The first part (May 22) of this series is where I mused about the impact of funding university research facilities that are designed to act as a revenue stream by making them available for a price to local businesses. Today’s posting was inspired by an announcement from EPSRC, from Nanowerk News,
Ten research grants to help solve some of the biggest health problems facing the UK have been awarded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC).
You can find the details here.
What makes it particularly relevant to this discussion is the process they (Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council [EPSRC]) used to determine the type of projects that would get funded.
First, agencies in the UK have run a number of public engagement exercises on the topic of nanotechnology. EPSRC has used a rather collaborative approach with members of the public to determine which projects will get funded. Here’s the description from the website,
The programme also involves other research councils (BBSRC, MRC and ESRC) as well as the Technology Strategy Board.
The EPSRC undertook a web-based consultation with a broad cross section of the research and user community to establish what topics should be included in the third Grand Challenge. These views were used by the cross Council Nanotechnology Scientific Advisory Team to select the area of Nanotechnology Solutions for the Environment.
The next stage involved holding a Town Meeting in March 2009. Attendees were chosen through an Expression of Interest call. The outputs of this event were then discussed by the Nanotechnology Strategic Advisory Team which advised that the final scope of the call should be the contribution Nanotechnology can make to Carbon Capture and Utilisation.
They do downplay the public input aspect but I’ve been following this and it was more important than you’d guess from reading what they have on their website. There have been many public engagement exercises where experts were trying to determine what kinds of projects the public would likely support. For a more comprehensive view of how it all came about, take a look at this posting in Richard Jones’s Soft Machines blog.
This activity can be viewed as collaborative and/or as market development for future products based on the research being funded. BTW, I was told once by someone in marketing research that focus groups are notoriously bad at predicting the success of a brand new product category. They do well when asked to suggest improvements and changes but they are not good at predicting the future.
In other words, the EPSRC projects are likely to be improvements based on tested ideas rather than new concepts. In effect, the research has been precommercialized.
I have at least one more part to this series which should be coming soon.