Sustainability of Research Centres - Advisory Science Council

An important feature of the scale is the shift in the underpinning rationale for research activity from
public to private goods as the type of research undertaken changes from basic research to applied R&D.
This shift is accompanied by a corresponding shift in sources of funding and location of research
participants/activities from public to private i.e. the balance in funding shifts from 100% public funding on
the left to 100% private funding on the right, and research participants shift from those located in public
research organisations (including HEIs) 49 to those located in private sector R&D labs (whether as an in-
house function or out-sourced as contract R&D). Between the two ends of the scale a range of models
exist for supporting collaborative R&D activities with mixed funding, participation and location of research
activities. Typical forms of research centres are shown along the top of Figure 3, illustrating their position
on the scale - with academic research groups / departments and centres of excellence on the left, moving
through collaborative academic-industry in the centre of the scale, to RTOs on the right 50 .
This model for characterising research centres is sufficient for most types of research centres except
government laboratories and centres with more mission-based or sector foci. For this reason, a separate
category has been added to the right of the scale to enable these types of centres to be included. Centres
in this category typically conduct applied (and user inspired) research in support of public policy and R&D
needs of the sector they are focused on. While some of the research they conduct may be nearer the basic
end of the spectrum the research tends to be largely applied and highly focused on well defined
application areas. Therefore, the centres fall on the right-hand side of the scale in terms of research
conducted but on the left-hand side in terms of part of the rationale for the research. It is recognised that
this is a generalisation, and that some centres may have a primary focus on societal outcomes with some
secondary focus on commercial outcomes, whilst other centres may split more evenly their societal and
commercial foci. A separate category has been added to the right of the scale (in purple) to enable these
types of centres to be included.
The scale illustrates that the relative proportion of industrial funding to a centre will increase from left to
right- although it is not suggested that the funding increases linearly across the full scale, but rather there
is a step change in the proportion of industry funding across the boundary of pre-competitive applied R&D
and applied R&D. It should also be noted that the types of businesses that interact with centres and the
forms of their interactions will also be different along the scale - and therefore the routes to
commercialisation of research outputs, and ultimately wealth creation, will vary in both form and the
timescales over which they occur for different types of centre. The typical types of industry interaction
along the scale are illustrated in Figure 4. For example, on the far left, only science-based industries,
pharmaceuticals in particular but also parts of ICT, materials and high-tech engineering, are able and
willing to interact with universities. These will tend to be large multinational companies (MNCs) with
considerable in-house R&D capabilities and budgets, in addition to a small number of high-tech small and
medium enterprises (SMEs). Pharmaceutical companies, for example, fund professorial chairs in
universities and enter into long-term collaborative relationships with research groups and individual
researchers. Similarly, ICT and high-tech engineering companies participate in collaborative basic research
49 The term Public Research Organisation is usually taken, in Europe at least, to include universities and public research laboratories and institutes.
50 The various categories of research centres used in Figure 3 are described in Appendix 3.
Sustainability of Research Centres 16 June 2012