Spreading the Jam: Examining Patterns of Publicly-Funded Firm-University Collaborative R&D Projects Across UK Regions

UK funding for collaborative R&D between universities and firms has follows scientific excellence, which tends to cluster in certain geographical locations. As former Science Minister Lord Vallance has argued, this kind of funding should not be spread evenly across UK regions, like jam across bread. Nevertheless, recent programmes in UK research and innovation policy have begun to spread the jam a little more widely. The clearest example is the 2025 Local Innovation Partnerships Fund (LIPF), which makes £500 million available to build innovation clusters in 10 earmarked UK regions, with a competed strand open to the rest of the country. The LIPF targets each region’s distinctive strengths in applied research and commercialisation. Despite this shift, we know surprisingly little about how firm-university collaboration actually works across the UK. Drawing on two decades of Innovate UK data on collaborative R&D projects, this report examines where firms find partners, who leads projects, and whether repeat participation builds leadership capabilities.

Our findings suggest that the jam remains piled thickly in the Golden Triangle of London, Oxford and Cambridge. This region dominates funded collaborative R&D projects, funding amounts, and sustained project leadership. However, the rest of the bread is not bare. Several LIPF regions show real strength, with high rates of repeat collaboration and firms progressing into leadership roles over time. Although at a smaller scale, ambitious, high-complexity research is found right across the UK. Notwithstanding this, outside of the Golden Triangle, local firms and universities often do collaborate at the scale needed to drive local economic growth. The report argues that LIPF strategy works best as a complement to the Golden Triangle, rather than a substitute, building regional leadership while maintaining scientific excellence.

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Please also read the related report:

• Beyond the Golden Triangle