I have always been keen on knots. I think it comes from Dick Callum worrying how John would feel about the knots he used to rescue the cragfast sheep in “Winter Holiday.” I felt for him and wanted, when the occasion inevitably arose for me, to do a better job. Perhaps my father should have given more thought to the long term effects of reading his old Arthur Ransome books to me as a child.

I finally managed to get in some practice with knots when I was a Girl Guide – the mascot for a Ranger Troop my mother looked after. From there I can remember the reef knot, clove hitch, bowline and the hangman’s noose (I wonder now if the last was part of the official curriculum, those Rangers had a surprisingly macabre sense of humour). I’ve pretty much been able to do everything I’ve needed to with these so far [1] (without recourse to the noose yet). The bowline will be good for that cragfast sheep when I do come across it. I haven’t yet.

When it came to ties my mother taught me the ‘four in hand’ as I started secondary school and my father the ‘half Windsor’ when he had to be seen in public with me wearing one. He thought the ‘four in hand’ showed a lack of effort and the full Windsor’ was, well, showy. The sort of thing you might expect from a man who would abdicate a throne. It turned out I am the sort of person who is was very pleased to get ‘The 85 ways to Tie a Tie [2]’ for their birthday when I was given it a few years back. Now I can tie nine of them.

But the very first knot I ever learned to tie was the bow. My mother convinced me that I couldn’t go to school until I’d learned to tie my own shoes: little brown lace-ups with crepe soles. I pretty much had it down pat when I set out on the first day but when they came undone, I couldn’t manage to re-tie them under the pressure of the teacher’s gaze and cried, worried I’d be sent home. She was quite surprised when she got out of me what the problem was: tying shoes hadn’t been on her list of requirements.  I’m guessing my mother looked a little guilty when she showed me how to do a double bow that evening.

Tying double bows became automatic. I could sit on the end of my bed, bare foot, and get up two minutes later ready for the day without another thought. Left sock, right sock, left shoe, left bow, right shoe, right bow – with my attention wholly given to Morning Report. Always a double bow because if I didn’t they’d come undone during the day.

So I was wrong from the start. I’ve known for years that a bow is just a reef knot with the ends tucked in to make it quick to untie. The whole point of a reef knot is that it doesn’t slip under pressure. The more you pull on the two sides the tighter it gets.  But if you tie a reef knot badly you end up with a granny knot and they sometimes slip and sometimes jam.

It was Dave Ackerley who set me right. He came around to drop off some exam scripts and casually mentioned a talk he’d been to that pointed out how most people tied their shoes the wrong way. Granny knots with their ends tucked in, not reef knots. Then the laces slip so you have to do a double knot, which defeats the whole point of a bow because they take two hands to undo. If your bows slip then you are tying them wrong. Damn.

So, basically for the last 51 years I’ve been making a fool of myself.

All that smug ‘right over left then left over right’ when knots tied by friends, partners and family members slipped.

As Mark Twain says, “It’s not what you don’t know that kills you, it’s what you know for sure that ain’t true.”

It took a bit of effort but now I have got used to tying my bows the other way (you can tell when you get it right because the loops go side to side across the shoe, not up and down). And they don’t slip.

I wonder what else I know for sure will turn out to be foolishness.

[1] I probably should have learned the sheet bend to have a complete set

[2] “The 85 Ways to Tie a Tie”, Thomas Fink and Yong Mao, Fourth Estate, 1999.

As though it wasn’t obvious, Rhadegund HQ is, as my friend says, baching it. Amongst the minor pleasures this brings; hanging as many plastic aeroplanes as we like from the ceiling, leaving the current construction project on the coffee table for the varnish to dry, I found myself surprised but not apprehensive in PB Technologies buying a 10 metre patch cable. When I said I wanted a light colour the enthusiastic young man offered me one in rescue orange and I even thought about it for a moment before opting for the beige.

I was sure I was over buying cables to connect to the internet. The world has moved on. In my latest
office I just bring along my laptop and log into the wifi by a separate profile by way of work-life balance. At home even the TV chats to my fibre broadband about TVNZ on Demand through the aether. I was sure cables had gone the way of the rather wonderful screechy gurgle of the dial-up modem.

And now I have a cable running under the window and around the gas heater to the back of, yes, a large black box. It turned out my son’s heart’s desire, into which he invested a lot of his own money and only some of mine, came in a big tower case like the one for the computer I bought in the 1990s. Once we got it out of the huge cardboard box that Mighty Ape (who are wonderful, by the way) sent it in and fired it up it was immediately obvious that the wifi wasn’t good enough to download the software for the games it was bought for.

What? It’s the 21st Century! How could it not work? We admired the strange blue light in the box for a while and went back to our laptops. Who would sell a $1000 computer with wifi that is worse than a $90 phone?

People who care about these things, obviously. In the shop the next day (with my instructions to get it sorted by the time school finished), the enthusiastic young man told me gamers don’t use wifi. His computer is connected to (his parents) broadband by a 30 metre cable, which I am guessing is orange and causes his mother real pain. Wifi is too slow when you are shooting zombies controlled by your school friends in the surrounding suburbs. The slightest delay and you are dead before your return shot has reached the router. Our big black tower case mostly contains the best graphics card you can get for the money and the $20 wifi adapter is in there by ‘popular demand’ (from the Dads, I suspect). When it first came out they didn’t bother. It’s a Gaming Rig – not a toy.

My father professed the same attitude to car batteries and starter motors. Does it make it go faster? Does it improve the handling? Why are we bothering? Oh, riiiight, convenience. Just pass me that handle. But the 4 ½ litre didn’t come to New Zealand with them and even racing cars have batteries now (along with wifi).

The cable under my window looks like a step backward. A low tech solution. But it’s needed to get to the cutting edge. Technology doesn’t develop; it evolves. With each new development pushing one area forward, it leaves others behind and we have to go back for a work-around until they catch up. It used to be that you played games in an arcade because home computers were uselessly slow. Not so long after that all the kids came round with their controllers to play on the console because the internet was too slow for multiplayer. Now it’s the wifi that’s the choke point.

I’m sure that someone out there is taking so much heat for the orange cable across the living room that they are working on a wifi that will give them useful access to their parent’s broadband. Once they get it working, it will turn up in the gaming rigs and the high-end computers and finally work its way into my lap-top where I’ll wonder how I managed without it.

I’m not so fussed about performance but I like it when computers get faster and easier. This machine works much faster than I can type but I still hate having to go back to my emergency PC which takes seconds to load files. I thought it was fine at the time and I’m guessing that in a couple of years this one will feel ridiculously clunky and slow. I can’t imagine what going back to the 386 the electronics technician at work built for me in 1992. It felt pretty special then. I like the convenience of wifi and the fact that everything works without me having to really understand it.

