Lena Mäler: Research policy – research and innovation for the future, curiosity and benefit

Much has already been written about the research policy bill (in Swedish), and there is a lot of discussion about what the outcome of the policy might be. I myself recently wrote a Dean’s Column on how it is likely to affect the Science academic area, and we recently dedicated a heads of department meeting to discussing the likely implications of the bill, which contains a number of proposals that could benefit the academic area. These issues are also high on the agenda when I meet with colleagues from other higher education institutions.

This time, I thought I would devote a few thoughts to what the Government bill actually says, or perhaps what it does not say. The initiatives being implemented are largely directed towards research councils that, among other things, will make specific investments in excellent and ground-breaking research and in strategic research areas within selected specialisations. It is very clear, even from the title of the bill, that keywords such as “innovation” and “benefit” have grown in importance. Other words that appear frequently are “technology” and “excellence”. The bill bears the hallmarks of what can be read in the so-called Draghi report, “The Future of European Competitiveness”, where innovation and competitiveness are key components.

You could make a game out of counting how often words like the ones I have mentioned appear in the bill. The word “innovation” is mentioned in one form or another about 300 times and some form of the word “technology” is mentioned about 200 times. In contrast, “natural sciences” is mentioned less than 20 times – which is about the number of times that “humanities” or “social sciences” are mentioned in some form. I can compare these last three with “competitiveness”, which appears about 90 times. For a broad-based university like ours, it is a little odd that the disciplines that form our foundation are barely mentioned in the bill.

What is actually meant by the term “excellence”? I remain firmly convinced that most ground-breaking and excellent innovations will be generated by free research, where each researcher gets to choose the areas and methods of their research. It is therefore important that the excellence initiatives mentioned earlier can be a true benefit to all researchers. Under the heading of “Words from the Management”, I have previously written about the importance of the university having transparent and clear processes for attracting the best and brightest teachers and researchers, and that this is the best way to create excellence in research. We have such processes at our university. But if we want to ensure that recruited researchers are able to reach their full potential, it would be desirable to have an increased proportion of direct government funding that could ensure we can have free research in all research areas, including the natural sciences, humanities and social sciences.

This text is written by Lena Mäler, Dean, Faculty of Science. It appears in the section ”Words from the University’s senior management team”, where the management take turns to write about topical issues. The section appears in News for staff.