Professor Ronan McNulty:

I will give the committee a few figures concerning the multiplier effect and the value.

One statistic Jean-Marie Le Goff came out with in the European Commission was that every €1 paid to industrial firms generates €3 of additional sales for it. That is merely sales, and nothing about the extra knowledge benefits. It is just purely how much money they made. Mr. Hendrick has a similar story that I hope the committee will have time to hear about his company at CERN, and the multiplier effect there that seems to be a lot bigger than three. There is also a survey by Bianchi-Streit that showed a factor of four on both sales and cost savings that companies had.

This, however, does not take account of the knowledge that one also acquires. If one includes the knowledge that a company gains by being involved at the cutting edge, the multiplier is much greater. Surveys of companies have been done and they have found that 40% of companies working at CERN developed new products, 40% increased their international users and 40% increased their technology learning. A study by John Womersley for the Science and Technology Facilities Council came up with a ten-fold return on investment for the collider that preceded large Hadron Collider and included improvements to the economy and in terms of the training of physicists, or valuing the training aspects of that.

Depending on how one does the calculation, which is not an easy one to do, one gets a factor of between three and ten. That does not include things like game-changing and completely disruptive technologies like the world wide web, which, as we know, came out of CERN. If one includes how one values that, one realises that 20% of the GDP of modern economies is a result of the Internet, and that comes from a McKinsey report.

Quite apart from a straight multiplier of three to ten, there is the chance of something huge that changes the whole of civilisation.