The cri de coeur of the independent reviewer is for their carefully worked out recommendations to be accepted in their totality. Not cherry-picked by a government on the hunt for low-hanging fruit to pick off and declare a win.
The independent Nurse review of the UK’s research, development and innovation (RDI) organisational landscape – announced in 2021 as part of the government’s Innovation Strategy – is a case in point: Nurse argues that only by adopting the report’s recommendations in full and, additionally, creating or tasking a cross-departmental working group to ensure those recommendations are implemented, will the government achieve its ambitious hopes for R&D.
This makes a lot of sense when the object of scrutiny is a complex ecosystem in which people and organisations interrelate in not always predictable ways – to tinker with one aspect of RDI policy can cause unexpected consequences in another.
And smorgasbords of initiatives and strategies designed to solve short term issues – or grab headlines – rather than address long term structural issues and build a sustainable infrastructure, Nurse points out, is what got us here in the first place.
