February 2009 Archives
I came to post something about my recent working experiences, and spotted Alex Connor's post "Culture Shock" which really got me thinking about how, as scientists, we communicate. Not just with each other within our own fields, but also with scientists outside our fields, non-scientists, everybody.
I've just formally accepted the role of project manager (and wielder of big pointy stick of management (tm)) for the Metafor project, which is all about collecting the metadata from climate models. As part of that job, I'm also responsible for the dissemenation of the project, and basically making sure that the people who are likely to use the results from the project are informed about it.
Metafor is closely linked to the Climate Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP5) - an international collaboration which'll provide the model results for the next IPCC's assessment report. So the information we collect not only has to be useful to the climate modellers who run the experiments, but also those scientists in the climate impacts and adaptation areas (who may not know so much about the models) and the policy makers and people who want to know what climate change could mean for their country/town/garden. And we need to get feedback from these people to determine if we've done our jobs right, and the information model we've created is useful enough to last longer than the lifetime of the project.
It's a lot of people to think about. (I was one of them, when I joined the project I knew sod all about climate models. I'm a bit better informed now, but I'm still nowhere near being expert.) And, as you can imagine, dissemmenation is a job as long as a piece of string.
But it's vital. And it involves a lot of communicating.
Communicating is tricky. I spent the first three days of this week in a meeting, listening to domain experts discussing various topics. I've just gone through my many pages of notes, trying to distill them down to a series of actions and issues. And it's astonishing, how many times I've written the same few things down - decisions that were discussed, and decided, and discussed some more. We did have the added wrinkle of international collaboration - partners in the project either don't have English as a first language, or we're seperated by the Atlantic and several time-zones, but these were all people who know this field intimately. Is there any wonder that it gets harder when there isn't a common scientific language to go with a common speaking language?
A couple of weeks ago I went on a UML course, with the specific aim of learning UML as a communication tool. Combine it with a mind mapping software, and you can draw pretty pictures to illustrate concepts quickly and easily. That's a help for communicating, but there's a lot more to it than that.
A week or so ago, I was on another course, which as a tangent had tips and tricks for how to network, do small talk, insert oneself into a conversational group, that sort of thing. That's comunication too, at a very fundamental level. The fact that we had to be taught it just goes to show how it's not something that's natural to a lot of people.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that scientific communication and knowledge transfer is a serious job. Yes, it can be done, and has been with great success many times. But it still requires effort, and, more to the point, recognition. It's too easy for scientists and business people to only talk to others of their own kind. It's really hard to bridge the gap (I know, I've tried) and go cross-disciplinary, or take science and turn it into engineering.
The Knowledge Transfer Challenge is more a challenge than a problem, but that doesn't mean it's not important. And I really don't think we've cracked it yet!
Research and development is on the up in UK industry, well, it certainly was in 2007 according to data released last week by the Department for Innovation Universities and Skills. The R&D scoreboard identifies the top spenders on R&D and shows that the total R&D spend in top 850 companies rose by about 7% in 2007/8.
Of course, 2007 is a foreign country, economically speaking, and the list of top spenders is different there: in addition to the expected names, the pharmaceutical and aerospace companies, also included are a couple of large investment banks. It is a fairly safe bet that when the 2008 figures are reported early next year there will be some changes, but hopefully not too many: research and development is the engine of science-based companies - no R&D, then no new technologies, and no new products.
The Institute responded to the release of the scoreboard with a welcoming press release which made a point about the way data is collected: the scoreboard charts the performance of the largest UK R&D spenders, rather than the total UK spend. While it is true that the big companies are extremely important, smaller science-based businesses also conduct extensive R&D, and it is just as critical, if not more so, for a small company to be on the cutting edge of product innovation and scientific research. The Institute's own R&D calculations which use slightly different government data (the differences between the analyses are somewhat arcane, and each method has its merits, but the Institute's analysis also includes data from smaller business R&D in addition to the big spenders) show an overall downward trend in R&D spending in high-technology businesses, and that it has been going on for a few years now.
This may seem unimportant against the success of the big spenders, but small businesses are crucial parts of the engine of innovation in the UK and are especially important in moving research from physics laboratories to the marketplace, and they need to be supported. And, or course, while they are small businesses now, they just might be the large businesses of the future.
