Innovation Strategy must be backed with funding

Boosting business R&D depends on raising public research spending, says Rosalind Lowe

The UK government’s long-awaited Innovation Strategy, published last week, sets out a pledge to create the world’s best innovation ecosystem as a central pillar of its plan to Build Back Better following the pandemic.

This is not an easy task. Innovation is a complex process with often unknown and uncertain returns. The innovation system has a huge number of moving parts—interacting and interdependent people, collaborations and organisations. Developing or embedding something new in the economy is rarely a linear process.