{"id":6150,"date":"2021-02-21T10:49:39","date_gmt":"2021-02-21T09:49:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/?p=6150"},"modified":"2021-02-21T10:49:39","modified_gmt":"2021-02-21T09:49:39","slug":"will-aria-sing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/2021\/02\/21\/will-aria-sing\/","title":{"rendered":"Will ARIA Sing?"},"content":{"rendered":"

The much trailed UK version of ARPA now has a name, and it\u2019s not BARPA or UKARPA, it\u2019s ARIA: the Advanced Research and Invention Agency. Not, note, Innovation but Invention. Is this going to be an important distinction or simply permit the old trope of \u2018Brits are good at inventing but not making money\u2019 to come to the fore again? Before this week\u2019s formal Government announcement<\/a>, the Commons Select Committee on Science and Technology had already published its Report<\/a> on the proposal, initially announced in the 2019 Queen\u2019s Speech. If I were to paraphrase their report, I would say this group was a bit suspicious of what the agency might be for and what it might look like, stating:<\/p>\n

\u201cIt is strange that more than a year after its inclusion in two successive Queen\u2019s Speeches, the Government has not clearly articulated the need for, or intended remit of, the proposed agency. To date, it seems to be a brand in search of a product.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And, indeed, the announcement this week still leaves wide open what the remit will be. With \u00a350M initially on the table (out of a committed total of \u00a3800M in the years ahead), it is clear that it will need specifically to identify one or two target areas, at least in the first instance; the field cannot be left undefined and it would be unwise for the money to be salami-sliced across different challenges. However, to date there is no \u2018customer\u2019 explicitly identified, unlike DARPA in the USA for which the Defence Department (and hence the D in its name) is key, so what areas are likely to feature is totally unclear. The remit is still to be narrowed down.<\/p>\n

The intention is that this agency will be distinguished from other funding sources by focussing on \u2018high-risk, high-reward scientific research\u2019. In other words, just like DARPA as spelled out carefully in the book by Sharon Weinberger The Imagineers of War<\/a><\/em>, failure will be a necessary part of ARPA\u2019s success. If there are no failures, then the funding decisions will turn out to have been too conservative. That attitude does not necessarily apply more widely!<\/p>\n

However, aside from not having specified the remit of ARIA, there are also, as yet, no details of how it will operate structurally. DARPA has operated by giving programme leaders \u2013 selected for their vision and technical expertise \u2013 much freedom in selecting the teams that get the funding, by bringing together researchers (academic and industrial) into groupings to fulfil some identified and ambitious goal, a moonshot as it were. So, the two key ingredients are visionary programme managers and funding delivered to teams brought together for a specific purpose. It is not about funding individuals (as with much UKRI funding, or the ERC), nor funding long-standing collaborations. Innovation may require significant disruption to break some persistent logjam or to think the unthinkable.<\/p>\n

This world of ARIA should recognize the importance not just of failure \u2013 and be willing to embrace it \u2013 but also of this disruption. And at this point it seems to me it is key to recognize that this means diversity in the broadest sense. Boardrooms around the world are waking up to the fact that diversity can lead to better profits because moving away from group-think, the traditional behaviours of an established customer base and managers who may all resemble each other, it is possible to bring new perspectives that open up products and markets. A US study<\/a> last year of diversity and inclusion among S&P 500 companies concluded<\/p>\n

\u201cDiverse and inclusive cultures are providing companies with a competitive edge over their peers.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

How does this translate into innovation in science and technology research?<\/p>\n

The evidence here is that diversity \u2013 in the sense of encompassing the work of minorities \u00ad\u2013 again plays a major role in innovation. \u00a0A study<\/a> in PNAS of over a million US doctoral theses (so here it is the diversity background of individuals which is being considered, not teams) over four decades showed that underrepresented groups produce higher rates of scientific novelty, according to the specific methodology used. This, you might think, would lead to highly successful future careers for these minorities, but this was not the outcome, as is probably rather obvious. On the contrary, novel outputs from racial minorities and women (typically the minority gender) were less likely to be cited and built upon by others. It has been well documented that women\u2019s research gets fewer citations (see e.g. last year\u2019s report<\/a> from the Royal Society of Chemistry on gender bias in publishing) and the penetration of the work \u2013 for instance to lead to innovation in products \u2013 will therefore also be reduced, with subsequent consequences for careers. The PNAS study suggests this is equally likely to be the case for racialised minorities, with ensuing negative consequences for their careers too. However, not only their careers, but innovative developments, exactly what ARIA intends to aim at.<\/p>\n

So, the evidence suggests, if you rely on the dominant group \u2013 typically white men \u2013 to drive innovation, you may be making a fundamental mistake. I hope that as ARIA gets going, it will create structures which enable those who make decisions about who gets the money to be visionary in many different ways, not least in looking beyond what one could call the \u2018usual suspects\u2019. This isn\u2019t simply a matter of justice; the evidence suggests innovation will be more likely to arise if a wealth of perspectives is brought to bear on whatever target(s) are selected for funding rounds.<\/p>\n

It will be interesting to see how the ARIA landscape unfolds, as the plans for this potentially exciting new agency crystallise and as \u2013 it is to be hoped \u2013 it finds, to quote the Select Committee, the product of which it is the brand.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The much trailed UK version of ARPA now has a name, and it\u2019s not BARPA or UKARPA, it\u2019s ARIA: the Advanced Research and Invention Agency. Not, note, Innovation but Invention. Is this going to be an important distinction or simply … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":18,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,27],"tags":[1372,934,1451],"class_list":["post-6150","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-science-funding","category-women-in-science","tag-arpa","tag-diversity","tag-high-risk"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6150","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/18"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6150"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6150\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6150"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6150"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6150"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}