The UK’s thirty year experiment in innovation policy « Soft Machines

In 1981 the UK was one of the world’s most research and development intensive economies, with large scale R&D efforts being carried out in government and corporate laboratories in many sectors. Over the thirty years between then and now, this situation has dramatically changed. A graph of the R&D intensity of the national economy, measured as the fraction of GDP spent on research and development, shows a long decline through the 1980′s and 1990′s, with some levelling off from 2000 or so. During this period the R&D intensity of other advanced economies, like Japan, Germany, the USA and France, has increased, while in fast developing countries like South Korea and China the growth in R&D intensity has been dramatic. The changes in the UK were in part driven by deliberate government policy, and in part have been the side-effects of the particular model of capitalism that the UK has adopted. Thirty years on, we should be asking what the effects of this have been on our wider economy, and what we should do about it.

See it on Scoop.it, via Knowledge Economy

http://www.scoop.it/t/knowledge-economy/p/1938208267/the-uk-s-thirty-year-experiment-in-innovation-policy-soft-machines/original The UK’s thirty year experiment in innovation policy « Soft Machines