Creating a more connected UK research and innovation ecosystem with Ottoline Leyser

Show Notes

Listen to Professor Dame Ottoline Leyser share her views on research culture, the future of UK innovation and the role of UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) within it. Ottoline is the Chief Executive of UKRI and Regius Professor of Botany at the University of Cambridge. Prior to this Ottoline was Director of the Sainsbury Laboratory at the University of Cambridge, which combines computational modelling with molecular genetics and cell biology in the control of plant growth and development. She served as Chair of the Royal Society’s Science Policy Expert Advisory Committee, Chair of the Management Committee of the University of Cambridge Centre for Science and Policy, and as a member of the Prime Minister’s Council for Science and Technology. In 2017 Ottoline was appointed DBE for her services to plant science, science in society and equality and diversity in science.

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In the Catapult Network’s Supercharging Innovation podcast, knowledge experts and leaders from the Catapult Network talk with some of the UK’s top industrial and academic leaders and parliamentarians to get their views on science, innovation and technology. Together, they are putting UK innovation under the spotlight and exploring the role of Government, businesses, the research community, private investors, and other innovative organisations in strengthening the economy through collaboration. Welcome to the Catapult Network’s Supercharging Innovation Podcast, subscribe now.

The Innovate UK Catapult Network provides a unique combination of cutting-edge R&D facilities and world-class technical expertise to support UK business innovation. Catapults are a critical element of Innovate UK’s portfolio of products and services, where the application of research is accelerated, and where new technologies are further developed, scaled up and realised. The Catapult Network is made up of nine world-leading technology and innovation centres with more than 65 national locations.

Jeremy Silver: 00:00

Hello, and welcome to Catapult Network's Supercharging Innovation podcast. My name is Jeremy Silver, chair chair for this year of the Catapult Network. In this series, I'm talking with some of the UK's top industry and academic leaders, business people, and parliamentarians to get their views on the future of innovation. On today's episode, I'm delighted to welcome professor Dei Motoline Liza. Motoline is the chief executive of UK Research and Innovation, UKRI, and Regis professor of botany at the University of Cambridge.

Jeremy Silver: 00:34

Prior to this, Otterlin was director of the Sainsbury Laboratory at the University of Cambridge, which combines computational modeling with molecular genetics and cell biology in the control of plant growth and development. Ottaline has a long term interest in research culture and chaired the Nuffield Council on Bioethics, a leading ethics watchdog, which was described as never shrinking from the unthinkable. And more broadly, she's engaged in work aimed at generating a more inclusive, creative, and connected culture. She served as chair of the Royal Society's Science Policy Expert Advisory Committee, chair of the management committee of the University of Cambridge Centre For Science and Policy, and is a member of the Prime Minister's Council For Science and Technology. In 2017, she was appointed Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire for her services to plant science, science in society, and equality and diversity in science.

Jeremy Silver: 01:29

Otterline, welcome, and thank you for joining us today.

Ottoline Leyser: 01:33

Thank you very much. It's a pleasure to be here.

Jeremy Silver: 01:35

So as we've just heard, you have an extraordinary and distinguished career in academia, and you have been chief executive of UKRI for just over a year now. Drawing on your personal experience, how have you seen research and innovation culture evolve in the last few years?

Ottoline Leyser: 01:51

It's a very interesting question. My interest in research culture started whilst I was very much rooted in academia, where the culture has become increasingly competitive over the years in a very particular way. So I would say it combines competition which is incredibly focused on the individual. Are you individually performing against some criteria? And then those criteria I think have become increasingly narrow.

Ottoline Leyser: 02:23

Both of those things I think are very unhelpful to creating the kind of collaborative connected research and innovation culture that we need because it kind of shrinks your world down to you as an individual. And the criteria that we've typically used I think are as I say far too narrow and that tends to kind of crush diversity And those things together I think have resulted in the system becoming very siloed where academics tend to stay in academia and the interface between academia and the other really important and crucial parts of the research innovation system, that interface is not sufficiently porous. So there aren't enough people going between the multiple worlds where research innovation happens and the concept of research and and innovation. In fact, one of the things that I think has been a really interesting conversation over the last few weeks as we've been talking about the new government innovation strategy is a framing of innovation that that is very what I could consider push driven. So it starts in academia and pushes wonderful ideas out into some mysterious world of business that does wonderful things with it and turns it into money.