So it won’t be me driving the next wave of technical innovation, it will be the kids with their cables and their desire to squeeze one last millisecond out of their gaming rigs.
But I’m expecting to be paying for a fair chunk of it.

Any number of controversial topics are swirling around the science and innovation system at the moment and, feeling uniquely unqualified to comment on any of them, I thought I would take the opportunity to look at robotic vacuum cleaners.

I am now on my third.

It isn’t that I particularly dislike doing the vacuum cleaning. In fact, as trimming the edges was to gardening, it is the piece of housework that makes the biggest difference in the least time. When my mother was after me to do something around the house as a child vacuuming was always my choice. There is something satisfying about all the noise and the sweat making a difference that is only comparable to cleaning a bath (my current favourite piece of housework).

The reason I got my first robotic vacuum cleaner is because they are so cool. Any fan of the Jestons (how could I not be?) would want a household robot and so far the robot vacuum cleaner is the best on offer.

The general run of technologies follow a predictable adoption cycle: the innovators cobble something together that sort of works, the early adopters think, ‘How Cool!’ and buy a few to suffer the pain and expense of working out the pitfalls so the majorities, early and late, can reap the benefits while the laggards make a virtue if suffering with the old technology.

But robot vacuum cleaners haven’t really got past the early adopters (even though it looks like there are more than 10 million of us). This quite often happens; so much so the gap between early adopters and the early majority is sometimes called the ‘chasm’. The book, Crossing the Chasm, by Geoffrey A. Moore is getting on but still worth a read (I’m hoping whoever put the book there dealt with any copyright issues), especially if you are convinced that your technology is so good the public can’t help but buy it.

The reason robot vacuum cleaners haven’t jumped the chasm is straightforward: they aren’t so sucky – and when you are a vacuum cleaner that’s a problem. It’s not going to be an easy problem to solve either because they need to be small to get around which doesn’t leave enough room or power for the sort of 1200 watt motor and quad-core rotor system that a standard vacuum has. To get around this limitation a lot of the actual cleaning is done by a set of rotating brushes which mean deep piles, tassels and dangly bits in general are the enemy because they keep getting tangled up in things. Not to mention the size of the dirt bin means you have to have to empty it after every use – although this does mean you don’t lose the stray valuable items that get picked up.

So essentially, if you aren’t a Jetsons fan, give it away now. Even if you are and you don’t do your own vacuuming, or aren’t the person who cares most about the state of your floors, walk away.

On the other hand, if the only people in your household who don’t have careers are the teenagers and the cats and you have a large expanse of tiled floor with a lot of furniture on it: buy one.

The first one we had was a Roomba 400 series. I got it in late 2004 and it came with two ‘virtual’ walls (you really only need one) and a remote so you could drive it around yourself (which is stupid). What sent me out to buy it (other than the need for a Christmas present) was a article describing how the iRobot people had originally tried to in build all sorts of sensors, recognition and map algorithms for the Roomba to navigate the room. It all got very complicated and needed a huge amount of processing power which didn’t fit and they couldn’t power. Then someone figured it just needed a smallish set of preprogrammed behaviours when it hit an obstacle and the ability to know roughly how long it should keep going. I took this as a tidy parable of the propensity for engineers to, well, over engineer things to the point they stop working and went out to buy one from the slightly mystified but helpful elderly gent at LV Martin and Sons.

This first Roomba turned out to be very engaging[1]. She trundled around, very much like she was actively looking for dirt and had a great propensity for getting herself stuck under, on, or tangled in things, whereupon she would sit peeping mournfully until rescued. If you gave her too much to do at once she would run out of puff and also sit lonely and peeping until you found her. We soon learnt to cut down the area with a virtual wall (a little dalek shaped box that put out an infra red beam she wouldn’t cross) and put cords and rugs with tassels on the other side. If she made it until she had finished she sang a special triumphant dadalat da dadaaa! and sat and waited to get put back on her charger. She was good at picking up small bits of lego and bits of board games and also fairly gentle with dropped wargaming figures. Some of the cheaper plastic toys and the things that came out of Kinder Surprises would get munched but marbles just got chased under the furniture.

After a number of years her battery wore out and even the smallest room made her breathless so Ii got a new battery from LV Martins at great trouble and expense. That was fine for a couple of months and then she died completely. It turns out that the soul of complex appliances lives in the battery and changing them always causes trouble. Anyway, Roomba went into the skip (I hung onto the old battery) and I went out looking for a replacement.

This came in the form of a 500 series in 2009. She was a much more Kiwi Roomba. She was much less bothered by obstacles – the rugs could stay where they were, less inclined to ask for help and didn’t do such a good job. On the plus side she was a bit quieter and the bin was less fiddly to empty (and more fragile). Looking at the Wikipedia article it looks like they updated the navigation software which most likely accounts for the loss of performance.

Anyway, she did the job for a number of years and then I realised there was a lot of trundling around and cheery peeping going on but no actual picking up of stuff. After crawling around after her for quite a while trying to see what was happening underneath  (which fortunately didn’t make it to You-Tube) I found that the brushes were only going for a very short time after she was put down on the floor and the sucking wasn’t enough to do anything useful by itself. Various other bits had fallen off or broken by that stage so I put her up on Trade Me. Now she is down in Christchurch working with someone who does the nightshift on a computer help line on their plans for global domination.[2]

Both Roombas had cost about $500, which is quite a lot for a vacuum cleaner that isn’t very sucky. What with one thing and another last year I wasn’t feeling quite so flush so I dug out the old vacuum cleaner we brought with us when we abandoned suburbia. That we hadn’t used it since we arrived was obvious when it filled the flat with the smell of dog. A new bag and some cleaning solved that but even so I was on the internet looking for a new robot cleaner as soon as I’d finished vacuuming the flat. I just don’t have the time.

The new Roombas looked a bit pricey and the Samsung, even more costly, looked like trouble. My phone already bosses me about enough and two of them would be insufferable. Then I saw that one shop had a special on a Hoover version so I headed out to the big-box retail centre by the airport to have a look.

There was a big sign on the front of the shop advertising the special and inside – amongst the piles of spaceage looking and very cheap standard vacuum cleaners in boxes – they had built a little pen for the robots to play in.

Even so, the man was very surprised when I ask to buy one.They are just motorised carpet sweepers, he told me, and they don’t do a very good job. I’d be much better off with this one here for the same price and the 365 cubic inch V8.

