry. There has been a “push” element to innovation policy so far, and that has produced great benefits; it has led us to have a very strong research base, and we ought to be proud about how close the connections between universities and business are. If you look at the HEFCE numbers, there is a story of steadily increasing contract research income and collaborative research. It is actually a fantastic story, and we can be really proud of the way our universities will link with industry. However, it has got to the point where if we look at the innovation system, frankly, we have to say that the place where the weak link is in industrial R and D. You will know the figures for the intensity of industrial R and D in the UK. They have been falling steadily for 30 years. The number in my head is 1.09% of GDP; for countries like Germany, that is more like 1.8%, and then if we go to recently industrialised countries like Korea and Japan, in Korea, I think, it is over 3%. Something is really not working for us there. Again, we look to China. A big date that ought to be etched in all of our minds is 2009. That was the date when Chinese industrial R and D intensity surpassed ours. It is now at about 1.4%, so industrial R and D intensity is about as much in China now as it is in France. I would say that we have done a lot of work on pushing the supply end of the innovation system; I do think we need to face the fact that there is a serious issue at the demand end about who is in a position to take up innovation and convert it into jobs and growth.
Chair
I will invite Nigel or Greg to answer.
Nigel Foster
I, too, think it is a very interesting question. It is interesting to know where you actually break into that particular cycle. I sat on a BIS working group on low‑carbon vehicles a few years ago, and I think that influenced the emerging policy and interventions around the low‑carbon vehicle programme. What seems to happen is that universities will generate leading research to say, “Here are a set of problems that are emerging within the world, or within a particular area, and we need to do something about it”. Government will then perhaps follow with policies about how we try to tackle that, which stimulates a set of further research into particular solutions that might be used in an applied way to address those policy problems that we are facing. It requires closer working between business and universities, business and Government, and Government and universities or academia to try to improve on that process, but I do think there is a need to promote pure research to understand what the issues are, and then follow that with applied research to find out what the solutions are.
Ann McKechin
Can I just follow on from that, on the issue about career structures? We have heard that the move from academia to industry is at times seen as less prestigious within universities. I am not saying that this is true for your own universities, but it is a feature within the sector, and it is often viewed as a one‑way move. Do you agree, or do you think that that sentiment is now beginning to change?
Professor Marsden
I would start by talking about the experience in our department. If you were to look back 10 years, I do not think we would have had any joint industry/academic posts. We now have various secondments in place; we have an industry‑funded post, and I think we should be aspiring to have more of those in the next five to 10 years. To get real value out of the industry/academia space, you have to build up an understanding of what the problems are and the focus of the business, and build up long‑term trust about the value that the two parties add to the relationship. I think, in a sense, that secondments and jointly‑funded posts are an outcome of you being successful in doing that. It is difficult, though. We went through a recruitment process a couple of years ago, and it was a difficult decision about whether or not to bring an industrialist into academia, because they have a very different portfolio and track record. There is a very different risk analysis that you do when you are making that appointment decision.
Nigel Foster
I would take it further. I think that the relationship between business and academia needs to be much broader. You are right; it is both ways. It is difficult to get businesspeople to go into academia for all sorts of reasons, and equally, as Greg said, it is difficult for them to fit sometimes. It needs to be across a much broader way: “How do we actually make the relationship between business and academia much stronger?” That could be about the recruitment of people and their development; it could be the role that businesses play in terms of mentoring and developing employability in students; it could be around research, or joint positions. The more we can find that working‑together, the stronger the outcomes for research and practical applications will be.
Professor Jones
I agree with all those things. We do have structural problems, in the sense of the reward systems that are imposed on us. The fact is that we submit people to the REF, and they have to have four good publications, and if someone has just come from an industry background, they will have been doing undoubtedly outstanding research, but they will not have published it. That is an issue. Having said that, where we have had the self‑confidence to appoint people from an industrial background, it has been enormously successful, and I can point to people in our university in quite a few departments who have brought a really important, different perspective; very important both on the research side and in connecting with industries, but we should not forget the teaching side, too. It is important for our students to see these sorts of things. The other point I would make is that one of the things that we have tried to do, using various bits of money that have come to us, is to get more temporary secondment transfers between the university and industry. The biggest disappointment we have had is that it actually quite difficult to get people from industry to come in for a six‑month secondment; by the time they go back, the entire place has been re‑organised and everybody has forgotten about them. That is an issue. There is a lot of willingness and a lot of understanding that there can be very positive learning both ways, but there are structural issues that stand in the way.
