“Bizarre meaningless guff” the triple helix explained

Fresh from his tour of every postcode Andy Burnham PM arrived at the House of Commons to set out his stall for the year ahead. It was good to see him dredge the deep well of industrial strategies to say that:

We will back local industrial strategies, a policy of the Theresa May government I am happy to revive by identifying priority sectors and developing the triple helix approach to economic development by entwining business, academia and government behind the plan.

Triple helix is one of those terms that is widely used but loosely applied to all kinds of university and business interactions. Inevitably, The Spectator has called the term “bizarre meaningless guff” and while the phrase is not the most pleasing on the ear it does have some meaning.

Burnham’s model for economic growth is that the state should do things the private sector has failed to do and the private sector should do things the state would not do well. Utilities can be publicly owned and foreign capital can be encouraged to build skyscrapers. Trains should be nationalised but AI is definitely a good thing. You get the picture.

The triple helix is an attempt to bind the ideas of academia to the dynamism of industry to the stability of the state. The term triple helix isn’t very good because it’s meaningless, or woke, or whatever problem The Spectator has with it, but because it is misleading. Helix implies three parts that are bound to each other equally but the model as initially developed proposes something else.

The basic dynamic is that universities work on the supply side of ideas. They do foundational research which exists with a large degree of theoretical uncertainty. Industry makes use of these ideas and exposes them to the uncertainties of the market. If the market validates the theory the ideas become real. A kind of academic-industry equilibrium is established. Academia thinks of things which are not yet real. Industry takes the not yet real and tests it against the market.

The government is not an equal partner in the helix. It has at least three distinct roles. It puts in place the incentives that encourage the production of the ideas and the adoption of them. It forms supra-national alliances that allow for the transfer of ideas on a larger scale. It also sets the rules of the game for the transfer of ideas with laws, taxes, investments, regulations, and other kinds of interventions.

What Burnham is saying is different parts of society should work together to grow the economy. His phraseology is weird. A triple helix approach isn’t about everyone joining in but about the government as a facilitator of a changing relationship between industry and academia. It isn’t a description of direction but a dynamic. Sometimes academia will do things industry does, sometimes the government will incentivise industry to do research, and sometimes the boundaries between academic and industry evaporate entirely.

There have been adaptations to the model. There is a quadruple helix which emphasises the role of society as a distinct actor in the research system. The quintuple helix adds the natural environment, and concerns about its sustainability, as another strand to the ever expanding helix universe.

Universities have also framed some of their own work as triple helix partnerships. Again, they broadly mean they develop ideas that are useful to commercial industry in a way that matches government ambitions and incentives. The description is not quite a helix but a bridge between two parts of the economy with complementary but different aims and means.

It would be a mistake to view Burnham’s statement as an indication of wider science policy. It is a vote of confidence for the industrial strategy, and a mark of his wider politics of hoping state intervention can enable the success of the private sector. As the man who once coined the term “platinum pentagon” as a rejoinder to the golden triangle the sextuple helix is surely next.