I would be pretty sure that he had a firm view on what a floor should look like after it was vacuumed and equally that he wasn’t going to be the person who vacuumed it. There was a bit of a standoff while I talked about tiled floors and cats and then I asked for a yellow one.[3] He said he wasn’t sure if they had any so I took one off the shelf for him. I thought for a moment he wasn’t going to accept my EFTPOS card but he took the money in the end. I think he guessed I use moisturiser. I had to ask for my receipt with the guarantee.

Trying to avoid reversing over the children in the car park with Robby (in my defence Hoover called him that not me) safely in my boot I wondered why bother?  Presumably he’s employed to sell vacuum cleaners, including those on special. Fair enough to point out that the robots didn’t  have the power of a standard cleaner but maybe also point out that if I came home from work and wasn’t happy I could just set Robby off again with no effort. I didn’t need his personal opinion on what constitutes a proper vacuum cleaner and implication of who is the proper user. Just give me the information on the drawbacks and advantages and let me make up my mind.

Anyway, Robby fits in well. Looking at him I would guess that a lot of the original iRobot patents have expired: he looks a lot like my first Roomba and really hates tassels. He has this endearing habit of looking like he’s stuck and going quiet then suddenly waking up and reversing out of it. The cat likes him because he’s quieter than the Roombas and doesn’t creepily slow down when he gets close to you. He doesn’t do the little victory song.

I’m in the habit of deciding which piece of floor is annoying me most and setting him up to go before I go out in the morning. I have to sweep the rugs and roll them up and check the children haven’t left one of their innumerable charger cords on the floor. But it’s a lot less effort than doing the vacuuming myself. I’m hoping that he’ll be around for a while.

I like it when the Health Research Council (HRC) funding round is announced. Partly to see if anyone I know got funding (see Disclaimer Statement above) but mainly for selfish reasons. I love the way the two universities with medical schools rapidly flick out press releases saying the results show they (and not the other lot) are the leaders in New Zealand health research. My favourite was the year that one came out trumpeting themselves as the leader because they got the  most projects funded and the other because they got the most money. There wasn’t much in it.

But now it seems the word is ‘loved.’ The results came out last week and neither University tried to laud it over the other. Both press releases, here and here, were interesting and informative but even taken together they weren’t amusing at all. Intentionally or otherwise. Perhaps the days of intense competition are over? Or perhaps it was something to do with the numbers.

The HRC don’t put their results on the website as a table (you can take that as a hint if you like) so those of us with an affection for the “Sumif” function have to make our own. They don’t put them out in institution order either so it took a while for the penny to drop: an awful lot of the winners had Wellington in the address line. In fact, in percentage terms the distribution of funding looks like this:

I can’t remember a year when Wellington got more funding from the HRC than Auckland. Not in the main round anyway.

Last year the Malaghan Institute in Wellington did well with $14 million and the Medical Research Institute of New Zealand (MRINZ) also got $6.8 million from the HRCs new (and possibly one-off?) Capability in Independent Research Institutes Fund. The main round bought another $6 or so million into the city (more than half of it for the Malaghan).

This year, without the Capability Fund I couldn’t see how the town could do so well again. But it did. Between them, the University of Otago Wellington, MRINZ, Massey’s Wellington Campus and Victoria University were awarded $21 million. The Wellington campus of Otago was awarded $11 million on its own – not far off the $14 million that went to the Mothership in Dunedin. I am told that the Wellington Head of Campus (see disclaimer above) described their success as a ‘staistical blip.’ Even if that is true, in the last couple of years Wellington has signed contracts with the HRC for $40 million. That’s a lot of money and there will be more added to it next year.

That’s because Wellington is growing as a centre for Medical Research in New Zealand. The Wellington School of Medicine (which now makes up most of the Otago campus in Wellington) and the Malaghan have been around for a while and have an established reputation. MRINZ, Massey and Victoria are building their strength in medical research. The Gillies McIndoe Research Institute, based around superstar surgeon Swee Tan, is a relatively new player in the research landscape and the Capital and Coast DHB have also been building their research capacity over the last few years. It was notable in the HRC numbers for this year that Wellington had more successful organisations than any other centre.

There are other health focused groups in the region as well that don’t tend to show in the HRC funding; Callaghan Innovation Research gave one of the country’s leading drug development groups, Richard Furneaux’s Ferrier Institute to Victoria, but hung on to the commercial Good Manufacturing Practice drug synthesis facility Glycosyn. The CRI ESR manages health science and infectious disease research out of ts sites in Kenneperu and Wallaceville, and the Hutt Valley DHB also conducts research, not all of it through its links with the Otago Campus.

So research-wise the region has critical mass (and now $40 million). The air is a thick with shared history (the family tree for the research groups looks a little Game of Thrones) so collaboration isn’t always straightforward but it’s getting there. What Wellington really lacks is industry. I was at a meeting recently run by Callgahan Innovation’s National Biotechnology Network Manager to look at what the sector needed and someone pointed out there were a lot of ‘providers’ and not many ‘purchasers’ for the Wellington discussion. Indeed. We have Matakina, some players in the natural health products sector such as Honeylab, testing at Trinity Bioactives, and the ever self-effacing AroTec and BDG. This may change though with the Malaghan and Ferrier combining to spin out Avalia Therapeutics and now that powerHouse Ventures, the most active of the new Technology Incubators, is getting going on the Callaghan Gracefield campus more may follow.

Patriotism (or in this case parochialism) may well be the last resort of a scoundrel but it is nice to see Wellington’s investment in health research begin to pay dividends and and maybe even get recognition alongside the city’s tech sector.

And why were those press releases so much less fun than usual?

So, when I rhetorically asked who cares about the R&D Stats when they first came out I didn’t expect an answer. Even then it was clear that people in government were a little bit miffed about the way they turned out. Vote Science and Innovation has been rising steadily and yet the Survey showed a drop in government expenditure between 2012 and 2014. How could that be? They went looking for a reason.

And now they have found an extra $68m and 200 FTE in the government sector and published the revised figures. Basically that gets government expenditure in 2014 neatly over the 2012 figure but doesn’t make much of a difference anwhere else. All the other stuff I said about GERD and HERD and the OECD still holds.

I couldn’t help but wonder how this happened. It’s not a huge amount of money or so many people in the scheme of things but it seems a lot to miss in a survey like this, especially from within government. And where did they find it? Did they ring around and ask all the CRI’s if maybe they’d underestimated their spend? And maybe they could look behind the bike sheds for any staff they hadn’t seen for a while? I don’t think so. And then it occurred to me  – government sector, $60m or so turnover, 200 odd R&D staff, a good chunk of income from overseas…

I think they just might have missed ESR.

