The Science System Advisory Group has been established by the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment in order to provide advice to Government on science, innovation and technology. It will review challenges and aspirations of the sector and its structure, efficiency and effectiveness. A two-part report will be published; the first delivered end of June and the second in October. The first part will focus on principles for the sector and providing advice and recommendations. The second will provide final recommendations and advice on long-term changes in order to ensure the future success of science in New Zealand.
The Science System Advisory Group is seeking submissions. Submissions are limited to four A4 pages and must be made by 17 May. You can read the details and make a submission here:
Here is the submission from Dr. David Lillis and Distinguished Professor Peter Schwerdtfeger. It was a challenge to keep it to four pages. There was a lot we wanted to say but could not!
The Science, Innovation and Technology System
Our desired future is science, innovation and technology that delivers benefits across all sectors and domains within New Zealand, creates human capital, matches the rest of the world in niche areas but encourages research in diverse areas, including fundamental science, and is evaluated positively in other countries. Its priority-setting should be based on up-to-date intelligence on the research needs of all sectors, including health, the economy, the environment, education, manufacturing and other industry, transportation, agriculture and forestry, sustainable fisheries and Artificial Intelligence.
Research, science, innovation and technology enable mankind to solve problems in social, health-related, environmental and economic contexts, develop new methods and make informed decisions. In the future, we will see opportunities, challenges and barriers to sustainable growth and prosperity, and the available resources should support such objectives. Thus, contestable funding administered by the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE) or other agencies must serve the entire research community, particularly STEM subject areas - the sciences in general, and technology, engineering and mathematics, which are vulnerable to any movement away from excellence-based research.
Besides excellent research we must focus on ensuring pathways whereby research and technology can be adopted and applied. We utilise traditional knowledge within our innovation system but only in those few areas in which it adds value. We must adhere strictly to agreed definitions of research and research excellence, consistent with internationally-accepted definitions, and not diminish excellence in order to include traditional knowledge or “other ways of knowing”.
The world of today faces genuine challenges, including degrading of our environment, pandemics and unequal distribution of wealth across nations. However, blind rejection of the use of fossil fuels, and the search for minerals and other resources, may damage economies over the short term. Thus, we require balance in our approaches to solving environment and climate-related issues. To drive innovation and accelerate the shift towards a knowledge-based, diversified economy, we must fund the best researchers and make excellence a non-negotiable condition of merit-based funding, along with judgements on the potential of proposed research to deliver benefit. Research organizations can harmonize more with tertiary education than at present, including non-university research providers directly (especially in student research), and we should provide incentives for graduates to make the transition to research and development careers more straightforward.
Challenges such as pandemics, climate change, loss of biodiversity, oceanic and atmospheric health and malnutrition are global, and will be addressed through mainstream fundamental science and technology. Traditional knowledges will focus on the wellbeing of the first people to settle in New Zealand, as well as that of other communities. Aside from a will to live simply, repair of the world’s environments and mitigation of the impacts of climate change will be addressed through green science and green technology that include atmospheric and marine biology, chemistry and physics; hydrology; research into cleaner agriculture and forestry and sustainable fisheries, research into cleaner and sustainable energy, transport and manufacturing.
Similarly, pandemics, and public health generally, will be addressed through mainstream medicine and pharmaceutical research and improved public policy. However, the future of mankind depends critically on a globally focused first-class education and world-class science. Thus we must focus on resourcing all areas of basic and applied science, including those areas that will underpin our efforts to meet existing and emerging challenges.
The Innovation System
Taking advantage of opportunities in the evolving global research landscape requires up-to-date intelligence and knowledge-building on emerging global challenges and on the research, science and innovation presently emerging in order to address those challenges. Also required are relevant research skills and sufficient cohorts of trained people, so that science careers must be made attractive to students entering university.
Government’s role is as provider and enabler of an environment in which research, science and innovation can flourish. Government must monitor the health of the research, science and innovation workforce on a continuous basis and address issues, such as those involving capability and shortfalls in particular areas, when they arise.
