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 commercialisation models of UK companies is leading to misdirected support that fails to tackle the complexities of the challenge.
Our research confirms that the period spent focusing on the development, implementation and iteration of a viable business model (referred to as Chasm II going forward), is where most companies face the greatest risk of failure. While government has placed more focus on technology adoption and exports, they continue to hold a narrow perspective that fails to tackle the wide range of factors which will drive growth.