Regional Heterogeneity in UKRI Funded Projects

After nearly two decades of place-based innovation funding, UK policy has steered investment toward regional research strengths. Using BERTopic method, we analysed UKRI‑funded project from 2006 to 2024, uncovering 69 underlying research themes across 12 UK regions. The headline result is a paradox: at the national level, funding remains stubbornly concentrated in just four broad areas—society and policy, climate and crops, biomedicine, and quantum technologies—and this core structure has barely shifted in two decades. Genuine regional distinctiveness does not appear among those top‑ranked themes. Instead, it emerges only when you look at what we call “secondary specialisations”, meaning the topics that sits outside the top 4 but within the top 10.

From these secondary patterns, the report identifies six maturing innovation clusters, each rooted in existing strengths recombined with new technologies: low‑carbon circular manufacturing in the East Midlands, mission‑critical science and AI‑enabled materials in the North West, offshore renewable engineering and AI systems in Scotland, net‑zero industrial materials with a bilingual digital layer in Wales, manufacturing‑health‑AI convergence in the West Midlands, and secure connected systems with green mobility in Northern Ireland. The policy implications are clear: future place-based funds should target these secondary specialisations, regions should align clusters with the Modern Industrial Strategy, and funding models must be tailored to cluster maturity. The real challenge is no longer finding research strength but building the coordination and infrastructure to turn it into lasting economic impact.