www.hepi.ac.uk 5 Introduction The research landscape is important.1 Public investment in the research base underpins wealth creation and quality of life through the training of highly qualified people, the development of knowledge capacity and the delivery of innovation. [...] Following various attempts during the 1950s to build momentum for investment in a UK version of MIT, the often quoted invocation by Harold Wilson of ‘the white heat of the technological revolution’ was the classic example from the 1960s.6 The inevitable failure of science alone to revive (or replace) the coal, steel and car industries by the mid-1970s led to Shirley Williams's verdict as Secretary. [...] What has been the outcome from this level of investment and does the ‘blind spot’ actually play out in the research productivity and performance of the West and East German institutions? On this we need to exercise some caution, since the structure of the German research base has developed in a fundamentally different way to that in the UK. [...] In the early period, the average output of the 24 higher education institutions in the East was 646 papers over five years while the average for the 74 higher education institutions in the West was 729 papers. [...] The comparison between the cumulative output of papers published in journals indexed on the Web of Science and the distance from Westminster of the publishing higher education institutions follows a similar pattern to that seen in the funding data.
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- United Kingdom
