There’s a lot that you might not know about Serbia.
Indoor smoking is a national pastime (somebody I met called it applied meditation,) the social scene is so booming that the decline of Monday pub going is seen as a national catastrophe, and Only Fools and Horses is a national obsession*.
I was in Serbia as part of a reciprocal visit of the UK–Serbia Science and Innovation Fellowship Programme. Alongside the British Council and British Embassy I organised twenty science and innovation leaders to visit the UK and I had the opportunity to make a return trip to Belgrade.
Before we get on to what we learned and how it might help the UK I should confess that it was one of the single most rewarding work experiences I’ve ever had. Not only because it was interesting but because every single person I met was kind, generous, and extremely welcoming. From the visitor who bought my daughter gloves, the British Embassy who helped me around, to the fellows who took me on a tour, bought me a drink, or otherwise took time to chat.
Trigger
Liverpool, London, and Belgrade are very different places with very different histories. The aim of the programme was to support the development of the innovation ecosystem in Serbia through reciprocal learnings between the two countries. The trip was ostensibly about sharing knowledge of the UK with leaders in Serbia innovation. In reality, seeing the UK through new eyes was equally fascinating.
The thing that should always be remembered is that how we do things today was never inevitable. The very basis of our entire system from how it is funded, to who gets to attend, to the way it does research, could have been spat out in millions of different ways depending on who was around at any given time. This means that our higher education is forever evolving but the frustration is that the period of stability coupled with the occasional lurch to crisis lack both the dynamism and the certainty to solve some of the country’s greatest challenges.
The university is not the silver bullet to all of societies’ ills but it is probably the closest thing to it. There are no set of organisations that simultaneously educate close to half of young adults, hold the keys to halting global pandemics, staff almost all major public services, and reshape the towns and cities they are based in. And yet, despite the potential of universities few would presently look at the economy and think things are going well.
It was only in explaining how our system is both the centre of the UK’s entire economic future and simultaneously entirely dependent on student recruitment, that research is carried out at a loss, and there is no plan to shore up the sector, that the lack of planning across the system feels neglectful if not outright absurd.
Like in the UK there is no shortage of good ideas coming out of Serbia. There are talented researchers, funders, and policy makers that believe innovation can be the future of Serbia’s economy. One of their key challenges is finding funding for early ideas and the right partners to diffuse those ideas across the economy. A challenge familiar to researchers in the UK. Fellows built models of solutions ranging from building new kinds of incubators, launching global alumni schemes for funders, and using new frameworks to assess the commercial viability of PhD outputs.
This time next year we’ll be millionaires
There are lots of things that help to build the complementarity of research systems.
The research system of Serbia has some similarities to the UK. It has a mixture of public and institutional fundings, Serbia is a member of Horizon Europe, and it has a range of place-based and independent commercial research organisations. It is different in scale to the UK but has complementary strengths in IT and technology, agriculture, engineering, and a range of other areas.
There is a cultural element that can’t really be measured through paper analysis.. It was not in the laboratories or science parks where we always learn the most but in the pubs and cafes. Ultimately, research and innovation is a shared bet that tomorrow can be better through risks than are taken today. This means not only a shared purpose but a shared trust that the people you work with are also in it for the long hall.
Whether it was in Belgrade, Liverpool or London the outlook was the same. Good days are ahead. There is pride in their places and a hope that research can make them even better. And an honesty of what is working, what can be done better, and what would need to change. It is this commitment to things improving that holds the secret for a better future more than any single policy can.
The commitment also comes with an honesty of what is not working. Fellows from Serbia were impressed with the scale of the UK’s ambitions and the various initiatives from knowledge quarters, to public-private partnerships, to independent research partnerships. It was clear in hosting dozens of roundtables that there is a lot of individual success but not enough consideration of how the ecosystem can work together. There is often still a misunderstanding of what the private sector does and how the public sector can engage with it and vice versa. Organisations like LYVA Labs that sit between universities, investors, businesses, and places, are one possible and promising model.
Lovely jubbly
In the UK, the emerging specialisation agenda doesn’t yet adequately account for how capacity can be maintained for inter-disciplinary work which is by its nature often unpredictable. There are few ways to encourage academics to move easily between academic and business and to bring their expertise to both. Institutional design is also largely coordinated on a discipline basis which militates against the easy creation of cross-disciplinary projects.
Serbia has identified some of these challenges and it has a mixture of strategies and funds in place to address them. It has a smart specialisation strategy which aims to enable greater collaborations between civic society, government, academia, and business. There is also the Science fund of the Republic of Serbia which is a public organisation that funds collaborative projects.
One of the reasons these kinds of funds, and indeed these kinds of programmes exist, is that the ecosystem will not naturally toward greater inter-disciplinarity and integration. It needs something to make it happen. However, even these best designed funds in the world can only take a system so far.
Integration, growth, and coordination, ultimately comes down to people. Throughout the fellowship much of the learning and sharing did not happen in the classroom but on tours, in cafes, and in the pub. It was the opportunity for people to come together, to learn about each other, and share their challenges. As the UK research funders build their new strategies they should make sure there is plenty of space for the kind of informality that makes brilliant things happen.
The future of global prosperity is dependent on the ability of people to turn their knowledge into products and services, for institutions to be adequately equipped to mobilise that knowledge, and for countries to work together to coordinate their resources. Some of this will happen by great acts of government. Some of it will happen because a group of people in a pub in Liverpool make a plan for how the world can be better.
*The is a documentary on the phenomena called Boycie in Belgrade: https://www.bigissue.com/culture/tv/why-does-only-fools-and-horses-work-in-serbia/
