Opening Remarks

Good morning, everyone and a warm welcome to today’s event on ‘’Innovation and Development in the Times of David Wield’’. It is with great pleasure and honour that I open this event today to celebrate the long career and influential work of Professor David Wield. 

Dave has been with the OU since the beginning of the 1980s. He joined a couple of years after he returned from Tanzania and Mozambique where he had held lectureships at the Universities of Dar Es Salaam and Eduardo Mondlane. Given his background in engineering, with degrees from Imperial College and the University of London, and his deep concern about development and progress, it feels natural that his amazing research and teaching career all these years have been focused on technological innovation and development policy.

Dave’s research interests and contributions are truly rich within innovation and development. He has worked on industrialisation and new technologies, on knowledge and organisational learning, on risk and regulation of innovative technologies (especially on new life science technologies), on technological capabilities in East and South Africa, and more recently on engineering and innovation. He has attracted millions of external funding for his research from ESRC, EPSRC, European Union and Commission, Swedish International Development Agency (Sida), IDRC Canada, Ford and Rockefeller Foundations. All these research activities delivered over 140 academic publications, including several books co-authored with well-respected academics and practitioners such as Doreen Massey, Ben Crow, Tom Hewitt, Naushad Forbes and others.

However, Dave’s achievements go far beyond grants and academic publications. Dave along with other great academics at the OU and the University of Edinburgh established two amazing institutions and he has been involved in many other forwards-looking initiatives. The first is the Development, Policy and Practice (DPP) Group. DPP was established in 1984 by the ‘Third World Studies’ (U204) course team that included Dave and Professor Hazel Johnson. As I was preparing this opening address yesterday, I looked at the 1984 application document to the OU. That document said the following (I quote):

“DPP was established to initiate and co-ordinate research on development issues within the OU from a wide range of interdisciplinary perspectives. It comprises researchers with engineering, sociology, economics, education, agricultural science, political science, geography and information technology backgrounds within the OU and works in collaboration with associates in a range of British and overseas universities”

Now this statement about DPP is very much true and relevant today as it was in 1984. We have just received our REF 2021 results and feedback which confirm our interdisciplinary and collaborative strength as a community of academic practice. This 38 years of mission consistency of DPP is very much due to the guidance and enormous effort of mentoring from Dave. Dave has been very generous with his time especially when it came to mentoring early career researchers and helping them to progress in terms of new research projects, peer reviewed publications and cases for promotion. I and many other colleagues were extremely fortunate to have Dave as mentor.

The second amazing institution that Dave established with great colleagues such as Professor Joyce Tait and Professor Robin Williams of the University of Edinburgh and Professor Joanna Chataway of UCL is the Innogen Institute that I have been trusted to direct since 2018. Innogen was created back in 2002 as the ESRC Centre in Innovation in Genomics, bringing together UoE and OU scholars to work on the social and economic aspects of innovation in the life sciences. Innogen now celebrates 20 years of active research and policy engagement. Over these 20 years, Innogen has established international reputation as a centre of excellence in interdisciplinary research. Innogen initially received £7M core ESRC funding and over the years it raised more than £16M external funding for hundreds of research projects in more than 30 countries. It has delivered thousands of publications and hundreds of policy relevant reports. It has trained so many young researchers from both the Global North and the Global South. Of course, Dave’s role in Innogen as a founding father and Director was key to the success of this collaborative experiment between the OU and the UoE.

The amazing achievements of both DPP and Innogen very much owe to Dave’s strategic and diplomatic thinking and his mentoring. But, of course, Dave’s contributions don’t end here. Dave supervised an enormous cohort of more than 30 PhD students, some of them are here today as successful academics and practitioners. Although I was not one of his PhD students, I joined Dave’s research group as Research Fellow in 2005, coming from the Freeman Centre of the University of Brighton and the University of Sussex. I did not know much about Innogen and DPP at that point. What I was told though in Brighton before coming to Milton Keynes was that I was very lucky because I would be working with a very nice person: Dave Wield. That has been exactly how I have been feeling all these years working with Dave: lucky, very lucky indeed. So I would like to thank Dave publicly here for everything he has done for me, for our colleagues, for the university and beyond.

The purpose of today’s event is to celebrate his achievements but also to take the opportunity to reflect on our work as a research community in innovation and development. The event here at Conway Hall is divided into three sessions. It is organised to be a series of conversations, with two plenaries and a short film:

The morning session kicks off with a plenary talk by Marc Wuyts on the “Mozambican Miner: Collective Interdisciplinary Research in Mozambique”. 

This first session continues with a panel discussion on “Past and Present: From Radical Science to Creative Industries” chaired by Professor Robin Williams of the University of Edinburgh. This session will include a short film from Alex Bud, one of Dave’s PhD students, on creative industries in Nigeria linked to the Nollywood film and media industry.

After lunch we will have a second panel discussion on “Innovation in the Life Sciences: What has Innogen Contributed?” facilitated by me.

And after the coffee break, we will hear from Naushad Forbes on “From Followers to Leaders and Friendship”.

This will be followed by a third and concluding panel discussion on “Engineering Innovation and Development” chaired by Professor Robin Roy.