Ottoline Leyser: 03:35

For me, one of the things I find exciting about innovation is for me, it should start in the other direction, should start with the identification of the kind of value proposition. How can I make things better? How can I add value? Oh look, I could improve this process, I could improve this service and through doing that I would add all kinds of value. How can I do that?

Ottoline Leyser: 03:54

And then you pull through all kinds of exciting ideas and discoveries from the research base to to help to deliver that.

Jeremy Silver: 04:02

So when you think about the extraordinary armory that you have at your disposal in in UKRI, Is there a way in which you're looking to therefore to sort of change that culture within? Is there something that UKRI can do about that? Do you think?

Ottoline Leyser: 04:16

Absolutely. I think there is at least I very much hope there is precisely because as I say, the culture we currently have now is one of very high levels of competition with sharp elbows which creates I would say this kind of homogenization effect and also a balkanization. And what we need to do is the opposite. We need to drive diversification right across the system and connectivity. So diversity with collaboration is how you really get the benefit out of diversity.

Ottoline Leyser: 04:43

So the fact that we have in our armory this extraordinary range of organizations where research and innovation is happening and different tools to support it and different tools and ways to support the people who are conducting it. All of those things, thinking of that as a portfolio of levers to create a much more connected innovation and research system where ideas and people move much more freely. That's very much the way I see we have to go and I'm very excited to see things like the government innovation strategy and the government people and culture strategy both led by base very much supporting that idea of much greater connectivity and collaboration across the system.

Jeremy Silver: 05:27

Let's come back to what you were just saying about this sense of push and pull because it's a really interesting tension and and certainly in the in the work of the catapults I think we see it all the time. There's that sense on the one hand of the real importance and almost sanctity of blue sky research the real the need to be able to allow people to just go off into the wide blue yonder without necessarily a clear sense of the destination and to make extraordinary discoveries along the way, as opposed to that more directed research agenda, which which some industry sectors are better capable of addressing than others. And then I suppose a bit further along, there's also that need to try and drive adoption and and innovation of new technologies within industry itself. Do you have a sense of how we get that balance right and whether we have we got it right at the moment, do you think?

Ottoline Leyser: 06:16

To me, the the sort of defining point to start answering that question is that we currently invest 1.7% of GDP in research and innovation in this country, which is well below the OECD average, which is 2.4%. And the government has set a target of 2.4% by 2027 and that's the average. And here we are seeking to be a science superpower and our target is to become average in a few years time, which I find a little, it would be nicer, I think if we were aiming higher and in fairness to the government, I think they are aiming higher, but we have to pass through average to become above average. So I'm not complaining about that target in principle. That is important to the answer to your question about how the funding and the effort and the consideration should be considered across those TRLs because whilst you're investing 1.7%, if you took money out of that blue skies discovery, and to put further along the TRL spectrum, the whole thing would collapse.

Ottoline Leyser: 07:19

On the other hand, if we are driving up to 2.4% and 22,000,000,000 and beyond, then I think there is very widespread consensus that the biggest share of that needs to go into driving that connectivity between the blue size discovery research base where we are clearly world leading to bring that extraordinary fuel to kind of inject into the innovation rocket that we already have. We have fantastic companies innovating brilliantly, just creating that much better joined up ecosystem so it can all happen more efficiently and effectively and we can get over that scale up hump that we seem to get stuck at so often. I think that's crucial. So new money I think towards those higher TRLs and into considering adoption and diffusion and and scale up but absolutely not at the expense of the existing world class research base that we have.

Jeremy Silver: 08:12

And is that going to come, do you think, this year?

Ottoline Leyser: 08:14

I agree.

Jeremy Silver: 08:15

With everything with everything else the government has to has to contend with?

Ottoline Leyser: 08:18

Obviously, in the light of the pandemic, the economy is incredibly constrained. There are really good causes that need public money. The argument that we will be making strongly is that investment for the future of the UK. If we don't invest right now at this time post pandemic when we have the opportunity really to turbocharge an innovation led economy, a properly inclusive innovation led economy that everyone across the country can participate in and benefit from. If we don't do that now, we will slip further behind in the context of national productivity and growth and all of those things.