Well, it is tricky keeping track of the CRIs these days. Once we had 10. Now we have seven. ESR might have gone out and merged with someone between surveys and not told StatsNZ. Anyway, good to have them back and be able to say definitively that New Zealand government expenditure on R&D is increasing (but not at the rate of GDP).

(Photo ESR annual report 2014)

Note added May 2015 – I was wrong. It was Callaghan Innovation Research that got left out. So you have to wonder why a research organisation devoted to ‘accelerating New Zealand business’ get quite so much of its income from offshore.

OK, this is the end of it. After this I won’t bother you with the results of the 2014 StatsNZ R&D Survey again. In 2014 19% of all R&D expenditure in New Zealand was on Bioscience. That’s a total of $486m being spent by 11% of the organisations that undertake research including most of the Government research organisations and most of the higher education institutes.

And that makes a lot of sense because most of what New Zealand does, and more particularly exports, involves growing things, which needs bioscience, and processing them, more bioscience, and we should be doing even more to add value to them, which is even more bioscience. I always look at these numbers because (see disclosure statement above) it’s about the only way to see how activity in the Biotech/Bioscience sector is going. I was making a chart to put in the Biotech 101 lectures on Society, Ethics and Regulation I do for Dave Ackerley’s course at Vic, mostly to show I don’t just trot out the same slides year after year, and probably started to think about the data a little too hard.

The total spend and the percentage accounted for by Bioscience R&D hasn’t really changed since 2012 – the dollars have dropped a bit because, as I have said, government has dropped its spend a bit – but nothing significant. There have, however, been some interesting changes amongst different sectors.

One of the biggest rises comes from the Petroleum, Coal, Chemical, and Associated Product Manufacturing sector, up $7m. This also the sector that spends the highest proportion of its money on bioscience R&D at 46%. This is good news because it’s an area of adding value to raw materials. I tell my students, according to the OECD Bioeconomy 2030 Report – which I like – that White Biotech is going to overtake Red Biotech as a contributor to the world economy so it was also nice to see New Zealand ramping up its R&D in the sector.

The biggest rise of all comes from the Wholesale Trade sector with a $15m increase. This puzzled me at first but, of course, I think a large exporting company that begins with F and a range of its competitors get classified as wholesale traders so the increase there is also good news. I hope so anyway. New Zealand preserving its margins in what it does best.

The worrying one is a fall in dollar terms and percentage of bioscience for R&D by the Primary sector. This has to be a concern. We need research in this area. It’s now official, New Zealand just lost its first 232 jobs to climate change despite the hedging from Sanfords about whether it’s a deeper pattern or not. It will only get worse and ffortunately the Cawthron have just started being able to breed mussels. Somebody needs to be doing the research to make the rest of the species 70% of our current exports rely on more heat and extreme-weather tolerant. Or find new ones. And quickly.

Oh, but wait, we are not allowed to do that research because of the heavy hand of HSNO and our reluctance to change it driven by non-science issues raised by lobby groups, who may be more interested in scrabbling for media attention than usefully addressing national or even global concerns.

So let’s hope the Petroleum, coal, chemical and associated manufacturing sector works out for us because we are going to need it. There won’t be much to trade wholesale if it doesn’t.

The results of Statistics New Zealand’s biannual survey of R&D expenditure have been out for a couple of weeks. They were  greeted by a disappointingly small number of commentators saying, ‘aren’t they great (vote for me)’, ‘aren’t they terrible (vote for me this time, not him)’, and, ‘Yes, we did read the Statistics New Zealand press release’.  Disappointing because these are important numbers for New Zealand and the future of its economy.

The biggest number is Gross Expenditure on R&D, the total the country spends on R&D, which was basically flat at $2.62b in 2012 and 2014. I guess, ‘Oh, well, things could be worse’ doesn’t make for a good headline so everyone turned to the next biggest number, Business Expenditure on R&D to make the news. This was up 4% (Yay!) from 2012 at $1.25b but not as a percentage of GDP (Boo! but of course Yay! that GDP rose).

The reason people look at the percentage of GDP is because it allows comparisons with other countries.  The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) is a group of 30 or so of the world’s more developed economies (including us) who all share a lot of dataso we mostly look at them. In OECD terms we don’t come out so well on R&D. New Zealand’s Gross Expenditure on R&D is a bit less than half the OECD average and well down on our current favourite comparator economies, Israel, Finland and Denmark. Our Business Expenditure on R&D, currently 0.54% GDP, is even lower at less than a third of the OECD average. For which you can make excuses but it’s still pretty dismal even though the dollar amount is heading in the right direction.

This matters because it is R&D carried out by business that really boosts economic growth. The current Government has very laudably set a target of getting Business Expenditure on R&D up to 1% of GDP. I was a little taken aback when I heard that announced. Although going from 0.54% to 1.0% doesn’t look very dramatic it means New Zealand business will have to spend about another $1b per annum on R&D (assuming this Government manages to keep GDP flat) and, basically, pigs will fly. In the government time frame anyway, even if we get there eventually. So it looks like a hiding to nothing for the agency, Callaghan Innovation, tasked with making it happen.

This talk of Business Expenditure on R&D is slightly confusing because that is what gets spent by business but it doesn’t tell you where the money is coming from. In fact the amount that business spends of its own money on its own research had been rising quite nicely, up over $120m from 2010 to 2012 but it levelled off with only a $12m increase from 2012 to 2014. That equates to a more or less steady 75ish percent of business funding its own research. This is overall a good thing (although you do have to wonder what happened in 2012).

The money government has been giving to business for R&D (grants, corporate welfare, call it what you will) almost doubled from 2010 to 2012, up from $82m to $146m, but fell a little, back to $139m in 2014. I don’t think this is so good. It obviously came as a surprise and a disappointment to the Government, especially with all the rhetoric around Callaghan Innovation accelerating business, because least week, as part of their pre-budget announcement a further $20m a year was given to Callaghan to fund business R&D. Or 0.0% of GDP – oops, sorry, lets up the number of decimals on my calculator – 0.01% GDP. I guess in the week following the Statistics New Zealand announcement they hunted behind the sofa cushions and that was all they came up with. Mr Key also made the point of saying that the new funding would be allocated on an ‘objective and independent’ basis. Um. Ok… So it hasn’t been up to now? Was he saying the Government has run out of friends to give …no, of course, well… almost certainly not.[1]

But, jokes aside, government funding of business R&D in New Zealand is important. We don’t have the big research intensive industries such as aerospace, pharmaceuticals or even automotive so spending on R&D is unfamiliar to us. Our businesses are typically small and lack the capacity and even the appetite for risk to get involved in R&D but clearly businesses that do spend on R&D, like Fisher Paykel Healthcare, the Livestock Improvement Corporation, Zespri, and even Fonterra, are successful. So if the government can help things along by reducing the risk with funding and providing people and support to improve capability that will get things going and the economy will benefit. I think that the increase in business funding its own R&D following the government’s increases is a sign that this is happening. So, the $80m announced last week is a good sign, even if the claim it is to get closer to the OECD average is a bit overblown. Other numbers indicate progress. My favourite statistic from the 2014 Survey, that salaries for R&D staff in business rose from $70,000 per annum in 2012 to $75,000 in 2014, shows that business is valuing its R&D staff more. Outside of business R&D salaries were pretty flat.