Ann McKechin
You have just covered my second question, which is the issue about rewards and the feeling that there are insufficient rewards, or the risk that moving from one sector to the next could damage a return back to the career that you came from. If the problem has been identified, and you say people are talking about it, but yet you have mentioned this issue about publication of papers being a criterion set, why is there not now a much more active discussion within academia that that criterion need to change if you are going to have that level of business interaction that all three of you have said needs to happen?
Professor Jones
That is a question that we should take up with HEFCE, perhaps, as the people who generally impose these structures on us.
Professor Marsden
I would say, internally, if you look at our promotion criteria now, you can make it right to the top of the university on a knowledge transfer and industrial engagement ticket, rather than necessarily being a global research leader. I think that there are more opportunities within the university space.
Ann McKechin
Can I just ask about the secondments? It strikes me that that is something that may happen when people are at a relatively junior level of their career. To what extent are we having secondments from people, particularly from business, at a more senior level to come in? If you are at a managerial level, is there in reality an option for you to come into academia; or, vice‑versa, for someone in your position as a head of department to go and spend time in industry?
Professor Marsden
Taking myself as an example, I will be spending a couple of weeks with Transport for London in the autumn, working with them on their energy research strategy linked to a research centre that I am involved in. It is certainly challenging to carve that amount of time out, and one of the reasons I am going is because I think organisations are quite thinly‑resourced. It is a real problem that you are pointing to there; just getting time enough for them to engage in a research‑funded programme where we have jointly‑funded research ideas is challenging. Getting them to come out to the university is surely challenging.
Nigel Foster
I think we are in a period of transition. Historically, universities have concentrated more on research and teaching. Now, there is a growing recognition of the importance of the relationship with business. We are in that period, but it is difficult. From an SME’s point of view, you can have more flexibility but perhaps less capacity; for a larger company, you have more capacity, but you perhaps need to understand how it fits within the wider structures. It is not unique to academia, however: this applies in business as well. Individuals can go down a specialist stream and be an expert within their area, or they can go down a more general business‑led stream. It is a matter of trying to match them up where, actually, the university succeeds and the business succeeds from that relationship. It requires that long‑term relationship developing.
Mr Walker
Just following up on that point, Nigel, we have had some submissions from the business perspective, arguing that the research base is so complex and difficult to navigate that businesses, and particularly SMEs, are deterred from investigating it in the first place. Do you think some universities need to think again about how they present themselves to the business world in order to counteract that?
Nigel Foster
Yes, I think they do. I think they are. With SMEs, it is particularly complicated. For example, in the Leeds city region, we have a really good working partnership with the universities. We also have the Yorkshire Universities group, but just within Leeds City Region, we have over 100,000 businesses. Now, some of those will be very small. They will perhaps be businesses that are not interested in research at all, but there will be others as well. There is a company that I am working with called Omnicom, which is a specialist imaging business within the rail industry. They are leading‑edge—world‑leading in some areas—but want to work, and do work, with a number of universities. It is about how the universities present themselves and who the partners they could work with are. For example, I am very fortunate in Leeds that both of the main universities—we have three, but the two main ones are Leeds Met and the University of Leeds—are working very closely with the Chamber to provide access to those smaller enterprises. So they do; there are good examples of how they do that, but I think it probably needs a bit more effort on both sides.
Mr Walker
The Witty review recommended that they could have a single point of entry for SMEs at every university. Is that something that you see mileage in? From what you were just saying, it seems to me that there are other organisations, such as Chambers or LEPs or so on and so forth, which universities can work through in order to make themselves more accessible to SMEs.
Nigel Foster
Obviously, that is very clear from the Witty review. I think a single point of entry is a difficult area. What I would encourage is working through some intermediaries. You have heard about the Transport Systems Catapult here; that is one option. The Chambers are other options for doing that, but also, I would say that you need each of the faculties or schools to have individuals within those departments making the relationships with particular businesses. For example, we have over 25 businesses as part of the advisory group at the Institute for Transport Studies, but individuals will work with specific businesses. We will have people working with Jaguar Land Rover, but we will have other people working with FirstGroup or Network Rail. It is incumbent on encouraging the academics and giving them the support for them to make the engagement as well.
