Public-Private Collaboration in Action
Q&A with Dr Barbara Ghinelli, Director, Clusters and Harwell Campus, Business Development, UKRI-STFC
1. As a world-leading science and innovation campus, Harwell is home to over 240 pioneering public and private sector organisations. What is Harwell’s makeup, and what is its mission?
The Harwell Campus is built around the UK’s Rutherford Appleton National Laboratory, a primary centre for R&D and the site of large national facilities such as the Diamond Light Source synchrotron and others that have application across a broad range of scientific disciplines. A primary attraction of the Campus is that it provides industry with access to this R&D base, stimulating innovation and accelerating its commercialisation. We do this through thematic, high tech clusters that encourage partnerships which promote collaboration, attract international investment and top-tier talent, advance the frontiers of world-changing science, and realise the incumbent societal and economic benefits.
By ‘clusters’, we mean creating concentrated environments of innovative companies and organisations, from start-ups and scalable micro-businesses to recognisable names we all know, to foster cooperation and commercialise powerful ideas and research across key themes. Each of these clusters has a clear governance structure, overseen by a Steering Board and individual Cluster Development Groups. Our clusters include Space, EnergyTec, HealthTec, and Quantum, which incubate and cultivate innovation, and encourage the sharing of ideas across these sectors, driving growth and empowering companies to interface with one another.
2. Why is public-private sector collaboration important to R&D, when we’re seeing record levels of venture capital investment into the Arc’s most promising companies?
It is important to remember that Government has invested over £3bn in world-leading national science facilities at Harwell so far this century. This impressive accumulation of knowledge-intensive funding has been vital to the formation of several world-class institutions within the Oxford-Cambridge Arc, not least the new Rosalind Franklin Institute for medical research, and has harnessed the economies of scale and long-term capital necessary for new innovation to thrive. Public investment has contributed to the generation of a huge and evolving knowledge base on the Campus.
Of course, while public investment is important to fuel future innovation, collaboration is where the larger gains are unlocked. Some of the biggest opportunities initiated on campus have their origins in relatively small public-private programmes, like the cross-cluster proof-of-concept, which accelerates the germination process from idea, to proposal, to delivery, which has in turn attracted millions in venture capital funding. This is true innovation in action which couldn’t have happened without the commitment from public organisations, and Harwell’s role in promoting collaboration and encouraging public organisations to talk and work with one another and together with industry.
Harwell has created a common vision and the conditions necessary to establish effective and impactful partnerships. To many this might be basic, but it’s fundamental. Harwell facilitates collective ambition, which is much more than the sum of its individual parts.
3. How important is plurality of size and approach to creativity, and to diversity of thought within Harwell Campus?
Innovation is not always easy to drive within large organizations that have established working models. That is why larger companies tend to seek creative ideas that originate within start-ups and small companies that have fresh ideas and can be more agile. When you pull together the two at a commercial level, that is where the opportunities exist; and Harwell and its clusters is where this interface can and does happen.
We have the likes of Oxford Nanopore, who have just raised an IPO and are growing very fast, and enterprises such as Vaccitech at the forefront of current life science research, especially in the aftermath of Covid-19. Within the Space cluster, we now have 105 organisations that employ more than a thousand people, and within that a varying composition of capital requirements. Small or large, fast-moving or more focussed on the long term, we see every company harnessing opportunities within a cluster to link-up and collaborate.
4. What are the benefits of being located within the Oxford-Cambridge Arc?
Harwell is in many ways a microcosm of what the Oxford-Cambridge Arc has the potential to achieve. The Arc benefits from a world-renowned knowledge base, some of the best facilities and lots of successful businesses as a real launchpad for growth. Knowledge catalysts like Harwell and Granta Park have a major role to play, building on the vast pool of knowledge and developing skills cultivated within the region’s universities and beyond.
The Quantum Computing Centre at Harwell wouldn’t have happened without the University of Oxford. Another large-scale, state-of-the-art facility within the Arc, the National Satellite Test Facility, will be ready in a few months to test large satellites, exactly the kind of mutual asset in the Arc that will benefit the enterprises that operate at Harwell, but also the wider strategic needs of the UK economy.
We’re only just scratching the surface of the region’s untapped potential.
Get in touch
Dr Barbara Ghinelli
Director
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