The principles that should underpin the design of a science, innovation and technology system for New Zealand, are centred on excellence in research and research staff, as well as potential to deliver benefit. One structural barrier to greater efficiency, effectiveness and impact may relate to lack of absorptive capacity to adopt and apply research and technology within sectors. This problem may derive from either lack of trained personnel or lack of funding - or both. A dearth of venture capital investors that otherwise could assist in getting products or services to market or to end use, and may also be a serious problem for New Zealand.
During the 1990s and up to recently, New Zealand funded research on the basis of two criteria – Excellence and Relevance. Relevance had to do with judgements of the potential for proposed research to deliver benefits and outcomes. Besides funding on excellence in order to extend our knowledge base, we must engage in prudent expenditure of public money and attempt to generate benefits for the people, the economy and the environment of New Zealand. Today we are diminishing excellence as a condition of funding for research. If we re-define research excellence to accommodate the many diverse world views, then we lose focus and our national effort in science and research will diminish. Some of the material emerging from our research institutes reads more like political activism than scholarship, often published in second-rate journals. Research must be objective in its intent and in its praxis, but too often we see motivated reasoning in order to justify some particular ideology, especially in education and health. This situation is particularly dangerous when such material is incorporated within policy.
Barriers between publicly-funded research entities may include competition for research funds that discourages collaboration. In turn, collaboration cannot be forced artificially on particular research groups. Sometimes research agendas and goals are too different and finding common ground is very challenging. Public research faces major challenges that are accentuated by increasing costs of scientific equipment and infrastructure and pressures on budgets. Investments required to keep pace with technological change in many fields of research have increased, as has global competition for increasingly mobile research assets, including personnel. Universities and others must compete for resources and talent on international markets. As science becomes increasingly open, identifying the beneficiaries of new knowledge and innovation becomes a critical consideration.
New Zealand and the Rest of the World
New Zealand is becoming more diverse. Scholarships for minority students are one idea but may unfairly disadvantage non-minority students. If the Treaty/te Tiriti is to be invoked to support Māori students through tertiary education and address closure of gaps in social, economic, health and education outcomes, then it should be invoked to assist all persons or communities in need, regardless of ethnic or cultural affiliation. In this regard, we note that our Pacific People experience worse shortfalls in measures of health and wellbeing and socioeconomically than all other ethnic groups. Contributions of Māori should indeed be recognized, but so should the contributions of other minority communities.
To plan for the future we must be aware of current trends. Between 2014 and 2018 global spending on research and development grew faster than the global economy, as nations sought to invest in order to accelerate environmental and electronic transitions and to meet economic, public health and other objectives. Global science spending increased by 19% during those years, and the number of scientists increased by 13.7% to approximately 8.8 million (Science Business, 2021). New Zealand must observe international trends (e.g. faster growth in global research and innovation spending than growth in GDP) and commit to matching international or OECD norms for investment as a percentage of GDP. Continuous monitoring of emerging issues and research internationally is necessary if we are to invest wisely. There is a clear need for international collaboration in order to address global challenges, and New Zealand’s research policies must be globally aware and not inward-focused.
In developing research expertise for the next two decades, we recognise that New Zealand has niche research areas in environmental and ecological research, agricultural and forestry research, fisheries research, medical research and medical technology. We should continue to focus on these areas because we cannot be competitive in every area. However, we should enable degree programmes and research in many domains, so that we can be sufficiently agile to capitalise on opportunities in new and emerging areas. Many of the most significant breakthroughs in science have emerged at the interfaces between disciplines and in the basic sciences. However, universities, peer review panels, funding agencies and scientific journals are configured along disciplinary lines that are not easily re-configured.