Professor Jones
Absolutely, it is difficult, and it is something that I have spent a lot of time thinking about and changing structures in Sheffield over the last few years. The first thing that we had to do was to try to find a way of getting beyond the Byzantine internal structure of the university and presenting a face that made sense, and that mapped onto external sectors, so someone in the healthcare technology area would be able to find someone without having to know whether they have to look in material science or cardiovascular or whatever. We have set up a series of gateways that face towards those sectors. I should mention that the HEIF money has been very valuable for us to do this. That has been a very valuable resource that has allowed us to do that. I think that has improved the situation. Of course, in our own special place where we have such strong links to the High Value Manufacturing Catapult, that has been very important for us too. There, of course, the big thing for us has been the way in which large companies can bring small companies behind them. By involving Rolls‑Royce and Boeing as major tier one companies, with lots of SMEs that want to supply to those companies, they will be our salesmen; they will say that Sheffield can help you with the skills and innovation that you need to come and sell to us. That has been important. We have had a lot of discussions with the LEP, and have been thinking through the Witty report over the last few months, and the thing that strikes me is how many SMEs there are in the Sheffield City Region. Paul will remember the figure better than me: 50,000, or 55,000?
Paul Blomfield
Some 40,000 to 50,000, yes.
Professor Jones
There are a lot, and it is clear that many of these companies are fine as they are. They are not in a position to benefit from what the university can give; they are not really going to be the high‑growth companies that we can do something with. We have been talking to the LEP and to Sheffield Hallam; this is an area where universities ought to collaborate together in their local region. The two universities have actually committed to work with the LEP, to find a way of being more proactive. It is a question of identifying who the SMEs are that we really want to work with, and then working with them in quite an engaged way. I do not think it is good enough just to say, “Okay, we will put up a website that says, ‘If you need us, this is the telephone number to ring.’” We need to actually understand how we can help, and in some places it could be research, but a lot of universities are deep institutions. Maybe, because we have got a Korean speaker, we could help them find some new export markets. There are many different things. That is the way we are thinking about it, and as I say, this is something that we are actively developing at the moment. I think that kind of selective approach is going to be something that is worth trying. We have not got a single point of contact, but I hope we have now got a set of reasonably sector‑based gateways that can help; if people want to come and look to us, they have got those. The next stage is for us to go out a bit more, and find out how we can help and what the best way is that we can do that.
Mr Walker
I think the point you made was very interesting around SMEs: there are many SMEs that might not want to engage, and might not necessarily benefit from collaboration. Targeting the right ones, and being able to reach out to the right ones, is important. Government procurement is also an area where, in terms of encouraging innovation, it is sometimes seen as a potential tool for doing that. Do you think that has a role to play in this, and in potentially incentivising SMEs to go down innovative routes?
Professor Jones
Of course, people look at the United States a lot, and things like the small business initiative. One has to remember that when the United States procure stuff from small businesses, actually, what they often procure is research, and the thing that keeps lots of high‑tech American SMEs afloat is direct research contracts from the Government. That is an important feature that perhaps needs to be understood. There is a tension in procurement, for obvious reasons, between being innovative and getting best value. If you are a cash‑strapped NHS Trust that needs to get a bunch of equipment in, it is going to be hard to say, “Well, I am not going to get this cheap model, because maybe we ought to keep afloat this company that is producing this slightly more expensive one.” Part of the reason for the fact that people have talked about this for many years and it has not really worked terribly well is because people have not really confronted that tension between value for money and the prospect of future innovation. They do not sit naturally together. Obviously, where the Government can be a massive help is in procuring really quite big things. In our Nuclear AMRC, which is the other bit of the High Value Manufacturing Catapult, we have been thinking a lot about new technologies like small modular reactors, and if the Government wanted to accelerate the development of an indigenous technology for small modular reactors, the best way to do it would be to place an order for a couple of them.
Mr Walker
It has been in the nuclear industry for a long time.
Professor Jones
Yes.
Professor Marsden
Although it does not solve the problem, initiatives like the Transport Systems Catapult actually provide a meaningful meeting-place with a set of resources that do offer the opportunity to lubricate the system. It does not help to engage everyone, but from my observation of the types of people who have been attending the events I have been at in the last two weeks, there is a different set of actors and stakeholders engaged here, and a lot more smaller businesses, looking to exploit innovative business models around intelligent mobility where you do not need large investment in kit; you need good ideas about integration. This does, at least, offer an additional stimulus that I do not think you would create in any one individual university.
