I joined policymakers, researchers and statisticians in Paris last week for the fourth OECD Blue Sky Forum. Held once every ten years, the forum considers the evidence we will need to understand science, technology and innovation in the decade ahead. I presented NCUB’s work on researcher mobility and contributed a second presentation on university–business collaboration data and where measurement should go next.
The thing that stood out to me was how much we are asking of science and innovation. Growth and productivity remain central, but the questions extend to resilience, security, trust and how research improves people’s lives. Geopolitical shifts and rapid advances in AI are making those questions more urgent. For those of us working on evidence, the challenge is making sure we can give policymakers useful answers.
AI ran through many of the discussions. There are opportunities to connect different sources, analyse more information and produce evidence more quickly. But we still need to understand where the data come from, whose experiences are missing and whether our indicators capture what matters. More powerful tools make human judgement, transparency and trust increasingly important.
My presentation on university–business collaboration explored where our evidence needs to go. We can measure research funding, contracts and patents, and these tell us important things. The harder questions concern how relationships develop, what each partner contributes and what changes as a result. Does a partnership help a business develop the capacity to innovate? Does it bring new problems into university research? Do the benefits reach beyond the organisations directly involved?
For me, the direction should be towards evidence that connects the activity we record with the outcomes we want to understand. That means capturing a wider range of interactions and getting better at following them over time. It also means recognising that collaboration takes different forms, with different purposes. A single measure will never tell the whole story.
My second presentation, on researcher mobility, made that challenge concrete. A researcher might move permanently into a company, spend six months on secondment or combine academic work with a role in industry. Each arrangement can carry knowledge, skills and relationships across organisational boundaries. Yet the picture we get depends on which movements we count, whose careers we can follow and the period we observe.
A clear takeaway was the need for a common international framework for measuring this mobility. Better data will help, but we also need shared definitions and clarity about what countries are comparing. And counting moves is only the beginning. For policy, we need to understand whether those moves help businesses solve problems, open up research questions or build relationships that last.
The two presentations came back to the same point: people and relationships are central to how research creates value, and our evidence needs to reflect that.
This is where NCUB has something useful to contribute. Our members experience these relationships directly, and our research can connect that experience with the broader picture policymakers need. I left Paris convinced that the next decade will require more imagination in how we produce evidence and more care in how we use it. NCUB’s contribution is to make the value of research, talent and collaboration clearer, so that policy can better support the partnerships that deliver it.
Principal Economist, NCUB
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