Another interesting statistic is that the biggest increase in Business R&D came in computer services, up $90m. While the residual chemist in me is tempted to say ‘that isn’t real research!’ the bureaucrat says ‘look at the numbers.’ Xero, Orion Health, Datacom and Weta are getting to be our biggest, fastest growing companies and can only benefit from building up their R&D capacity.

The increase in overseas funding for business R&D in New Zealand also caught my eye.  In 2008 this accounted for 8% of R&D funding for New Zealand business at $54m. In 2014 it is $144 (more than New Zealand government investment in business R&D) or 12% of the total. That has to be significant but I have no real idea what it means. I hope it shows that New Zealand business R&D looks competitive on the world stage.

In the meantime, government investment in its own research institutions and higher education fell. This doesn’t bode well for the future so let’s hope they take the opportunity to turn it around in the next budget. And, with any luck, by more than 0.0% GDP.

The biggest problems in New Zealand Science for researchers are the appalling career structures and the increasing bidding pressure which has forced down success rates (and left everyone terribly risk averse). To my mind both problems stem from two decisions taken in the 1990s. And no, one of them wasn’t the breakup of the DSIR. The decision to go to full cost funding followed by the loss of ‘audit trail’ have led between them, inevitably, to where we are now.

Full cost funding is, on the face of it, is a very sensible idea. I can see why you would do it. In full cost funding of research the body funding the research gives a grant which covers the cost of the research itself, salaries of staff employed just for that project, reagents and so on, as well as the proportion of the salaries of permanent staff, usually the principal investigators, and, on top of that, the cost of maintaining the facilities that the research happens in, the so called overhead. The overhead pays for buildings, power, lights, car parking and all the non research staff, secretaries, commercialisation staff administrators and so on and the facilities they use that support the research (note, O my Best Beloved, that I do not use the phrase ‘are essential to the research’). Marginal funding on the other hand just pays the direct cost of the research (including staff employed just for that project) and sometimes the salaries of the permanent research staff, leaving the institution to carry the overhead.

Full cost funding looks good to policy makers because clearly someone has to pay the overhead costs to support the research: if you want the research done then you should pay for it. It also means that the funder only pays for the share of the overhead that contributes to the research they have paid for. There is no cross subsidisation. So in an ideal world the funder pays for all of what they want done and only what they want done. Very tidy.

However, this, although it is undoubtedly the best of all possible worlds, is very far from being an ideal world. The concept of overheads in full cost funding has two fundamental flaws that undermine the policy rationale and lead to these undesirable and unintended consequences. The first flaw, which was identified by the original instigators of full cost funding, is that you cannot simply pay the your share of the overhead cost on facilities for the project you fund, stop when you don’t need them and hope they will be there when you need them again. Research is not like water in a tap that can be turned off in one place and turned on in another when you choose. The underlying expertise, experience, equipment and facilities that make for good (or even half way decent) research need to be built up and then maintained. Redirection or worse, relocation, of research effort is slow and expensive. This makes sudden changes in funding that includes overheads hugely damaging. Research staff and equipment cannot be mothballed and sit there at no cost waiting for the research funding to come back and neither can they be seamlessly assigned to another research area and just get on with it.

And so, as I said, that was recognised, and the concept of ‘audit trail’ was introduced at the same time as full cost funding.

Audit trail is where when a proposal fails and isn’t funded, the amount of money the research institution is reduced by steps to give researchers a chance to redirect their effort or rebid without losing all its capacity in the meantime. Without audit trail all your good research staff clear off, the rest get fired and the equipment and facilities rot when the funding runs out. In the meantime the successful bidder is hiring different staff and buying new facilities. In a few years they will be unsuccessful in a bidding round and all the good research staff will clear off…

Which is why I took to referring the removal of audit trail as the ‘second worst decision in the new Zealand Science System.’ Again it was done for the best possible reasons. Trying to redirect research funding becomes very slow and cumbersome with audit trail in place because the funding agency winds up funding a whole lot of research it’s just turned down proposals from – which doesn’t make sense on a superficial analysis. Even more annoyingly for the potential funder, in a limited funding environment this is money that could be spent on research which would have been successful in their funding round. So in the name of efficiency (and don’t forget efficiency, Best Beloved) as well as flexibility audit trail went. This makes perfect sense in that ideal world where research can instantaneously start and stop but that, sadly, is not the world in which we do research. The decision gave the unintended effects of full cost funding free reign.

The other major flaw in overheads as part of full cost funding is that they aren’t. By which I mean that direct costs plus overheads is almost never the full cost of research. Calculating the difference between the marginal cost of research and the full cost is very difficult, especially when you are estimating the cost of a six year research programme in advance. So the overhead rates tend to be variously a byzantine calculation vaguely connected to reality, a wild guess or in the worst case scenario, what you can get away with. This problem seriously undermines the removal of cross subsidisation rationale for having full cost funding in the first place. And even if you could accurately calculate all the costs how would you, Best Beloved, determine what is essential to the research. Is the VC’s PA (sorry Vicki) essential to the research? Depends who you ask. The VC says “Totally”; the principal investigator says, “Not so much.” This makes overheads very divisive. The researcher sees all that money lost to their project and the administrators are struggling to keep the lights on in labs. The mathematician in their freezing attic with a pencil glares balefully at the NMR spectroscopist in the basement who is desperately longing for a bigger machine. Everybody is grizzling.

And then it gets nasty. The standard way of calculating overheads is to put a multiplier over salary costs of the research staff involved in the project. This is simple – like a window tax to fund local bodies – rather than figure out the actual costs of keeping the household/research project going you just count the most prominent feature that gives a convenient proxy and multiply until you get the amount of money you need. The effect of this is that no one want mid career people on their research grant. Young researchers are cheap (and fluffy with big eyes so everybody likes to fund them) and they are good to have on your grant to do the work. Older researchers have good publication records and good contacts with industry (and the funding panels) through their old boys (and hopefully one day soon their old- no, we need a better term – folks? well established gender neutral?) networks so they are good to have on as well. Especially if you keep them down to 0.15 FTE. The people in the middle, building their careers and paying off their mortgages; not so welcome.