Nigel Foster
All I would add to that is also to ensure that the procurement criteria facilitate engagement by businesses at different levels and in different ways, so to enable smaller businesses to collaborate in a consortium that might deliver a solution. Quite often, the requirements are in favour of well‑established, large businesses that do not always deliver, and there was a very interesting discussion on Radio 4’s Today programme, which you may be able to still podcast, by the founder of Confused.com about tagging devices between her company and some major companies that would also provide them, but perhaps had not done so successfully.
Paul Blomfield
Richard, I would like to return to some of the points you were touching on earlier, and cover much more extensively in your paper for SPERI, on the innovation deficit. You mentioned earlier that the point at which Chinese investment in R and D overtook ours was a significant date. What I thought was much more striking from your paper was that over the last 30‑year period, we have not only fallen down in terms of private sector investment in relation to emerging economies, but also in relation to our traditional competitors. I think I am covering what you have covered in there accurately by saying that we are probably the only advanced industrial economy that is now at a lower level of private sector investment in R and D today than we were 30 years ago.
Professor Jones
Certainly for the large countries that were on my graph, I think that is right, yes.
Paul Blomfield
In terms of our major competitors—Germany, France, United States—it is quite extraordinary, is it not, that we have slipped behind all of those competitor countries?
Professor Jones
Yes, it is extraordinary.
Paul Blomfield
What is the reason for it, in your view?
Professor Jones
I think that this is connected to bigger issues about the particular model of capitalism that we have chosen to use. It is connected to the bigger issues about short‑termism that were written about by Kay in the Kay review for BIS, which was an excellent summary of the bigger picture of the stuff that Andrew Haldane has been writing in his time at the Bank of England. The emphasis on shareholder value to be realised in the very short term is something that really militates against long‑term R and D. We have seen it in the two examples I have talked about in the paper—ICI and GEC. Both of them were very large industrial companies that employed many, many people with a very large innovative base. Many things about those companies were not perfect—you can find many things that were not great about them—but the fact is that both of those companies are no longer with us. ICI finally expired with the final sale of the paints bit of it, which was sold to AkzoNobel about five years ago, was it not? The last bit of GEC was Marconi, which was finally sold, again, about 10 years ago. If you look at this, what you see is a pattern of management in which the emphasis was on doing deals, buying and selling companies. The idea was that the manager of an industrial conglomerate was a kind of meta‑fund manager, rather than someone who has built a business, found new business opportunities, and put in the R and D and development to create new businesses. I think that is part of the problem. The inverse problem, of course, is that we had a bunch of old companies that died; you might say that that is not a problem if we have a bunch of new companies that came up to replace them, but of course, that has not really happened. It has been difficult. We cannot really point to a lot of new companies that have been able to grow. We have been very successful at producing spin‑outs; we have lots of spin‑outs, and the classic pattern is for the spin‑outs to be sold in trade sales, typically, when they get to a value of £50 million or £100 million. I think that that is a problem. Again, we have to look at what in the nature of our capital markets leads to that happening. A figure that stuck in my mind, because it quite shocked me, was that if we look at venture capital, the total amount of venture capital that was put into the pharma and biotech industry in 2012 was £46 million. The number you have to compare that with is £751 million, which was the decrease in the overall expenditure in R and D in the pharma industry in the same year. The amount of money that venture capital was putting into this industry was one‑fifteenth of the decrease in the research of the whole industry. It is not even on the same page, in terms of growing those businesses. It is just not doing that. If we ask ourselves why that is, it is partly because those are actually quite difficult businesses and the returns are not particularly good. One needs to look into the structural reasons for why that is the case, but also in the whole venture capital/private equity space, people have a choice about where they put their money. The venture capital bit of it is really overshadowed by private equity, because it proves to be much more reliably lucrative to go and run a management buy‑out of a retail chain or something like that. Those are the kinds of deals that provide the returns, so that is the answer. That is why we have not been able to grow those new innovative technology‑based companies.
