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Public Policy|Southampton

New Things Fund: Networked Technology Futures

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By Juljan Krause

HM Government Senior Officials Event Series

 

My NTF journey is a good reminder that starting too big is no less dangerous than thinking too small. My contribution to making the world a better place was going to be this: I wanted to make the transmission between academia and policy more efficient and transparent, no less! To this end, I wanted to get started on a new software tool for users in Government that collects evidence that which maps evidence to academic profiles and research output. While there seems genuine demand for this sort of tool, it has proved immensely difficult to pull this off in such a short space of time. Lesson learnt! Here’s my story.

 

Prior to joining the Southampton PhD community I was working in a number of research-heavy roles at think tanks and a large financial institution. In particular at the latter things would move fast, and research was demand-led. Someone in senior management is asking about interest rate forecasts for East Asia? You’ll have my VAR projections tomorrow! There was no such thing as research output no one cared about. My mindset was that behind each piece of research there is a reader keen to learn all about it.

 

Upon re-joining academia that picture changed somewhat. I noticed how many academics couldn’t help but feel frustrated that some of their hard work wouldn’t get picked up by policymakers, in particular when it addressed really pressing issues. While some academics seem to excel at engaging with policymakers others find it difficult to attract the level of attention that their work deserves. Of course, PPS is all about getting policymakers to attend to Southampton’s world class research output.

 

From my own experience in working in central Government I can definitely say that there is genuine demand for evidence-based research. It’s not the case that policymakers don’t care about academics or were wholly driven by short-term policy cycles. It’s also not the case that the problem is primarily one of presentation and communication. If anything, the policymakers and civil servants I’ve met during my time with the Cabinet Office were most impressed by the engagement activities that academics pursue in reaching out to the world of policymaking.

 

In many instances the issue seems one of evidence base and robustness. It’s hard for researchers in Government to sift through tons of publications, opinion pieces and grey literature to find the evidence base that drive the kinds of policy recommendations that academics make. This is obviously not true in all instances but it’s a stubborn problem. Oftentimes the first response from a Minister to a proposal is to ask about the evidence for it. This is not to suggest that randomized control trials should be the gold standard or that qualitative research wouldn’t matter, far from it. But with many submissions it’s not always immediately obvious on which empirical grounds recommendations are being made, which makes it difficult for researchers and advisers in Government to pick it up.

 

So my idea was to build a clever tool that scrapes research in the public domain for its evidence base and links it to paper summaries and academic profiles. My dreams were big: a content-management system that collects, groups and annotates scientific papers, grey literature, reports, research project news and opinion pieces by types of evidence. The platform was to map research output to its evidence base for fast and easy retrieval. It would build on an ontology that connects datapoints with evidence classifiers. Ultimately, the aim was to enable searches such as “Find research output published after 2018 in the domain of algorithmic accountability that draws on a minimum of 10 interviews but not survey data”.

 

In trying to translate this vision into an actionable plan I’ve received incredible support and excellent advice from the Southampton community. I want to mention in particular Prof Vadim Grinevich from the Southampton Business School and Grace Burton and Alex Dunlop from Future Worlds. I’ve learnt so much about minimum viable products, focus groups and start-up funding all thanks to them.

 

My own market research seemed to confirm that I had a good idea. I’ve had conversations with managers at Salesforce, ProQuest and eBay. Of course, I’ve also engaged with former colleagues in the Cabinet Office and a local council in London where I live. Most of the responses were supportive in that this would be a nice tool to have. But does that mean that there will be actual demand for it, i.e. would anyone in Government actually purchase a subscription to a service of this kind? That’s a whole different question and one that’s difficult to test in a short space of time.

 

Others warned me that there is no shortage of IT systems in Government that never really worked or got picked up. How would my solution be any different? And how quickly would I be able to move from a minimum viable product, essentially a Python script, to a slick platform that looks inviting and would be easy to use? Where would the funding to build it come from? Slowly but surely I had to accept that I wouldn’t find convincing answers to these questions by the end of the funding period. Good things may come to those who wait but I was quickly running out of time.

 

Putting the patience and goodwill of the great people at PPS to a test, it was back to square one for me more than halfway through the project. I still believe that trying to improve the transmission mechanisms between academia and policy is a good idea. Working with former colleagues at the Open Innovation Team at Whitehall, I realised though that more tech is not necessarily the answer to the problem. If for academics the issue is to get their ideas across, why not focus on exactly that? If ministers and senior civil servants won’t pick up your research why not engage with them directly and tell them why they should? So in the end, the NTF funding is being used to put together a high-profile speaker series that gives researchers from Southampton a unique opportunity to engage with top level civil servants and Permanent Secretaries. The event series is planned to commence later this year. It will give Southampton academics a chance to tell senior decision-makers in Whitehall directly why their research matters.

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