Ottoline Leyser: 08:56

And so we will not have then the public revenue to pay the nurses in the future. To me it's a bold investment but it's really a very wise investment that we need to make now and that that's the case we'll be trying to make whether we win it or not I'll see.

Jeremy Silver: 09:12

And you mentioned earlier the sort of the sense of different tools, different intervention types, different approaches, which kind of address these different areas of Blue Sky or director of research or or or technology push. We also have a very wide range of institutions that deploy those those tools. Do you have a sense of whether we're getting the mix right? I mean, do do you think that we're as smart as we could be in the way that we're using those those tools, do you think?

Ottoline Leyser: 09:40

So again, I think for me, the answer to that question is about portfolio diversity with collaboration and connectivity. That's the kind of mantra of mine. And I think that that diversity of institutions is really important. I think the catapults for example, play a really crucial and unique role. There are no other organizations that do what catapults do.

Ottoline Leyser: 10:01

I'm particularly fond of them because of this connectivity that they bring to the system. On top of that, there are, you know, a range of public sector research institutions that have a range of functions either from, you know, blue skies research right through to fulfilling very particular national capabilities are important. And then of course we have a fantastic university system and within that there is a huge diversity which I again, I think we need to kind of unleash and let thrive and grow rather than trying to assess them all on the same criteria. And so for me, yeah, absolutely. Thinking very intelligently about whether we have the right mix, Are they properly funded and supported that we tend to stretch things as soon as we can for obvious reasons, but that causes real problems because then the institutions can't deliver and perform as well as they should.

Ottoline Leyser: 10:51

And are they locally embedded in ways that are working synergistically economies to really support leveling up and that local economic growth through which we can gain the national productivity drive that I think we're all looking for.

Jeremy Silver: 11:08

It's really interesting this, isn't it? Because we have such a sort of varied landscape and it and it's very complicated. And a lot of people have a great deal of difficulty navigating it, particularly businesses who are trying to find the right level of support or just the right point of contact. I'm just wondering, do do you think, you know, in terms of sharing what works and what doesn't and and really understanding what the rich mix of this landscape is. Is there more that we need to do do you think?

Jeremy Silver: 11:32

Is that something that UKRI can do something to address?

Ottoline Leyser: 11:35

Absolutely. There is an increasing amount of work now both in the context of innovation and what kind of interventions really support the kind of innovative economy that we're after. And also on the research end, what kind of interventions in research really support the portfolio of research activity that we need, not just completely wild and free blue sky stuff, but as I'm very fond of saying groundbreaking, which is an analogy that comes from building, it's very good, but if all you do is go into fields and break ground you never get any buildings. So we definitely need to support that full range of research activity as well. And and how you do that, how you create an ecosystem that really provides that stable resilience that we need is key and there is an increasing amount of research and there's a research on research institute at Sheffield.

Ottoline Leyser: 12:26

I've also spent some time in the past with people like Owen O. Sullivan and the Institute of Manufacturing in Cambridge. They do a fantastic job really trying to understand what works and what doesn't. In a cultural context, that's the other thing, it's very easy to point at another country and say, look, look, we need one of those because they've got one and they're good because it's a system, you need to think about the whole system, what you've got already and how you move it to where you want to be. Absolutely behind UKRI being involved in asking those questions and trying to tune our amazing system to deliver even more.

Jeremy Silver: 12:59

You mentioned the catapults earlier and you spoke very eloquently at the House of Lords inquiry into the catapults about how you see their role contributing to to leveling up. I'm sort of interested beyond leveling up. What do you think the Catapult network contribution should and could look like over the next 5 years?

Ottoline Leyser: 13:16

Well, obviously they have their really important sector specific roles. So fundamental to a catapult is kind of de risking that middle ground and allowing nascent industries access to that kind of capability in a way that they would find it difficult to as standalone individual industries. So I think that's those sector specific roles are obviously core to the role of catapults. The thing that I think is really growing in the catapult network that I'm very excited about is is a much broader considerations and skills agenda. I would flag both the amazing apprenticeship programs that quite a number of catapults are now running, I think they're fantastic for all kinds of reasons including the levelling up reason but also actually a little bit that derisk for industry because you're simultaneously generating the skills that will support those industries to develop in those new and different directions.