There is a need for international collaboration to address global challenges and many universities function as multi-national enterprises, with campuses across several countries. Public research faces several major challenges that are accentuated by the increasing costs of scientific equipment and infrastructure and pressures on national budgets. Coordination across priority areas is already sufficient and it is difficult to identify how to improve it. High intellectual risk, high innovation-intensive research applications will best be identified by industry and end-users. Researchers and funders will play a significant but secondary part here. The balance of research investments across the humanities, social sciences, health sciences, life sciences, physical sciences and earth sciences should take account of potential to add value through innovation and taking account of the size of particular sectors and their importance to New Zealand in contribution to GDP and other measures.
To ensure effective and efficient science we must have effective research evaluation to judge research retrospectively and prospectively. We must consider the judgement of peers, the importance of the research to policy, to the people, to the environment or to the economy; the educational and human capital benefits to researchers and students of participation in the research; the potential impact of the research in stimulating further research, and judgements on future benefits and outcomes. Government’s own research needs can be identified through a central agency, working in conjunction with advisory groups from universities, other research providers and from industry and end user groups. Government’s research needs will be addressed by resourcing the best research teams.
Public Research Organisations
The role of public research organisations is to support and carry out research and innovation that delivers benefit to New Zealand and that may not be undertaken otherwise. Possibly greater decision-making could be devolved to research agencies than at present. Perhaps the Swiss model could be adopted, where research centres of excellence are created around the future needs of the country. Selected themes could include energy and environment, ecology and biodiversity, biosecurity, health and social sciences, geosciences and engineering. Top researchers from various institutions should be selected to participate and, as in the Swiss model, Ph.D students can work at such research centres in conjunction with universities.
Perhaps public research organisations are quite well aligned with higher education but possibly their degree of alignment could be enhanced. Public research organisations must be oriented primarily towards public good but must harmonize with private organizations, industry and other end users in order to ensure wise investment of public money. We note that some research providers waste money on unnecessary Intellectual Property or Intellectual Property that cannot be defended.
New Zealand does need an advanced technology organisation conducting applied and developmental research and that engages with the private sector. Public research plays a key role in innovation systems around the world by providing new knowledge that can enhance the development of new technologies for societal or economic purposes. Universities and public research fill a specific niche in undertaking long-term basic research that is unlikely to bring immediate economic returns. Public research must fulfil many needs which are inter-dependent. Basic research underpins the development of breakthrough technologies but its full impact can take decades. Incremental increases in knowledge, applied research and experimental development can generate more predictable shorter-term returns. Thus, both basic and applied research are necessary. Public-funded industrial and commercial innovation support mechanisms must keep pace with international trends. However, incubators and accelerators are not always successful and we must exercise care in developing more of them in future.
Public research is vitally dependent on Ph.D students and post-doctoral researchers who have limited long-term job security. And, as recent events at Massey University show, they also have limited short-term security. Moreover, frequently the prospects of a tenured position are limited. The lack of clear and sustainable career paths could be a disincentive and present particular challenges for women.
We have appropriate mechanisms to develop the innovation pipeline, attract global partners and funding but funding is insufficient and the system is at risk of degrading through artificial equality of science with traditional knowledge and funding on the basis of ethnicity. New Zealand does not need a revised approach to promote innovation, but we must focus on areas of strength and need, and where we can be competitive. Funding instruments must resource excellent research and not have funds diverted to meet institutional overheads rather than actual research.
To make New Zealand’s economy more competitive we can take advantage of innovation and technology to add value to products and services for export and for domestic use; for example, research-intensive wood-based building products rather than exporting unprocessed logs. However, we have been aware of such opportunities for several decades and actually making it happen in a competitive international marketplace may not be so easy. An innovation-focused policy and promotional organisation should focus on promoting and supporting excellent science and innovation, rather than pursuing social justice agendas. Modern science evolves continually, its framework intergenerational by nature, and both empirical and theoretical scientific methods exist within international historic contexts. Some research into traditional knowledge, including mātauranga Māori, is indeed desirable, but funded from a different contestable fund from that of mainstream science. Similarly, Pacific research should address issues specific to the Pacific community and should be funded from a different contestable fund from that of mainstream research and science.
