Definitions of R & D : report with evidence.
- Great Britain. Parliament. House of Lords. Science and Technology Committee.
- Date:
- 1990
Licence: Open Government Licence
Credit: Definitions of R & D : report with evidence. Source: Wellcome Collection.
56/148 (page 54)
![2 March 1989] [Continued [Chairman contd.] policy decisions about what they should invest in R&D and in what sectors and what the wealth- creation possibilities within those sectors are. I think if you have not got that kind of information you really have no basis for beginning to debate that point. I suppose I hitch my personal waggon to the idea of saying the better you can make the definition of the information the more meaningful it will be in usage. I think that perhaps that has been the difficulty so far. I think it is important. It is difficult,but I think correspondingly when you start making comparisons across national boundaries, which again are critical to exactly those kinds of issues, it is important internationally to try to find some sort of agreed framework. Lord Kearton 89. But it is not agreed by the witness that you measure everything by cost and not by quality? You can have 100 research workers with alpha pluses and hundreds with beta minus or gamma minus and everything else is the same and the results are completely different? A. I think that is a very fair comment and I would not pretend that what I am saying is only one parameter of a rather difficult multidimensional problem, but it seems to me that the business of quantifying the quality of R&D, certainly internationally, is a phenomenally difficult exercise. I am not sure I understand even how to begin to do that, whereas I think so far one can tend to begin to equate financial investment. I think those who are moving in those sorts of scenes can often make some rather qualitative judgement about a comparison of the quality between R&D in, say, microelectronics in the US and R&D in microelectronics in Europe or something like that, and from that you may get meaningful arguments about, are we doing enough or are we not. That is the only thing I say, but I do accept your point. It is phenomenally difficult and it is a bit qualitative. Baroness Lockwood 90. Do you think by applying your definitions it would perhaps be easier to judge, as it were, the quality of the research? For instance, one would probably get a better understanding of the division between actual research and development on your proposed definitions. A. I think possibly it would not be’ so much perhaps quality but it would be interesting to make judgments. You might find that one particular sector or one particular country has a lot of its alleged R&D money invested right in manufacturing technologies and nothing in innovative R&D or product processes, which would be an interesting thought, whereas another country might have everything invested in product concept R&D and practically nothing in manufacturing technology or production technology. Again that is an interesting thought. These are some of the kinds of deductions one might make out of these sorts of situations and I think maybe those are less dependent on quality arguments than they are about missing links in the R&D chain, in fact. Chairman 91. Do you find the subcategorisation in the Government review of primary purpose a valuable one? Could it be applied to Frascati as well, do you think? A. I think it could, undoubtedly. 92. Do you think it would be a good thing to do? A. Yes, I do. I think it would be very relevant because at least that is a further attempt to try to get in a sense another limb of a matrix, so to speak, as I see it, of understanding what that R&D is about, what it is addressing and so on. A lot of what we have been talking about so far has been addressing the product process but there are other kinds of R&D too which, of course, we have to take into account. 93. Do you think we ought to try and get an agreed international definition of strategic research and near-market research? A. I think it would be helpful to have as good a definition as one can but there is a limit to how far it is worthwhile straining on that. point because undoubtedly at the strategic research level there is probably a fairly reasonable international kind of feeling about what that all means and the chances are there would not be too much ambiguity. As I say, I think where the ambiguity lies is very much more as you go towards the product process and the product development as to what does it mean and what do the numbers mean within that particular bracket? Lord Kearton: You get an awful lot of “copycat” research in industry. Some company develops a product of some kind and its rivals decide they will try to match it and they go through the literature and look at the plans, so there is a certain amount of industrial espionage in trying to match their product. Baroness Lockwood: What would industrial espionage come under? Research? Lord Kearton 94. We had better ask you the question, I think! A. Yes, it is a difficult one and undoubtedly that sort of thing does happen, but when you have “copycat” research then you do have sheer duplication, which at the end of the day is not necessarily, in either national terms or international terms, making the impact you imagine by looking at the numbers. I would like to pick up another point that relates to what we have been saying. One of the concerns I have is the fact that a lot of the statistics we are talking about relate to Government expenditure and so on and, of course, that is the area that is reasonably easy to get at because it is in the public domain already. I think there is a very significant contribution by definition made by private industry to that particular portfolio and it is one where, while one is busy in a sense generating very highly refined data on Government expenditure, at the other end of the scale one has rather crude and inadequate data on industrial investment. Whilst I accept the reality that it is jolly difficult to define that and all the problems we are talking about in the public domain become even more difficult in the private domain, nevertheless it is a factor which can be a major distorting factor if you just treat public](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b32218540_0056.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
