§ 32. Mr. Simon CoombsTo ask the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster what is his estimate of the value of the private sector contribution to scientific research within the universities.
§ Mr. Robert JacksonIn 1990 British education institutions received around £300 million from non-Government sources in support of research and development, about half of which came from business.
§ Mr. CoombsHas my hon. Friend had an opportunity to study the Economic and Social Research Council's report entitled "Turning New Ideas into Business Success"? What role does my hon. Friend envisage for the private sector, in conjunction with universities and other places of higher and further education, in ensuring that the new ideas for which this country is so famous are turned more successfully into prosperity for our people than was the case in the past?
§ Mr. JacksonI like to think of my hon. Friend as the Member for the research council because its headquarters is in his constituency. We have looked at the ESRC report 709 on the innovation agenda—it is an interesting paper—and we shall draw conclusions in the White Paper, but it has been one of our themes in the 1980s and through the history of this Government to promote stronger mechanisms of interaction, which is one of the themes of the innovation agenda, between people who use technologies and the people who are developing them. It is not a one-way process of inventing ideas and then transferring them into the marketplace. We need to have a marketplace sending signals back into the communities that produce ideas. That is very much the theme of that paper, the theme of our policy and the theme of our thinking on the White Paper.