Contestable Research
We should revise completely the MBIE research funding system and take a fresh view of funding for fundamental blue-skies research, applied research and late-stage pre-commercialisation. We may encourage research for, by and with Māori, but ensure that inclusion of Vision Matauranga, or its future equivalent, within grant applications is optional. We must have a system that is politically-neutral, ensuring that the proportion of funding to researchers identifying as Māori and to research embedded in Te Ao Māori aligns with national demographics.
We must revert any replacement of the PBRF to political-neutrality, focusing on excellence rather than on social justice. The latter may be important in some cases, but should not drive the overall system. Political-neutrality includes dropping the requirement for Māori co-chairs of panels. Excellence is obligatory in any kind of research, but the stakes are particularly high when the proposed research is intended to influence decisions that affect all peoples’ lives, the environment, governance or other areas of development. Possibly we already have a near optimal structure for mission-led and contestable research but more funding is needed, as is a balance of short-term and long-term funding. Regular priority-setting should identify the optimal levels of resourcing for research across the different sectors. Researchers compete for funds, students and positions. Institutions compete in international league tables and nations compete for returns on innovation. Competition is indeed a major driver for research, though excessive competition limits cooperation.
MBIE and its policy functions do not need to be more clearly separated from contestable funding decisions. New Zealand does not need to rationalise its research funding mechanisms, but funding must go directly to research rather than to meet overheads or in order to increase the number of administrators. Prioritisation of research and research investment should occur at the highest level – Government. Funding to different Output Classes (or their equivalents) should then be contestable, as it has been in the past. After that, funding on the basis of excellence is obligatory. Making strategic choices on future priorities across different fields is a challenge for research organizations and government and choices between 'big science' or investigator-led projects or between infrastructure and personnel can be difficult. Effectively balancing distribution of resources between various fields of science, between long-term and short-term needs, between big science and single investigators, between infrastructure and personnel, between national and international needs, is a major difficulty. However, we can meet this challenge. We must, if New Zealand is to emerge as a prosperous, twenty-first century, multicultural nation with a bright future.
Reference: Science Business (2021): Number of scientists worldwide reaches 8.8M, as global research spending grows faster than the economy
Dr David Lillis is a retired researcher, statistician and academic manager who also worked for several years in research evaluation for the Foundation for Research, Science and Technology.
5 comments:
Brilliant.
May be ignored - in the interests of equity.
"We must have a system that is politically-neutral, ensuring that the proportion of funding to researchers identifying as Māori and to research embedded in Te Ao Māori aligns with national demographics."
Demographics should play zero part if you're arguing for backing excellence in research.
Quality foremost.
Good on you, David and Peter!
In contestable funding, excellence must be the prime criterion, as you say.
This should apply to research funds and also to postgraduate scholarships.
Thank you for stating the case so clearly.
I don't think we will get anywhere in developing science and technology in NZ without tidying up the awful ideologically driven education in our schools.
Take just primary maths for example where teaching of tables by traditional rote learning is scorned as is traditional explicit instruction in one quick algorithm for basic manipulations instead of the now half a dozen crazy confusing strategies. Recent neuro and cognitive science supports traditional education methods and content.
Progressive education is an ideology devoid of and frankly unconcerned about any scientifically evidenced based approaches to teaching and learning. This is where we need real science and honest research to be done and applied keeping in mind we do have guidelines already of what works best from when we used to have a world class education and quality science and technology graduates.
Progressives focus on producing social activists, steeped in Marxist critical theory and thinking which is not going to help us grow science and technology in this country.It replaces solid learning as well.
There is something inherently wrong with a system that encourages a scientist to spend weeks developing a funding proposal that has a 10-20% chance of funding, and whose job and career depend on obtaining those funds. We lose our brightest either overseas or to other careers. Secondly, where a scientist is employed by a lab, even if $millions are attracted in research funding, pay is pitiful unless a managerial career path is chosen. Gone are the old days in DSIR where top scientific staff earned more than the director!
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