Ottoline Leyser: 14:10

I would zoom out on that a little bit too in that I think one of the key things that we lack in our system are high quality careers for those bridging people, for people who have 1 foot in academia and 1 foot in business or one foot in research and one foot in innovation. And those people I think providing more visible valued, defined roles and skills and training for those people is crucial. And that's again, very much a thing that catapults are doing perhaps actually less, they're making less fuss about it and some would dance about it than they could because I think really celebrating those people is extraordinary.

Jeremy Silver: 14:50

It's certainly interesting. We definitely have people who are quite adept at jumping back and forth between speaking a research language and engaging in the very high level academic research and then being able to address industrial need as well. The more technical you get, the more challenging that that bridging that gap is. There's no question about that. Moving on though, you mentioned earlier that the challenge of of really understanding how effective we can be and how effective we are.

Jeremy Silver: 15:15

And I think everyone agrees, particularly in the world of innovation, it's difficult to understand how best to evaluate the impact. I mean, I always tend to sort of think of it as a bit like the old marketing person's adage, which was, you know, I know that 50% of my marketing works. I just don't know which 50% it is. And I wonder whether you, you know, in a sense I mean, actually, marketing, of course, has has moved on. Marketers particularly use the Internet and direct relationships with end users to really understand the data that can demonstrate what works and what doesn't in a way that is now increasingly effective and and very, very targeted.

Jeremy Silver: 15:50

Have we got something to learn from that? Do you think? Are we in the right place when it comes to understanding impact? And and do we jump too quickly to sort of, you know, mechanistic measures?

Ottoline Leyser: 16:00

I think that's a really important question that actually loops back right to our first question about how you measure research output in the first place and the rules for winning these competitions for example because I think we have tended to go for the things that are easy to measure, which are actually proxy measures for what we're really interested in and then the things you can measure become the real measures and then you cause all kinds of perverse incentives and actually undermine the very things you're trying to support. So I think picking the right things to measure is really important and I think then you come up with problem because what you're interested in measuring tends to be quite a downstream event a long way away from the intervention that you're making. And so making that connection, that causal connection between the 2 becomes extremely challenging to the point that the validity is questionable I think. So I think are real and very sensible desire for KPI's we have to be really careful about and I think always using a mixture of the quantitative things that you can measure along with more qualitative things as you were describing in the marketing context is really important.

Ottoline Leyser: 17:12

And also using a mixture of those leading and really lagging indicators, it's very important. And I think that there's a multi scale issue as well. The big things we're trying to increase national productivity, the effectiveness of our public services, those kinds of things. But there are of course small things as well, you know, local job creation. There's a lot of interesting work in the context of adoption and diffusion for example, you know, scraping web adverts, looking at which companies are seeking to employ which sorts of people.

Ottoline Leyser: 17:48

So there are quantitative measures you can capture reasonably straightforwardly and they all feed in, but you need to make sure that those are part of a balanced scorecard of measures that is really allowing you to get a feel for how the system is working. And then that I think would be another key lesson for me, it's a system and you're always working with a portfolio And I think lots of comparisons with economics and investment portfolio management is very important because we tend at the moment to ask for an individual investment whether it's doing an individual thing and I don't think that's a sensible question.

Jeremy Silver: 18:24

It is really challenging when a lot of the impact that you would expect if you were trying to make impact to sector level is is, you know, it happens over numbers of years. And of course we tend to have a political agenda which wants to operate in a much shorter timeframe than that.

Ottoline Leyser: 18:40

I agree.

Jeremy Silver: 18:41

Do you think we can do anything to overcome that or is that just the nature of the world we live in?

Ottoline Leyser: 18:44

I think there are things we can do. So I think as with the large number of things in life now, what we're interested in doing is using these multiple levers, as you say, these diverse inputs or whatever to tune quite a complex system and that's hard for people to get their heads around. That's improving, that situation is improving because so many of the things we need to shift now are in that box. So lots of interest in net zero, all of the kinds of things we have to move to deliver this huge reconfiguration of our economy, they're all interconnected in extraordinary ways. And people are beginning to understand that there isn't a silver bullet, there isn't one thing, there are so many different things you have to do in a way that connects up.

