UK Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills, Baron Mandelson, Asks for New Ways to Encourage Collaboration Between Researchers and Industry. (July 28, 2009)

Peter Mandelson, the UK's Secretary for Business, Innovation and Skills in his first speech on higher education since the newly formed department engulfed responsibility for the brief said that more encouragement was needed to forge collaboration between researchers and industry. As Natasha Gilbert writes in NatureNews: "These include incentives for collaboration in the Research Excellence Framework — which will replace the Research Assessment Exercise in 2013 as the UK's principle method of auditing research quality."

However, Lord Mandelson made the point that the challenge lay "not with universities but with businesses." He was speaking to an audience at Birkbeck, University of London. He added that small businesses, in particular, are not aware of the resources available to them "down the road in the local lab".

Whether or not his audience was reassured by his comment: "I do not believe that the function of a university is limited to — or even primarily about — economic outcomes," isn't recorded, but he went on to say that how useful knowledge will be is often impossible to predict. So "the case for a higher-education system that invests in everything from classics to quantum physics is a compelling one".

Lord Mandelson also took the opportunity to announce the commissioning of a review of postgraduate education, to be undertaken by Adrian Smith, the director general of science and research in the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills. It is to be completed in the coming year.

Aside from examining the size of postgraduate education in UK universities, its growth and funding, the review will look at whether postgraduate education meets the needs of employers and how it compares internationally. "[Postgraduate education] is a major export earner for the UK, one which we have perhaps taken too much for granted," Lord Mandelson said.

Nick Dusic, director of the Campaign for Science and Engineering told Ms Gilbert that the government's focus has previously been to try to push ideas out of universities into business, and he is pleased Lord Mandelson seems to recognize that businesses need to be more proactive in approaching universities: "This process can't be forced by the government. It must be defined by businesses and universities."