The Research & Development Society: From ideas to wealth

The Manifesto for National Growth

Mon, 16 Feb 2026 06:00:21 -0800

After a year in power, the UK government is facing a litany of challenges between a new world order, a divided nation and a stubbornly sluggish economy, contributing to a cost-of-living crisis. While delivering the government’s pledges of strong economic growth cannot solve these issues alone, it is vital to preparing for the turbulent waters ahead.

In response to these challenges, the Research & Development society is proposing a manifesto to lead a new cross-sector coalition to develop a unified growth framework, beginning with an assessment of the deployment of AI technologies across UK clusters and market sectors, to better link government policy with commercial success and drive sustainable economic renewal.

This initiative will be built around three core elements:

1. New Models to Underpin UK’s Growth Strategy

Although the government has pledged strong economic growth, current efforts are unfocused and under-resourced. Traditional economic and political models are no longer sufficient to address today’s challenges (including global instability and structural economic weakness). The continued focus on measuring activity rather than impact prevents a useful assessment of interventions. This manifesto argues that new conceptual frameworksⁱ are urgently needed to properly understand and stimulate growth. Our coalition intends to develop and promote these models.

2. A Broad Inclusive Coalition around a Unified Growth Framework

The Research & Development Society is forming a cross-sector coalition to create a more coherent and practical growth strategy. This includes research institutions, commercial companies, trade bodies, combined...Read More

Great Science, Poor Commercial Climate: "The UK's Pharma Dilemma"

Fri, 28 Nov 2025 06:04:10 -0800

A key element of an effective national innovation strategy is the ability to capture the creative value of invention to support the growth of the economy. We have previously discussed the risk of the UK becoming an Incubator Economy where the downstream value of new business is lost to the economy due to a failure to scale, either through poor commercialisation strategy or as a result of investors being too eager to cash out too soon, allowing others to acquire the business and potentially shift the value capture overseas. But this is not the only issue the UK faces in developing an effective growth plan – it also needs to align with the needs of more mature industry and attract their investment. The pharmaceutical sector is a case in point, with 2025 becoming an annus horribilis in terms of industrial focussed investment.

Back in 2020 Merck, known as MSD in Europe, announced a £1 billion ($1.31 billion) investment to a build an early research hub in London’s Knowledge Quarter located around Kings Cross Station. The centre was expected to be operating in 2025 with a staff of 800 including 120 new hires. At that time David Peacock, MSD managing director for the UK and Ireland told the Financial Times “We currently view the UK as a world leader in developing science, driven by the long-term emphasis on building a strong research and development infrastructure”. Yet abruptly in September 2025, the company announced it no longer planned to proceed with the centre with the loss of 125 jobs. So, what drove the change of heart? UK science, the foundation for the original investment decision has not...Read More

Unpacking the ‘Black Box’ of Meso-Economics

Mon, 22 Sep 2025 05:00:30 -0700

1. The Challenge

There is general recognition that macroeconomic theory is inadequate when it comes to understanding growth - but most responses to this challenge so far have been largely inadequate.

This weakness has been recognised and studied by many leading economists in the field but the precise challenges were very clearly articulated in the collection of essays on ‘Rethinking Capitalism’ edited by Mazzucato and Jacobs, containing contributions from several leading economists.

In their introductory essay for this collection, Jacobs and Mazzucato summarise the three main challenges in understanding the growth challenge:

‘Firstly, we need a richer characterisation of markets and the businesses within them …markets are better understood as the outcomes of interactions between economic actors and institutions…

The second key insight is that investments in technological and organisational innovation, both public and private, which are the driving force behind economic growth and development. The diffusion of such innovations across the economy affects not just the patterns of production, but of distribution and consumption…. But this requires a much more dynamic and accurate understanding of how innovation occurs than is provided by orthodox economic theories…

Recognition of the role of the public sector in the innovation process informs the third key insight. This is that the creation of economic value is a collective process.’

2. The Macro-meso Framework

These astute observations point to the urgent need to develop a rigorous meso-economic approach to understanding growth—the RDS has set out to provide this approach and to apply it to the UK economy to drive the growth agenda.

Re-shaping UK Life Science Commercialisation

Fri, 22 Aug 2025 04:00:35 -0700

Over the past few months the Research and Development Society has been collecting and analysing data from across the country and engaging in thorough consultation with stakeholders in key clusters. During this time we have seen announcements from new UK Industrial Strategy paper and the associated Life Sciences Sector Plan. There is still more that can be done, particularly in the area of commercialisation, as our investigation has revealed. We are now publishing our own conclusions and recommendations that have been produced and iterated over the course of our consultation. Please find our full report below.