Ottoline Leyser: 19:28

So that thinking about things in that more systemic way is beginning to emerge politically as the dominant narrative, which is very exciting and I think gives us the opportunity to think about the kinds of things we're talking about interventions in the research innovation system in that more sophisticated way. And then the other massive, win is that you can take that complexity and illustrate it so powerfully with particular examples. And the one that is so obviously in people's minds at the moment is the vaccine development where all the things we've been talking about, all of them over the last half hour are the illustrations of those things that they're, you know, years of investment in blue skies research investment in really quite out there innovation as to how you might deliver that into a value add functional product linking into manufacturing and supply chain dynamics right through to the regulation that goes with how you test a new product in an effective and efficient way through to deployment across the whole system through to volunteer sounding outside the GP in the high vis vest showing you where to go to get the thing in your arm.

Ottoline Leyser: 20:39

That whole systems thing I think is so clear in people's minds now where it's a great moment to say yes, it sounds complicated, but look what it can do and look how you can relate to this particular part of it as an individual, as a company, as a nation.

Jeremy Silver: 20:54

That is so interesting to to make that analogy and to draw it so widely across the breadth of what we've been discussing. And a lot of that, of course, is encapsulated in the new innovation strategy that's just been published as you you mentioned before and it's just come out in the last week or so. And obviously, UKRI has had an enormous contribution into the writing of that strategy. What do you think of the your priorities when you when you look at what it contains and what do you want to take forward from there to actually start implementing it? What are what are the sort of the key headlines for you?

Ottoline Leyser: 21:25

So it is very exciting to have the strategy for me what UKRI absolutely uniquely can bring because we reach all across the disciplines, all across the sectors, all across those many diverse organization types that are conducting research and innovation. We can really drive the connectivity element I think both in terms of supporting much more effective join up between the discovery research base and business but also within the business community providing that single front door so that businesses can navigate that complex landscape more easily, can access the support that they need in a more, obvious way. So what I I would like us to be is that focal point, I suppose, node in the system that helps the whole system work effectively and efficiently, by joining up all of those many and wonderful dots.

Jeremy Silver: 22:20

You mentioned the breadth of it. The statute itself doesn't talk very much about the individual needs of individual industrial sectors. And slightly obliquely, the industry sort of makes makes an appearance in the in the family of technologies in as much as there are some references to some industries there, although in a slightly sort of oblique way, it doesn't really have a sector focus or prioritization. So what what's your sense from an industry point of view, from a business perspective, how do you think that individual businesses and industrial sectors should respond to that?

Ottoline Leyser: 22:53

The individual sector strategies are continuing to merge. So there's a new life sciences vision for example that was published a couple of weeks ago now. There's a space strategy on the way out into the real world soon. So there are individual sector strategies emerging and then I think there is a feeling that the call for missions in the innovation strategy will be met over a slightly longer timeframe than the framework under which we put together, working very closely with base and all kinds of colleagues very much led by BEIS, the innovation strategy itself. I think some more sector focus in the form of these missions will follow in due course particularly I think in the context of the new office for science and technology strategy that's being set up in the cabinet office.

Ottoline Leyser: 23:42

And I think that central government leadership is really valuable if you are making really high level strategic choices about focus in the nation, then, having that central leadership is really important so that the policies can be joined up across all the different government departments to align as they are beginning to do for net zero to deliver on these major national goals.

Jeremy Silver: 24:05

I was going to ask you about that because at the same time as, within the sort of same time frame, we've had the announcement of the new Council For Science and Technology and then the new enhanced office of science and technology strategy advisory as as well as the announcement of ARIA as well. I just wondered, and UKRI sits in the midst of all of that as well. How do these all intertwine? How do they work together? Because from the outside, some of us might look at this and feel a little unsure.

