CERN, STFC and the public-private sector dichotomy

The European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) recently partnered with the Science and Technical Facilities Council (STFC). The pair have gotten together to create a “Business Incubation Center” for the United Kingdom. The collaboration aims to connect innovators and entrepreneurs, and to help bring highly innovative concepts in high energy particle physics from the whiteboard to the assembly line.

The BIC represents a change in the way innovation is handled in Europe. In the United States it’s largely taken for granted that most innovation will come from the private sector or larger, state-run public research facilities like UCLA. By contrast, Europe tends to prefer more centralized, state-sponsored approaches to innovation, pooling the best scientific and technical minds of the nation together for the common cause. BIC stands firmly in the American-style camp and is, as such, a bit of a novelty. Of course, none of this should be surprising to anyone who has been following British politics. The current ConLib Coalition between the Tories and the Liberal Democrats has pursued private sector solutions aggressively, mounting unprecedented attacks on public entitlements such as the National Health Service (NHS). This fetishization of private sector solutions has now expanded into the realm of innovation and scientific research.

Nor is it surprising that the United Kingdom is adopting more American-style policies with regard to innovation. The UK and the US have what is often called, with varying degrees of irony, a “special relationship,” standing together on foreign policy issues, often times together alone. Additionally, Britain’s contemporary national identity is largely centered around a deep sense of Euroskepticism. Britons, or at least British politicians, define “Britishness” as anything that is not European. While the UK is in the EU, it was dragged there kicking and screaming and is still not in the Eurozone.

Beyond the largely political implications, it’s interesting to ponder precisely what this will mean for the world of British innovation. High energy physics isn’t a field where innovation comes from small start-ups and mom and pops. On the contrary, high energy physics research and development is a field requiring an enormous capital investment to even think about the prospect of doing research. This means that the BIC offers very little to the smaller elements of the private sector, while offering tons of giveaways to larger firms, in particular defense contractors. It goes without saying that those companies with political influence will jump to the front of the line with the unconnected picking up the scraps.

None of this is meant to say that one sphere of innovation (i.e. public vs. private) is “better” than another. On the contrary, public-centered and private-centered research, development and investment each have their pros and cons. But the CERN / STFC alliance does not take place in a political or an economic vacuum. One does not have to believe that private sector innovation is “bad” (whatever that means) to see potential problems with an ostensibly government agency providing safe waters for megacorporations to do work.

The Science and Technical Facilities Council is indeed a government agency whose ostensible aim is not helping companies make profits or indeed creating a single job. Rather, it is supposed to be concerned with answering “big” scientific questions like why there’s a universe, how cells work and if there was ever life on Mars. While the private sector is perfectly capable of finding answers to such questions, for-profit enterprises are not concerned with answering questions -- they’re concerned with posting increasing rates of profit. Any knowledge for knowledge sake is an afterthought to creating innovative products and services.

And that has a value too. However, it’s not clear that the BIC will be anything but a center for corporate cronyism. When taking the whole of British politics in 2012 into account, the innovation community should display a degree of healthy skepticism about the BIC.