Business motivations to do science engagement

The Royal Academy of Engineering and the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills have recently conducted research into the motivations for businesses to engage the public in science and engineering. Engagement in this context included science communication and education as well as more dialogue-based initiatives.

The key finding was, perhaps unsurprisingly, that businesses have a range of motivations for engaging the public. Those motivations included raising their own profile, improving their reputation, or inspiring bright young people to join their business sector. The report therefore recommended that if seeking to encourage more businesses to engage with the public, the focus should be on purposes rather than process. In other words, what will interest businesses is what they will achieve by participating in a project, rather than simply a commitment to engagement in itself. How can dialogue speak the language that business uses?

The report also found that very few businesses saw engagement activities as a way of the public informing decision-making. While this might be consistent with many areas of science engagement that are predominantly educative or communicative, persuading business of the value of dialogue as a way to inform their policy is a challenge for anyone wishing to involve businesses. As last year’s Science for All report outlined, having potential influence is key to dialogue on science. Any dialogue exercises run by businesses that do not include ways to feed into policy decisions (whether made by businesses or Government) but intentionally or unintentionally give the impression that they do, will damage public trust in dialogue across the board. The golden rule  with all dialogues is clarity and openness on the purpose.