Big Science and Innovation
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5th July 2013 Big Science and Innovation Paul Simmonds Erika Kraemer-Mbula Andrej Horvath James Stroyan Frank Zuijdam www.technopolis-group.com Big Science and Innovation technopolis |group|, July 2013 Table of Contents 1. Summary 4 1.1 This report 4 1.2 Overview of capital funding and research infrastructure 4 1.3 “Big Science” and innovation 5 1.4 Evaluating financial & economic outcomes 6 1.5 Evaluating innovation outcomes 6 1.6 Evaluating agglomeration effects 6 1.7 Directions for further development and future research 7 2. Introduction 8 2.1 This report 8 2.2 The study objectives 8 2.3 Overall approach 8 2.4 Structure of the report 8 3. Capital funding and research infrastructure in the UK 10 3.1 “Big Science Facilities” 10 3.2 Overview of capital funding 11 3.3 An inventory of research infrastructure 15 4. “Big Science” and innovation 18 4.1 The relationship between “big science” and innovation 18 4.2 Facility lifecycles and implications for innovation 23 4.3 Distinct contributions to innovation 30 5. Evaluating financial & economic outcomes 31 5.1 Introduction 31 5.2 Our selection of studies and evaluations 31 5.3 Economic outcomes 32 5.4 Methodological approaches 32 5.5 Data requirements 36 5.6 Strengths and weaknesses 36 5.7 Results and stylised facts 38 5.8 Implications for future BIS evaluations of research infrastructure 38 6. Innovation outcomes 43 6.1 Introduction 43 6.2 Our selection of studies and evaluations 43 6.3 Innovation outcomes 43 6.4 Methodological approaches 43 Big Science and Innovation i 6.5 Data requirements 45 6.6 Strengths and weaknesses 46 6.7 Results and stylised facts 47 6.8 Implications for future BIS evaluations of research infrastructure 48 6.9 Development needs 48 7. Clustering and agglomeration effects 53 7.1 Introduction 53 7.2 Our selection of studies and evaluations 53 7.3 Innovation outcomes 53 7.4 Methodological approaches 54 7.5 Data requirements 54 7.6 Strengths and weaknesses 54 7.7 Results and stylised facts 55 7.8 Implications for future BIS evaluations of research infrastructure 56 7.9 Development needs 56 8. Directions for further development and future research 57 Appendix A Glossary 59 Appendix B Overview of capital funding for science 62 Appendix C Inventory of large research facilities 69 Appendix D Literature review and bibliography 80 Appendix E Case studies 87 Appendix F Analytical overview of methodologies used in key reports 125 ii Big Science and Innovation Table of Figures Figure 1 – Allocation of capital funding within the science budget (£Ks, cash) ........... 12 Figure 2 – Distribution of research infrastructure by primary scientific domain ........ 15 Figure 3 – Distribution of UK facilities by type of research infrastructure ...................17 Figure 4 – A schematic showing the social and economic impacts flowing from large research infrastructures .................................................................................................20 Figure 5 – A tabulation of direct and indirect social impacts by stage in a facility’s lifecycle ........................................................................................................................... 21 Figure 6 – Research design for measuring the direct and indirect social impacts at the design stage ....................................................................................................................22 Figure 7 - Tabulation of innovation outcomes in each phase of a big science facility ..28 Figure 8 - Tabulation of innovation outcomes by broad class of facility ......................29 Figure 9 – List of RI studies and evaluations that sought to measure the economic impact of the facility.......................................................................................................40 Figure 10 – List of RI-related studies and evaluations that have investigated innovation outcomes ......................................................................................................49 Figure 11 – List of RI-related studies and evaluations that have investigated regional and locational outcomes................................................................................................. 51 Figure 12 – Allocation of capital funding within the 2011/12 science and research budget .............................................................................................................................63 Figure 13 – Summary of SR10 capital allocation (SR10 Science Budget) and additional commitments (fiscal events) to research capital (£000s).............................................64 Figure 14 - Evolution of capital allocations of the science budget (2000 – 2015)........65 Figure 15 - Evolution of science budget and the share of capital budget within it .......66 Figure 16 - Evolution of capital funding of science by organisation type .....................68 Figure 16 – Evaluation reports presented as case studies in the appendices ...............87 Figure 17 - Examples of wider benefits from evaluation of EDSD ................................92 Figure 18 - The Structure of Forward and Backward Linkage Impacts Associated with the Human Genome Sequencing ...................................................................................94 Figure 19 - Five key ways of generating economic impact from research, DIUS ‘Economic Impact Framework’ – May 2007 ................................................................110 Figure 20 - Indirect economic multipliers.................................................................... 111 Figure 21 - Overviews effects new supernode in the Netherlands............................... 123 Big Science and Innovation iii Big Science and Innovation 1. Summary 1.1 This report This report presents the findings of a study to explore the relationship between large research facilities and innovation. It is a reference document, providing advice about approaches to the evaluation of innovation outcomes alongside a bibliography of past evaluations. We prepared the document through a literature review and desk study with a small programme of qualitative research involving interviews with key stakeholders. Large facilities are an important sub-category of research facilities that combine large investments in state of the art equipment and associated infrastructure often with quite large and highly-skilled operational support teams and related services. They are widely held to be critical ‘tools for science, central to our ability to push the boundaries of what we know. Large facilities have tended to be identified with single site facilities such as particle accelerators or telescopes, however, research infrastructures are very much more diverse than this: types of research infrastructure extend far beyond large centralised facilities to include physically distributed resources, such as ultra-high speed communications networks, through to virtual facilities and collections of artefacts of national or international significance. We used a four-category typology (single site, distributed, mobile, virtual) to help our literature review, albeit with limited success as the majority of publications we identified are concerned with the socio-economic impacts of single-site facilities. 1.2 Overview of capital funding and research infrastructure In order to set this analysis in context, we looked at the development of the UK’s science budget overall and the share of capital funding within it. The Allocation of Science and Research Funding 2011/12 to 2014/15 (ASRF) shows that capital investment constitutes a small but significant share of the total science budget. The budget for capital funding was around £515M in 2011/12, or around 12% of the total science budget. We estimate that one third is invested in capital projects related to large facilities, but support for larger strategic investments is increasing in absolute and relative terms. The government has made several important announcements in the period since the Spending Review in 2010 (SR10), which are expected to result in very much higher annual expenditure in 2013/14 and 2014/15. The main budget lines comprise the individual capital budgets of the seven grant-awarding research councils and the four home-country funding councils (46%; 27% respectively), with the UK Space Agency and Large Facilities Capital Fund (LFCF) making up the balance (26%). The research councils’ capital budgets have been used to fund facilities at the councils’ own research institutes and university-based facilities. The various higher education institute (HEI) capital funds are designed to ensure universities have the volume and quality of research-related building, equipment and infrastructure to carry out excellent research. The Large Facilities Capital Fund is, as the name suggests, a fund to support capital investment in the country’s largest research facilities, existing or under development (e.g. the Diamond Light Source, the ISIS neutron source and the Square Kilometre Array). We were interested to form a view of the UK’s stock of large research facilities, to understand its scale and scope and any evident trends in terms of disciplines or types of facilities. There is no definitive UK-wide list of facilities, however we were able to take advantage of the MERIL project, an EU-funded initiative to map research infrastructure across the EU. 4 Big Science and Innovation We compiled a list of large research facilities, predominantly taken from the MERIL database but with additional contributions from The Science