5. 6. Statement: The Small Business Research Initiative

Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 3:36 pm on 21 March 2017.

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Photo of Julie James Julie James Labour 3:36, 21 March 2017

Thank you for that, Adam Price. I agree with you that it’s a really exciting initiative, and we have had quite a lot of interest, as I said, from elsewhere to see how we’re doing it here in Wales. And I also agree that we do need to develop some metrics as we go forward. A lot of this, however, has been specific responses to specific grand challenges or problems, and developing the metrics to allow the risk, if you like, whilst also measuring the output will be a task in itself, but we will be taking that forward. If the Member has any particular views on how that might be structured, I’d be very grateful to consider them.

What we’re looking to do is mainstream it a little bit in the way that we respond to challenges and drive some of the technological improvements using some of the Government data systems that we have. The Member may know that—separately to this at the moment, but we can integrate the two—we’ve also been running some data challenges and some hackathons, as they’re called, and unconferences—these are all terms relatively new to me, but that are understood by the small communities of people who support them—to identify challenges that can be solved through our data sets as well, as some of the social, environmental and mainstream core challenges.

In terms of the budgets, they are currently funded out of the core Welsh budget. The budget so far has been just over some £6 million. We’re just looking to see what else we can fund. We’re looking to see what our public sector partners might do, and what we can do with procurement spend, and so on. So, the idea is to drive it into mainstream procurement thinking with a view to solving problems, not just buying stuff.

So, I largely agree with most of the points you made, and we will be taking it forward in that spirit.