Don't Cut Innovation

In December 2009 the UK Finance Minister and Chancellor of the Exchequer, Alistair Darling, announced that he would make cuts of £600m ($1B) in funding for higher education, research and science by 2012. Shortly afterwards the Science and Technology Facilities council announced a range of cuts in experimental programmes. The number of students funded to take PhD degrees is expected to fall by 25%. It is remarkable that these announcements have not generated national concern because they strike at our national ability to innovate. On Dec 16^th over 100 leading scientists and academics published a letter criticising the cuts and pointing out that research is essential to scientific discovery and innovation.

Currently interest for postgraduate education is very high but funding is being slashed. At a national level it is recognised that our dependence on financial services should be reduced. A good way to do this is to encourage the growth of high-tech start-ups. There is considerable evidence from the OECD among others that people educated to doctoral level are 'key players in innovation.' We clearly need to cut public spending in order to rein in our enormous debts but even so the country needs to increase not reduce spending on science, research and postgraduate studies as these are shown to fuel the technology start-ups that will give us future economic growth and employment.

Paul Sloane writes and speaks on innovation. He is the author of The Innovative Leader.

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