The Challenge

The Research & Development Society has been running an intensive programme over the last 6 months, to understand the most significant challenges and potential solutions within the UK’s Life Science ecosystems. This initiative has integrated the RDS’ extensive expertise in R&D strategy and innovation management, new data collected from RDS surveys, and data provided by its partner organisations, augmented by close consultation with key stakeholders in life science ecosystems across the country.

The timing of this report is critical because the UK government has made Life Sciences a key component of its industrial strategy, assigning it significance as one of the Industrial Strategy growth-driving sectors (IS-8). This focus rightly recognises that the UK is well positioned to be competitive in this sector. The Government has also recognised that despite the nation’s success in innovation; it struggles with commercialisation and adoption: However, there are still problems with how the UK government is tackling the commercialisation challenge in the Life Science sector. A failure to accurately identify the gaps in the...Read More

Unbundling the Promise of AI: Hyperbole vs Reality

Wed, 23 Jul 2025 06:00:49 -0700

Artificial Intelligence is being hailed for its potential to transform many aspects of our lives – in particular, it provides a big opportunity for us to do new things and do them differently - But we need to understand the implications of this at global, national and local levels, in a systematic way.

The UK government has rightly recognised the importance of AI in developing a modern industrial strategy and is seeking to keep the UK at the forefront of the application of these new technologies. For example, the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) recently announced the creation of The Sovereign AI Unit to build and apply AI capabilities to drive economic growth and national security. But a key question is whether the UK has the right strategies in place to realise this promise.

While many in industry and government are getting excited about AI as a key to problems across the country and society, there is a lack of integrated analytical thinking on the matter. The challenge in doing this systematically is that much of this debate is already dominated by two distinct mindsets, which largely reflect the bi-polar view of technology-driven innovation:

the technology mindset which aims to promote the revolutionary potential of AI, emphasizing how recent developments, particularly in large language models (LLMs) have transformed the landscape beyond the foundations in this field laid over the last 50 years: this view is promoted aggressively by the major technology companies who would like to dominate this space, and the associated...Read More

The Search for Growth: Focusing on Commercial Readiness, Beyond Technology

Mon, 14 Jul 2025 06:00:22 -0700

The key challenge facing policymakers today is how we create growth. Whilst much has been written about industrial strategy and the critical role of innovation in generating growth, there is still a serious gap in understanding how innovation translates into growth: we need a better understanding of the commercialisation process, and the metrics associated with this growth trajectory.

The Triple Chasm Model, as we have discussed previously, is based on an AI-driven analysis of the empirical data associated with growth provides a rigorous basis for looking at this challenge. Fundamentally, this analysis confirms that this growth trajectory can be modelled using the simple diffusion equation, but with the three discontinuities in this journey, where growth stalls and the parameters in the diffusion equation change: hence the 3 Chasms behind the Triple Chasm Model which correspond to the development of prototypes, commercial acceptance of the product and the point at which serious scaling can begin.

The Three Chasms

While these 3 Chasms provide powerful calibration of the commercialisation journey, we need a finer scale to understand the maturity of any innovation more precisely: the Commercialisation Readiness Level, or CRL, provides this maturity metric which covers all aspects of the commercialisation trajectory from idea to full deployment and impact.

In contrast, most innovation agencies currently use Technology Readiness Level, or TRL as their growth metric, which suffers from two key problems:

It only measures the readiness of the technology, not how it is deployed
This metric runs out of steam soon after Chasm I is crossed

This problem has...Read More

The Search for Growth: Moving Beyond an Incubator Economy

Thu, 10 Jul 2025 06:00:17 -0700

The past 30 years has seen a dramatic increase in spinout activities by UK Universities. A recent report by the Russell Group noted that in 2023 UK university spinouts raised £1.66bn in equity funding which is second only to the US in terms of total investment in spinouts and accounts for 9.54% of all equity funding raised by UK companies. And a WSJ article noted that the U.K. currently boasts nine decacorns and over 200 unicorns and soonicorns (valued over $10 billion, $1 billion and $500 million, respectively. In 2023, the combined economic impact of these fast-growth firms was an addition of £50.4 billion to the U.K. economy.