Ottoline Leyser: 24:34

The National Science and Technology Council, that's the prime ministerly chaired council, which the office for science and technology strategy will serve that unit which is a kind of central number 10 type unit. To me that's remaining recommendation of the nurse review, which is as you will recall the implementation of which led to the formal instrument of UKRI in the first place, bringing together the disciplinary research councils with Research England which supports the universities in England but collaborates with the equivalent bodies in wells and Scotland and Northern Ireland and of course innovate UK as the business facing element. So bringing those things together to create a stronger interface out to the research innovation community but also into government. And then there was supposed to be or recommended a really high level ministerial committee to embed that key strategic thinking about research innovation right across government. And National Science and Technology Committee I think very much fulfills that role.

Ottoline Leyser: 25:32

It's a very high level role. Its job is not to say this grant should be funded or this catapult should be funded. It's much more high level strategy about how the nation should focus the efforts that it has from the point of view of of strategic advantage and national security and all of those really important things as well as, of course, our economic growth. And so really thinking at that level in a way that then depends on organizations like UKRI to ensure that that strategy can be delivered and enacted. But it's a very high level strategy, I view it and very much about cross government join up.

Jeremy Silver: 26:12

Where does industry insert itself into that conversation? Do you think is industry represented on the council, for example?

Ottoline Leyser: 26:21

The full membership of the council is as far as I know, not yet published. It's chaired by the prime minister and the key ministers from the relevant departments will be present. And so I would hope that those ministers would have strong relationships with industry across the board, that particularly the industry is irrelevant to their particular remit. So one would hope when we get feed in that way, there has been discussions about additional membership to that council which would include UKRI but also a small number of thought leaders from key sectors where industry obviously is crucial. But as I say, that's ongoing.

Jeremy Silver: 27:00

Still a work in progress. It's still

Ottoline Leyser: 27:01

a work in progress. I have not seen the final format of what that will look like. But you're absolutely right. It's essential that that, industry is fully understood on these structures. There's also within the existing government office for science, science and technology insight function that's being built up to scan the horizon much more actively and proactively and again, deep industry engagement and that's going to be really important to make sure that really there is a really good understanding of what the opportunities are at any one one moment, so I think that's crucial.

Jeremy Silver: 27:33

You're you're about to talk about ARIA as well. So what does ARIA fit in?

Ottoline Leyser: 27:36

So if that's a really high level committee talking about cross government strategy and being ARIA is almost the opposite to me. It's it's the kind of wild and free thing over here that's able to experiment with different ways of funding research, innovation, different ways of even thinking about the system, taking, you know, it's small, it's agile, it's people who think divergently in the in the cognitive sense, not, you know, in any kind of pejorative sense, you really think broadly and any sector. It's very open at the moment, very much will be up to the director how and in what direction it's taken. As I say, I see it as the kind of the wild card almost. Both of those organizations will critically depend on having a really healthy and vibrant research and innovation system in which and through which to work.

Ottoline Leyser: 28:35

ARIA can't work without that system. The OSTS and the National Science and Technology Council will obviously not be able to enact any of its policies without that full system, business, academia, independent research institutes. And I very much see it as the job of UKRI to support that vibrant creative system in any way we can to to invest the large amounts of public money we get to create the system, that can deliver for the UK.

Jeremy Silver: 29:02

So we're we're nearly at the end, but we started and you made a a number of references at the beginning of our conversation to diversity and inclusion. And in your UKRI blog, you've written passionately about your desire to see innovation and research open up to being more diverse and inclusive. Personally, as a working mom in a world that's still quite male dominated, I just wonder what would you say to the younger generation to make their journey smoother and to create a future that's more open to equality, diversity and inclusion?

Ottoline Leyser: 29:33

You can look at this through a variety of different lenses. And I try to precisely because you need to from a diversity point of view. So I think there are, to start with, at some level, research and innovation is massively diverse, not necessarily in the colors of the skin of the people working in it, but the roles available, the opportunities, the just extraordinary, very exciting range of things and it's not all boffins rattling test tubes. There are extraordinary range of jobs. UKRISE running 101 Jobs that change the world campaign at the moment where they're trying to illustrate the extraordinary breadth of roles.

