In the Cabinet Paper announcing the National Science Challenges in April it said ‘three to four challenges will implemented in 2013’. These Challenges, new science funding which, according to the Ministry for Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE) website, will ‘tackle some of the biggest science-based issues and opportunities facing New Zealand’ are important.
MBIE have recently issued an update on their progress and the news is all good – MBIE expect to issue RfPs for managing the first set of Challenges in September 2013.
Essentially, I am lost in admiration for whoever managed to interpret ‘will be implemented’ as ‘expect to issue an RfP’. With any luck it will take a bit of pressure off MBIE to get something, anything, in place to keep Cabinet happy.
The National Science Challenges are very easy to talk about (the bit that Cabinet does) but very hard to make happen (the bit MBIE has to do). Like ‘a manufacturing-based economy for New Zealand,’ on the face of it Challenges looks like a good idea. Who can be against focussing New Zealand’s science resources on the things that really matter? Then of course the questions start: What areas? What science? How will we know if we have chosen the right ones? If the areas are so important why aren’t they being worked on already? If they have been worked on already why hasn’t the science had an impact? What will be new? Is it really the science that’s the problem? Do we need more fundamental science to build on? Will we get more impact from just applying the science we already have? And so on…
None of the questions has a single right answer. So it is that we have been talking about the National Science Challenges for a long time and not doing very much about them so far. Two years of policy work, three cabinet papers, a public engagement process, a peak panel report identifying 11 challenges, ten cloistered meetings of the great and good, ten open workshops (with the most anodyne set of notes I have ever seen issuing from them) and the result so far is an expectation of three RfPs next month. Could nobody have said somewhere in this process ‘’The Challenge idea is really great but why don’t we put our efforts into actual research” and stopped things then and there?
The key issue is the old, old one of what is the government’s role in funding research – should government fund the fundamental research that no one else will pay for or only the applied research that will be demonstrably valuable to the tax payer? Is it only worth funding research that has some sort of socioeconomic value or by chasing value do we miss the disruptive advances that bring step changes in the economy? Short term vs long term. High risk vs low risk.
Obviously it has to be a balance. If there is no fundamental research to apply then there won’t be any applied research and if no one is going to get any value from the research, why would the government pay for it? Research is hard work and takes up a lot of time, so scientists like long term, and politicians have an election every few years, and like short term. Policy makers get caught in the middle.
The reason I think the Challenges are important, and why I’m glad that the idea hasn’t been dropped is that the current contestable system is falling over. It has been tinkered with a few times to many. Politicians and officials, especially new ones, look at the system and think “How can it be that hard?” A new idea is talked about that will solve all the problems and everyone jumps on the bandwagon.
Then, of course, it comes to implementation, and managing a science system really does turn out to be that hard. Research is inherently high risk; commercialisation of science to get economic return is inherently high risk. Conducting research and making it useful requires deep understanding, knowledge, passion, and probably the experience of failure, to be successful. None of which comes with the wave of a magic wand – or indeed a new funding mechanism.
The worst thing we can do is keep chopping and changing the goals and expectations of the system. The passion gets lost and people don’t get the chance to build the knowledge and experience they need to be successful. It is clear what New Zealand needs to do – good science well implemented to support our agricultural base and add value to it, and good science to diversify our economy in a non resource-limited way. There will be a fair bit of failure and blind alleys on the way but let’s get on with it and see and refine things as we go rather than constantly start afresh. Saying that we need more of the same, with perhaps a little more focus and drive, is politically difficult though.
Which is why I like the Science Challenges. They are Challenges. They should bring impetus and focus to the problems we have been working on – why wouldn’t we have been if they were important – to get something done without losing all the earlier effort. They will leave gaps that need to be filled and we need to keep research going in the areas that lie outside the current Challenges so we have a solid science base to meet the challenges to come. That means we need to keep the other funds going but the extreme contestability of the system which has been so destabilising should be lessened if contestability isn’t the only game in town. The Challenges should be able to encourage collaboration and consensus which will bring more stability.
My concern with their development so far is really around the rush, which I think has led to both a lack of focus and poor connections with the pieces of the Challenges that lie outside of science. It also introduces the risk hurrying things along by tapping a few shoulders
We need to keep focus and I think that needs to come from the top. By all means the actual work of the Challenges needs to be science led but what will have an enduring benefit to New Zealand needs a broad view. As any scientist what is important and they will tell you their area is the most important so the high level decisions do need to be made by politicians and officials, however unpalatable that has been to scientists. Too much trying to please everyone will blunt (even further) the challenge aspect.
For some of the Challenges that need them there is no involvement of the people who will actually meet the Challenge. If the challenge is to make money out of New Zealand’s agricultural base then it needs to be driven by agribusiness. If the challenge is to understand the southern ocean because we don’t know how it works then science leadership is fine – we probably don’t need the fishing industry. So far the discussion around the Challenges has all been about the science and nothing about how that science will be applied to meeting the Challenge. I hope that the RfPs will fix this – there is room for each to be tailored to meet its Challenge head on so let’s take advantage of that.
There may be an election next year but New Zealand will still be there after it. Let’s take our time to make sure the Science Challenges build on all the effort we have put in so far and are connected enough to make an impact. I hope our innovator deep within MBIE had bought us that time. So let’s not hurry.