But in contract to these statistics, other data from Warwick Business School show a less rosy picture with just two per cent of surviving start-ups registered in 2020 managing to achieve a £1 million turnover after three years and only 7% of established firms over three years continuing on a growth trajectory to £3 million annual turnover or more. Of 325,811 start-ups registered in 2020, only 47% survived to 2023, and only 2% managed to achieve £1m turnover after three years – a proportion that has remained constant over the UK in the last decade. There are 400 000 more SMEs in the UK than in 2010, but the proportion of them registering any employment growth fell from 20 to 13 per cent between 2020 and 2023.

This reminds me of when I was at secondary school back in the early 1980s. The school I attended had around 200 students in the Upper Sixth form yet seemed to measure its academic...Read More

Claire Ruskin, Director at Cambridge Network, joins the UK R&D Society as a Strategic Advisor

Fri, 27 Jun 2025 05:00:56 -0700

The UK R&D Society was founded to be the authoritative voice for UK technology businesses, focused on the commercialisation of research and advocating to government, investors, and intervention agencies to develop a sustainable industrial strategy that supports economic and social growth in regions across the nation.

Most recently, the RDS published a response to the UK Government Industrial Strategy Green Paper ‘Invest 2035’ published in November 2024.

We are delighted to announce that Claire Ruskin joins Pierre Socha, partner at Amadeus Capital Partners, Jamie Urquhart, co-founder of semiconductor company Arm, Ric Parker, former Rolls-Royce Director of Research & Technology, David Hughes, former industry executive and Director General of Innovation at the DTI, and Sir Richard Sykes, former CEO and Chairman of GlaxoWellcome and GlaxoSmithKline, on the Strategic Advisory Board of the R&D Society, contributing to the Society’s recommendations to the Government on the UK Industrial Strategy.

Claire is Director at Cambridge Network, a membership organisation focused on growing businesses through connections, peer groups, events, learning, and help with recruitment. The organisation...Read More

Re-shaping UK Life Science Commercialisation Strategy - Summary Workshop

Mon, 23 Jun 2025 02:00:27 -0700

With the success of our workshops with Stevenage Bioscience Catalyst and Bruntwood SciTech we are now looking ahead to the final event, where we will be summarising what we have learnt so far and offering up our conclusions for critique and enhancement. Over the past couple of months we have collected data from more than 150 Life Science companies across the country and had conversations with investors, academics and innovators about the challenges they are facing in pursuit of commercialisation.

The workshop will be held on Zoom from 11am to 12:30pm on Wednesday 25^th. Please sign up here if you would like to attend.

Agenda:

11:00 – Setting the Scene

Introduction & Workshop Goals
Survey Findings & the commercialisation challenge

11:20 – Recommendations

Key points of discussion
Resultant recommendations from Stevenage & Manchester workshops

11:50 – Questions & Feedback

Opportunity for audience to contribute their own thoughts on our work so far

12:30 - End

“Protection” or “Protection Racketeering”? Medical Device Regulators are Preventing World-Class Technologies from Saving Patient’s Lives - are LLMs our Hero?

Fri, 13 Jun 2025 06:04:37 -0700

Sam studied MRes Medical Device Design & Entrepreneurship at Imperial College London under the supervision of Prof James Moore Jr, The Royal Academy of Engineering Chair of Medical Device Design. Here, Sam gained experience in the development of biofeedback, closed loop neuromodulation devices for neurorehabilitation. After graduating from Imperial College London, Sam took a Research Associate position in the lab of Professor Rylie Green, Head of Department for Bioengineering. Today, Sam is a Cambridge NeuroWorks Frontier Fellow developing Myonerv, a wearable medical device to monitor and treat stroke-induced paralysis, funded by ARIA. With a passion in seeing world-class medical devices to treat patients with neurological diseases, and improving lives around the world.

Medical device safety is important, self-explanatory, and has no argument against. However, when a startup begins their journey towards medical device certification, they’ll come across a small club of organisations responsible for issuing compliance certificates i.e. the only way of legally selling medical devices. These entities hold the keys to the major passageway between breakthrough technologies and clinical use. Access to their library of Standards are gatekept, interpretation is then sold, and patient lives are being held at ransom for regulatory approval. Is this how patient safety and technological advancements should be managed? And if this doesn’t change, is society itself under the control of a mafia, at the very top of the command chain?

The cost of compliance for early-stage technologies is often insurmountable. It can cost £200,000 from a regulatory consultant to prepare your first documentation packages. This leaves so many incredible ideas buried within world-class institutions, as it’s not worth risking a steady research career to venture into the high-stakes world of fundraising a startup, whereby a disproportionate sum...Read More