Which is trouble for scientific career development. It’s relatively (I said relatively) easy to get funding for students and postgrad level staff and the old guys but there is nothing in the middle. Funding is uncertain and could be cut off at any moment with the institutions not able to carry staff who don’t bring in overhead. Add to that that the institutions are not choosing who they hold on to. The granting panels are. OK, that is radically simplified, but the people choosing who get the overhead support needed to fund the institution are picked by funding panels in Wellington. Their aims and levels of information are very different to the institutions. The panels are aiming to drive the outcomes of a particular programme informed by 40 odd pages of Arial 9.5 point and shaved margins (in the hope that no one notices) without paragraph breaks. The institution knows the staff (ameliorated by the unusual internecine warfare and personal animosities) and is trying to build a long term successful research enterprise. The distortion of careers by institutions ending up with large numbers of short term, soft money early stage researchers that they can drop when the funding runs out is causing problems everywhere. At a time when success rates for funding proposals are in the low twenty percents and the gap between substantial funding rounds (see previous post) is increasing.[1] It’s no wonder the career structure for research in New Zealand is, well, buggered.

And why those success rates? The amount of money in the system has been pretty static. Depending on who you ask, of course; politicians say up a bit, administrators and researchers say down a bit but even in real terms it hasn’t plunged like proposal success rates. The number of researchers hasn’t doubled but still success rates have more than halved.

One reason is overheads. If an institution needs more money – not just money to do research but money to keep going – it needs to bring in more overhead. The long term solution in the ideal world is to do research that better matches the funder’s needs and be more successful in the bidding but the short term solution in this world is to bid more. Overheads make successful research proposals look like income to keep the institution going, not funding to achieve research outcomes.[2] Looking at overheads as income means there is huge pressure on staff to bid for anything going –regardless of the chance of success. I think this has been going long enough that people have seen the effects are getting more strategic but it’s still a problem.

Another reason is desperation. No successful proposal; no job. No chance to regroup and have another go. The system begins to look like a numbers game at a 23% success rate where you need to get five or six proposals into get one funded. But that just isn’t the case. If your research bears no relationship to the request for proposals it simply won’t get funded. Don’t bother. But how can you not when…

All this means that the number of researchers in the system is roughly the same but the turnover and shuffling around is huge. With each funding round the unsuccessful groups downsize and leave the field or the country and the successful groups employ another crop of the fluffy and large eyed and import expertise from offshore. How can this waste, disproportionately affecting the mid level, female researchers, possibly be a good idea?

Sorry I’m beginning to shout. I’ll sit down again.

So what can be done about it? It’s always dangerous to give policy advice but I will anyway. There needs to be more block funding. Give institutions enough block funding to run themselves and allow them to plan ahead, keeping their costs within a certain clear budget including salaries for principal investigators and permanent research staff. Marginally fund research projects in established research areas, including costs for students, postgrads and especially postdocs. Only let researchers with permanent posts at institutions lead proposals for these research projects (you fluffy, big eyed people hate me now but you’ll thank me if you are still in science when you take out your first mortgage). Then you could hold the institutions to account on the macro-scale, where outcomes make a difference, and not project by project, where they rarely do.

Use full cost funding (probably without audit trail because it is an ugly work-around) to get new areas going, drive new programmes and give new potential principal investigators a go.

This would allow you to save money by cutting the amount of bidding, along with reporting costs, and reducing flux in the system.

The big issue with seeing these types of ideas implemented?  So called ‘efficiency.’

But Best Beloved, research is not by nature efficient. If you know enough about what the result will be to make it ‘efficient’ then it is not research it is development. Actual research needs to be effective rather than efficient. In research that means taking risks. You need to give good people the chance to get on with it; make mistakes and run into blind ends but have the time and resources to get there in the end. Even if it wasn’t where you meant to get to. Having your best researchers wasting 30% or more of their time bidding is a much greater loss overall than having even 30% of the research apparently misdirected and ‘inefficient’. One of the major issues with New Zealand research is that it already too ‘efficient’. Why bother being good when you can be cheap? Nice bibliometrics but crap outcomes.

And keep fashion out of it. Dairy prices are cyclical. Political fortunes are cyclical. Research shouldn’t be. But that is another topic.

As always, for those who put in proposals the results make fascinating reading and for those who don’t, well, not so much. Which is a shame because what gets funded is going to be important to the New Zealand economy, and society, as Minister Joyce said in his press release. For more information the Science Media Centre have done their usual good job of summarising the results and rounding up the press in the area. I was particularly drawn to the NBR’s headline “Winners and losers in the latest government science funding round” from their list but it turned out (spoiler alert) to be mostly about winners with couple of wry shrugs from those who didn’t do so well. As you would expect when they’ll have to go back for more money next year – if they can.

This year the bulk of the funding sat in the High Value Manufacturing and Services Fund so, with Industrial Research having morphed into Callaghan Innovation and not contesting for funding, that left the field open to the Universities. And that showed in the results, with the universities getting nearly 80% of the total, the CRIs a bit less than 20% and independent research groups taking the little bit left over. Last year, with most money in the Biological Industries Fund, the CRIs took 60%, the independents nearly 30% and the Universities just 10%. There was the special funding pool for the independents in play last year as well, which wasn’t available this year. I think the absence of the specific funding for independents was the major factor in the number of organisations getting funding dropping from a high 17 last year to 13 this. Of those missing out on funding completely I was most surprised by AUT University who I thought would have the contacts with industry to do well in the High Value Manufacturing round.

The big winner this year was the University of Auckland, receiving more than a third of the total; quite a jump from last year’s 6%. Last year I tried to argue that Auckland did pretty well (at nearly twice as much as the rest of the Universities combined) given that the research questions on offer didn’t really mesh with Auckland’s strengths, but their then Dean of Science, Grant Guilford, was less sanguine. A lot of effort had gone into the bidding without proportionate return.

I think that the temptation to bid even if the research questions don’t suit your work is too hard for many researchers to resist and even harder for administrators. In such a tight funding environment it is difficult not to chase rainbows. From the groups I worked with I thought that maybe things had got better but, on checking, it turns out that this year’s overall success rate of 23% was only marginally better than last year’s of 22%.[1] With that sort of success rate if the work isn’t an exact fit for the request for proposals then scientists need to spend their time more productively than on writing fruitless bids. All that happens is that the overhead rates go up.