Ottoline Leyser: 30:09

There are core to research innovation that are not being a researcher or an innovator. So there is a place for everyone to deliver these extraordinary benefits for society by joining it with the research and innovation agenda. So that's kind of one element, you just got to think about the system as the full system which can support a huge range of skills and talents, needs a huge range of skills and talents. You know, if you go to the other end, the more kind of classical almost EDI approach there, I think for me the key, it actually comes a little bit down again to our obsession with a small number of performance indicators. We have mapped out in our mind that the career path for a researcher and a system that needs people with actually a much wider range of backgrounds and skills and talents.

Ottoline Leyser: 31:05

And so I think we need to think really hard about the way in which we assess researchers and innovators at all points in their careers and throw away the lists of papers you've published or the lists of, I mean that that kind of narrow set of assessment is really unhelpful for supporting people who have been at the coalface in some kind of practice based profession. We've really extraordinary understanding of what's needed and and what can make a difference. And that person then thinks, oh, I would really like to do a PhD on really trying to understand exactly as you were saying earlier to research what works in this area for example. And they show up at the university and their a levels were 10 years ago and they were in some completely other topic. You know, we've got to find a way to welcome those people with their extraordinary ideas and creativity and different ways of thinking about things into the system because that difference is really what creates the extraordinary innovative outputs that we need.

Ottoline Leyser: 32:07

There's really good evidence that diversity is necessary for the range of creativity that we need. I am completely obsessed with it because I think it's key to to our success and it's about freedom. It's about trusting ourselves more, I think to take the risks and to work with that wide range of people who will challenge us more, rather than just kind of huddle together for warmth touching our certificates or degree certificates.

Jeremy Silver: 32:35

Incredibly refreshing to hear you talk like this and and it does feel to me that we're facing problems of the kind and that we've never faced before as a as a species, and our planet is in such a precarious state that it seems obvious that we we've got to find new ways of looking at problems and new sorts of solutions. And is this part of it, the sense for you of bringing more fresh brains?

Ottoline Leyser: 32:58

Absolutely. It's one of the things that if you're in a research environment and your whole kind of M. O. Is about going to places where no one's ever been before. You have to think of if you kind of go back to the science superpower, quite reminded of some of those kind of superhero movies where you want to have, you know, multiple people with the different special powers to go with you to fight the enemy of the unknown rather than having to go all by yourself.

Ottoline Leyser: 33:27

I mean, that that is very much how I see it.

Jeremy Silver: 33:30

Perfect sense to me, I have to say. We're nearly at the end. So I I've I've got one final question that I always ask, I guess. It's very, very interesting to get a reply, but we've talked a lot about innovation and and how important it is, but what's your favorite innovation?

Ottoline Leyser: 33:43

What's my favorite innovation? Oh, good heavens. I'm going to do the opposite. Okay. So the way I think about and that proves the world around and that proves the world around you and also can start a highly successful business and so on and so forth.

Ottoline Leyser: 34:03

And the example I like to pick because it's very simple and everybody knows about it, you probably know about it too is if you wear glasses, the little screws that hold the things onto the lenses, they're dreadful, they come loose and they come out and most people who wear glasses have to carry around a baby screwdriver with them to screw it back in again. Why? Why hasn't somebody fixed that problem? You could make a fortune to that. So that's an innovation that hasn't happened yet, that is on the way.

Ottoline Leyser: 34:30

And I guess, you know, I use that slightly differently because that's the point really, there's a huge range from tiny little things that just would make a little bit of difference to everybody's lives to huge, you know, how do we capture CO2 effectively from the atmosphere? How do we cure, you know, horrendous diseases? How do we create a more equal society? I mean, huge questions where you want solutions down to the little screws in people's glasses.

Jeremy Silver: 34:56

What a what a what a brilliant and precise way to end our conversation. Thanks so much. I feel that we could have carried on talking much longer, but but thank you so much for joining us this week, Otili and Liza. Thank you for sharing all your views on the future of UK innovation and and the role of UKRI, particularly within it.

Ottoline Leyser: 35:13

And you're very welcome. Thank you. It's been a pleasure.

Jeremy Silver: 35:15

That's all for today's Supercharging Innovation podcast. Thanks for listening. Join us again for the next podcast episode, and make sure you subscribe to us on iTunes or Spotify. Other podcast distribution platforms are, of course, also available. Goodbye.