Nigel Foster
Just to add to what Richard has said, I think there is an opportunity here, as well. I guess that that is part of why you have these panels; you are looking for opportunities. I do think that with companies cutting back on their own in‑house research—which they particularly did during the recession—there is a real opportunity for Government, working with academia and universities, to stimulate research. That might be done between universities and business, rather than business doing them or universities doing them, but the government can encourage much closer working between the two, which I think is part of the questions you are asking. There is a real opportunity for Government to stimulate that relationship by making sure that the research funding has a strong element of academic and business collaboration around leading research.
Paul Blomfield
Thanks very much, Nigel. I just wanted to push Richard a little further, if that is okay, because your paper was entitled, “The UK’s Innovation Deficit and How to Repair it”. I would like to talk a little bit more about the repair side of it.
Chair
If I could just intervene: we have got another five minutes, if we could make it brief.
Professor Jones
We need to look at what is good. We have got a really good research base. There are many excellent companies around. If we look at Rolls‑Royce, it is a fantastic, world‑beating company; we just wish there were another five of them. The point is that we need to use the excellent research base that we have got, and build on the fact that the culture in universities has changed: we are very effective at working in partnership. TSB has been an effective organisation. The Catapults have great potential. Government just needs to have that mindset that, actually, it does need to help build some new capacity. It is not just about connecting existing businesses; we really need to have a positive aim that we are going to grow some major new industries that can contribute to growth and wealth. If you ask, “Where are they going to be?” it is obvious where they are going to be: they are the things that we need to do. We need to make low‑carbon energy cheap enough that you do not have to massively subsidise it anymore. That is one obvious area. We have to make sure that we can afford to run the NHS in 30 years when the number of old people is much greater than it is now, and problems like dementia will be really serious. I do not think it is a mystery. We have to look at what the really big problems are that society is facing. I say this as an academic physicist: solving them is not just about new science, but it is also about the work that needs to go into developing products and services. That goes well beyond what we do in the research space. It needs intermediary organisations like Catapults, and it needs us to build new companies that can take those opportunities. Government just needs to be a little bit more assertive about realising that it has to contribute to building that capacity.
Paul Blomfield
Following on from that, much of the conversation is about what Government can do to encourage innovation, which is great, and a huge focus of what we are talking about. You were talking earlier about demand and supply‑side initiatives, and last week, when we were talking to Will Hutton and Alan Hughes, we were looking at what initiatives there might be to suppress barriers to innovation as well. I wondered what thoughts you might have on that.
Professor Jones
This is difficult, because many of the barriers to innovation are incumbents who would lose their business if you innovate past them. This makes life slightly awkward.
Paul Blomfield
I guess I am pushing a little bit on the point you made earlier about short‑termism, which we have touched on today, but certainly was also a feature of previous inquiries that we have done, not least on the Kay review.
Professor Jones
On barriers to innovation, you need to be very careful about the kind of tax structures and incentives that you set up. Some of those things can lead to unintended consequences. You were, a few weeks ago, talking to people from Pfizer and AstraZeneca about an initiative that would have undoubtedly been damaging for innovation in the UK. A very large part of its driving force was the way that tax law had been constructed on either side of the Atlantic. Those are the sorts of things.
Chair
I am going to finish up with a question on tax treatment. In fact, we do need to be off in a second, not least because we have got trains to catch. I am going to outline a question; I would be very grateful if you could submit a response in written evidence to the Committee subsequently. My question was going to basically be in three parts: collaboration with industry is seen as part of the university’s “third mission” of wealth creation. Do decision‑makers in universities seek collaboration as a primary purpose? That is, if you like, the core question. Arising from that, is there a case for Government to look at tax treatment of universities engaged in third‑mission activities? Lastly, if there is, could you outline the case that you think should be made? I am happy to send you that question subsequently, just to refresh your memories, but if you could submit any evidence you have in a written form, that would be very helpful.
Professor Jones
I suspect if I go back, I will get some briefing about what I need to say about state aid, which is a complicated issue that does get in our way.
Chair
At the end of the day, it has got to be workable within the context of European regulation. Thank you very much. That was very helpful. I think we could have gone on for at least another half‑hour; unfortunately, we have got other pressures. We do appreciate your contributions, and more generally, if there is anything that you feel you did not say but would like to, please feel free to submit it in the form of supplementary evidence. Thank you. Oral evidence: Business-University collaboration, HC 249-iii 21