Of the other universities Waikato did well, taking over 20% of the total funding. Otago and Canterbury also had big increases over last year, again reflecting the different fund profile. Victoria was back on the board after a not such a good round last year but a significant amount looks to come from one of the teams that came from the former CRI, Industrial Research Limited.

But what of the losers promised in NBR’s headline? Because there was very little money in Biological Industries this year the primary sector facing groups were always going to miss out.  The successful High Value Manufacturing and Services proposals also had a strong IT and materials focus and a number of groups with strong MBIE track records missed out, particularly health area. These swings make the funding lumpy and it is hard to maintain capacity.

Next year’s round was due to be pretty small with $1.4m a year available in each of Biological Industries and High Value Manufacturing and Services Funds.  Extra funding was announced for contestable funding rounds in the last Budget. Without the new money the groups that missed out this year, especially those not involved in the National Science Challenges, will be in a really poor position because the amount of funding in the contestable rounds would have been very low for the next three years. Even with the extra funding next year’s round isn’t huge, up from around $10m to $30m odd, and there is no indication yet as to where the extra money will go.

Looking even further out in MBIEs predictions for funding rounds in the National Statement of Science Investment you can see waves of funding propagating. 2019/20 is huge for Biological Industries (over $30m per year available) with almost nothing else from 2015 to 2023. Miss out and you are toast. High Value Manufacturing has big years in 2018/19 and 2022/23 with some pretty lean times between. I’m hoping that the additional funding from the Budget will be used to smooth out these waves, and also that more will be found as the Government heads for a science funding level of 0.8% of GDP. I’m also hoping that the research questions will be carefully targeted to fill gaps and pick up capacity that misses out in the down rounds. Or maybe the system could be tweaked.

I know it isn’t fashionable when money is tight but thought needs to go into what happens when a research group suddenly loses funding and needs to regroup and refocus or lose hard earned expertise. Sudden swings in funding just chases good researchers offshore. Core Purpose Funding was there to help with the CRIs and maybe PBRF for the universities. But with the National Science Challenges taking up resource the sudden shifts in funding seem to be getting worse.

It was encouraging to see the problem of rigidity being flagged in the National Statement of Science Investment but emphasis needs to be given to ensuring maintenance of important capacity and giving it a chance to address emerging ideas. Not starting from scratch each time there is a shift in what seems important. Otherwise we’ll be looking around for the people to take our science into the future and thinking – bugger, fired them a year ago and they’ve gone to Aus. It’s happened before.

Disclosure statement: George Slim was involved in helping a number of groups with their MBIE bidding. Most of his best work this year was in persuading people not to make proposals and get on with their real work. He also likes cutting and pasting numbers into Excel and using the sumif function. George bought his third robot vacuum cleaner last week.

So yes, as it happens, I did divide Queens Birthday between the Armageddon Comic Con Expo and reading the National Statement of Science Investment from the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE). It was a pleasant weekend. The National Statement ( NSSI) is a surprisingly easy read, a consequence, I suspect, of having been pulled together quickly by a fairly small team. Armageddon was fun too. It just took me longer to write this post than I meant.

For a start, the Statement looks nice. I was always taught that serifs make small text easier to read so I haven’t got used to this on-line publishing habit of serif fonts in the headings and sans in the text. I can see why you do and know I can’t ask for it to be reversed in the printed documents so I’m just going to have to get used to it. The layout nice, the flow is good and there are lot of tables and charts  which are, mostly, informative. And it’s nice to see red used in Government documents again.

Which is all good but what does it say?

• A certain amount of motherhood and apple pie but probably no more than is required to get it through the Minister’s office in election year.
• There has been a lot of change in the system recently, most importantly through the creation of Callaghan Innovation and the National Science Challenges
• Government funding for science will grow to $1.5bn in 2016/17, an increase of 70% since 2007/08
• The government aims to increase its funding from 0.56% GDP to 0.8% GDP (as fiscal conditions allow  – and one presumes this doesn’t signal a desire to dramatically lower GDP)
• Primary agriculture gets around 24% of current government research funding and new funding will focus on sectors of future need and growth including ICT, health, high value manufacturing, and, before you farmers get comfortable on your high horse, processed primary products and environmental innovation (whatever that may mean exactly but you get the idea)
• It reminds us of the extra funding in this years’ Budget for the contestable pools.

Otherwise it says things will carry on pretty much steady as she goes.

Looking at the tables the funding stays roughly constant in dollar terms over the next ten years (which does mean either the Government’s predictions for GDP growth are low or it’s just too difficult to calculate and risky to get peoples hopes up).

The NSSI usefully divides the funding pools up into Investigator-led, Mission-led and Industry-led (See Chart 1). I guess you could criticise this for being input rather than output driven but it is clearer in signalling how things work than say Blue Skies (where work often finds application) to Applied (which often never finds an application). Anyway – it’s a usable framework.

From my perspective the most telling charts are Chart 6 and Chart 7 (sorry but this website doesn’t like pictures so I can’t post them). Chart 6 isExpenditure on Research by Purpose of Research and Sector which shows that the biggest total investment in research is in manufacturing with the primary sector not far behind. However the majority of manufacturing research is conducted by business while the bulk of primary sector research is conducted by government. Chart 7, Number of R&D Personnel by Sector, shows that, compared to other countries of a similar size, New Zealand has a far lower proportion of researchers in business as compared to government and higher education. I was chatting with Peter Morton at Science New Zealand and he thinks it’s a pity the Netherlands aren’t included in the comparator countries but I think Denmark has more the economy we aspire to and that is there.

To me the message of the two charts is that the proposed increased  focus for future government funding on manufacturing and added value rather than primary production per se is sensible and that one of the most useful things we could do would be to get more of that research done by business. There has been a fair bit done in this area recently with Callaghan Innovation getting sorted, increases industry co-funded grants in the Budget before last, and the introduction of the Growth Grants, so perhaps steady as she goes for a while is warranted.  Actually,  I don’t like the Growth Grants as an alternative to tax credits for R&D. If the Government really believed that investment in R&D would lead to growth then they would agree that the tax lost in tax credits would rapidly be recovered. But I guess deep in Treasury they don’t have that belief (and politics is politics and the incoming Government in 2008 had campaigned against tax credits) so we get a gesture that is better than nothing in the 20% Growth Grants but not the game changer we might have.

The same is true with the ability of loss making companies to cash out tax losses on R&D announced in the last Budget. As I’ve said elsewhere, great idea, will help, but nowhere as much as it should because of the timid nature of the caps. I worry that when the scheme gets reviewed we will be stuck with the self fulfilling prophecy that it didn’t make a significant difference and will be stopped.

I do like the Primary Growth Partnership. The National Business Review is happily bagging it as corporate welfare for a sector that doesn’t need it but it has made a difference. At a Meat Industry Conference in 1997 I got sworn at for suggesting (along with many others) the industry should do some of the things that the PGP has now got going.  Nothing that was exactly rocket science but clearly projects that could add value if you spent the money to get them going. (As an aside, if you want to see what happens when someone has vision and courage in an industry read Whey to Go about the development of whey protein products by the dairy people).

So overall, I think the directions signalled for Industry-led funding are good. Industry certainly seems to be responding by applying (despite the inevitable grizzling about the process) and the people I speak to are comfortable with the way things are going. They like to relative consistency with the former TBG schemes. And the amount invested by New Zealand businesses in R&D is growing.

Down the other end of the spectrum, in the Investigator-led funding, the Marsden is left alone having had an increase in the last budget. More steady as she goes. The issue that upsets everyone with the Marsden fund is overbidding but that is an intractable problem in the current system. Putting more money in is nice but doesn’t cut the overbidding for more than one cycle because you just have more people  bidding into it as the cycle goes round again.  I’ve always thought the fund is a victim of its own success in terms of prestige and career enhancement and the solution lies in ditching full-cost funding. Which is a topic for another day. The CoREs went a little strange but it looks like some more money will sort things for the moment.

Again, the Investigator-led end of things seems to me to be heading in the right direction and not doing too much more is the sensible thing to do. So what’s happening the middle with the Mission-led stuff?

I can’t tell.

There is a lot of money in there, spread amongst the CRI Core Funding, MBIE Contestable, Health Research Council (HRC) Contestable and the National Science Challenges (NSC). Looking at each chart and table on its own I think I can see what is happening but trying to get an overall picture is hard. The appropriation for 10 years of NSC Funding is around $660m – including reprioritised MBIE Contestable Funds. Looking at Chart 11, which lays out the potential funding for all the Challenges, I got a total spend on the NSC over 10 years (a slightly different 10 years from Chart 11 by the looks of it) as $930m odd.  The amount that CRI Core funding will contribute is $570m (something like 30% of the total Core funding). The HRC will put in around $220m (or about 30% of its funding). I can’t get that to add up. Perhaps I got confused by the odd axes on the chart and maybe if I read off the axes and not the length of the bars it will be a bit better.  OK, not really.

But I don’t think it matters too much. The conclusion is that a bit less than a third of all the contestable funding is going to wind up in the National Science Challenges. About which we know very little at the moment.

I said a while ago that it was dangerous to rush getting the Challenges going because they were important – an importance which is reinforced by finding out how much money they will involve – but it’s beginning to look like there are problems. It worries me that a system based around the inherent contradiction of an open and competitive process with only a single applicant for each Challenge has got such a large proportion of the science investment. Of the 10 challenges one has been announced as being awarded but that has yet to be contracted? The Challenges are asking for a new way of working together and new ways of meeting their targets. What targets? They won’t be clear until each Challenge is contracted. How can people be expected to open up across well entrenched organisational and intellectual positions when so much of their existing funding is at stake? The call is to do something new but the areas chosen have been key areas of research in New Zealand for decades. No one had any useful ideas until 2008?  I understand the policy and even intellectual rationale behind the Challenges but in practice it all looks very difficult indeed.

The Challenges look to me like Frankenstein’s Monster, or the PBRF, very likely a good idea but before you know it the Monster has tucked your girlfriend under its arm and is rampaging across the countryside causing all sorts of unintended effects and sucking up all your resources. The creator is left torn somewhere between ‘OMG!’ and ‘isn’t that amazing?’ while the population run for cover. Or less melodramatically, the science-funding equivalent of the Little Yellow Digger (which has a happier ending).  Already Souxsie Wiles – microbiologist and ardent science communicator – has expressed disquiet at not seeing her area in a Challenge and wondering where future funding for this vital area will come from. New funding for the MBIE Contestable pool may help but it’s not clear at all where this will go.

So until we actually get to see what the Challenges will do there is a huge hole in the middle of the Science Investment picture around Mission-led Science. The Statement has a lot of sensible things to say about the individual pieces but how they fit together is unclear.

In all of this it is obvious that the evaluation of performance of the investement is vital. The government will be spending over $1.5bn of the tax payers’ dollars each year  and asking what it gets for them. This is a very, very complex problem and hard to cover in the 5 pages NSSI has available. To paraphrase Ray Davies, I’m not the world’s most visual guy but I don’t think Chart 9 helps. All I can see is a big red stop sign in the middle and I’m not sure this was supposed to be my main take away. The list of indicators given is good as a list of possibilities but too long to be useable in a measurement sense.

The government basically needs three things from its science system; national prestige -so New Zealand is seen contributing to the store of world knowledge, so it can draw from that stores and is recognised as a first world sophisticated nation; the science to address social and environmental issues; and the technical innovation to drive economic growth. Underpinning those three is an education system, primary, secondary and tertiary, that will provide the people you need to do them. The issue then is to choose indicators that relate to progress in achieving these results. Too broad and you have the attribution problem – monitor GDP growth and is the rise due to increasing the industry cofunded research grants or an increasing fashion for milk in China. Too narrow and you have the contribution problem – does an increase in patent filing actually lead to an increase in export growth? It’s a really complex problem and the section in the statement makes a start but you wouldn’t expect it to solve it. This is something to focus on in the feedback.

What is the feedback likely to be? I guess there will be a lot of “Well, [my favourite area] isn’t getting enough and should get more” by way of comment with maybe some hand-waving or, in the more advanced cases, moralising by way of justification.  One of the pleasures of being in government is seeing the number of ways people can say ‘Give me the money and I’ll sort your problem.”

If you need guidance in formulating your feedback, MBIE have given you an 8 page form with 27 questions to answer. Some of them are very substantial questions. Reading through it I think I have had a go at the first part of number three with this entire post; How well do the different parts of Government’s overall investment system perform, both individually and in combination?  Could settings be changed to improve their performance? If so, how? Twenty six questions to go, and given the time this has taken me I better get going to get it in by the closing date of August 22^nd. I think I will mostly try to say to MBIE that we have tried a lot of new things recently so let’s see how they work out before doing too much more, and quite a few of the things we’ve been doing for a while are still OK so let’s leave them alone.

And I am assuming that whoever is preparing the summary of feedback is currently working on a piece along the lines of “On balance it looks as though our direction of travel is pretty much right.” I would be, Ministers being what they are. I think this is close enough.