Projects

This project will identify what contribution to firm level productivity growth IUK support makes to recipient firms. It will also identify which types of firms benefit more (or less) from IUK support. In addition, we will be able to establish whether there is scope for expanding the reach of IUK support activities to a wider pool of UK firms to maximise their contribution to overall UK productivity. Finally, we will identify how efficient IUK decision-making processes are in allocating funding to applicants.

Project team: Prof Marc Cowling and Prof Nick Wilson

This project will use big data on publicly funded R&D and innovation activities in the UK, combined with other administrative and alternative datasets, to develop new comprehensive measures of innovation and regional technological specialisation.

This project will provide a comprehensive picture of firms’ innovativeness and regional technological specialisation across the UK, capturing aspects of hidden innovation which have not been considered so far by traditional metrics, and identifying innovators among underrepresented segments of the business population operating in low-tech industries and regions.

Project team: Dr  Enrico Vanino

This project focuses on assessing applications for innovation funding, which is challenging and requires significant effort to ensure the process is effective and efficient.

The project aims to shape the development of the next generation of assessment criteria for industrial R&D at IUK, drawing on interviews, a field experiment and archival analysis to understand how new assessment criteria are understood and used by evaluators. In doing so, it will provide insights into the ongoing efforts of Innovate UK to improve its assessment process, and will further understanding of the assessment of R&D.

Project team: Prof Ammon Salter, Dr Rossella Salandra and Nadia Maamoun

Substantial national and international evidence suggests a disconnect between rural businesses and communities and the research and innovation ecosystem.  Rural businesses are resilient and resourceful and make up around 25% of UK businesses.  They could help the UK lead the way with innovation missions such as green growth, healthy ageing and adaptation to environmental change.

This project aims to therefore review existing evidence concerning how entrepreneurial and innovation ecosystems differ in rural areas, consider how innovation is best encouraged and harnessed in rural areas, and explore implications for future innovation support capabilities in the UK.

Project team: Prof Jeremy Phillipson, Prof Matthew Gorton,  Melanie Thompson-Glen, Sarah Best and Natalie Partridge. This project will also leverage expertise from across the wider NICRE partnership.

This projects primary goal is to create a longitudinal database of UK PhD graduates that allows identifying their direct and indirect contribution to invention. While the UK accounts for a comparatively low share of overall patent applications in Europe (about 2.9%, EPO), a high proportion of its research papers is cited in patents (about 10%, Elsevier). A longitudinal database of UK PhDs’ research and inventive outputs would thus provide an estimate on the extent to which graduates support invention through their research.

This project will adopt the methodology developed by DOC-TRACK, a European-wide effort to investigate the performance of PhDs and create a new open access PhD database thus permit comparative studies on doctorate holders’ performance. Academically, this project will contribute to streams of research concerning science and its relationship with innovation.

Project team: Prof Cornelia Lawson, Dr Xin Deng and Dr Catalina Martinez

This project aims to develop evidence and insights into knowledge leakage to support innovation and innovation policies. Better understanding leakage is crucial for balancing the tensions between the need to foster knowledge flows and research collaborations with the need to protect against knowledge leakage. The project aims to provide industry-specific insights with a focus on knowledge leakage in sensitive technologies.

The project will help better safeguard investments in our research & innovation ecosystem, while informing risk assessment and TRI support initiatives. This will support the development of a proportionate response to the TRI threat and evidence-based policymaking.  Ultimately, by better understanding knowledge leakage, the project seeks to support the knowledge flows crucial to the UK’s innovation ecosystem.

Project team: Dr Nicola Searle, Dr Bernhard Ganglmair and Prof Maurizio Borghi

This project addresses ‘determining the constraints to UK economic growth’, and investigates how first-time-innovator rural small businesses could overcome innovation barriers in rural Scotland.

The project focuses on the role of business advice to support these first-time rural innovators, and will delve into how business support interventions need to be tailored to rural small firms. In this context, of interest is what types of business support enables placemaking in rural areas to leverage place-based innovation and contributes to rural development considering the complex interplay between firms and their social, economic, political, physical or spatial contexts (including the natural environment).

Project team: Dr Inge Hill, Dr Serdal Ozusaglam, Dr Hamisu Salihu and Tess Hartland

Access the project page via this link.

The project aims to provide a comprehensive overview of cross-border R&D by UK firms, analyzing how they have adapted to major economic shocks particularly in response to Brexit and COVID-19. This involves examining the innovation collaborations with foreign partners and the variation in innovation efforts across different industrial sectors, with a special focus on green and digital technologies.

The research will develop a major data infrastructure to integrate various complex databases, including firm financial and ownership records and patent data. This will allow for an in-depth exploration of the UK’s role in global innovation, identifying trends in R&D internationalization, and assessing the comparative advantages in key technological domains. Key contributions of the project include enhancing understanding of firm, technological, and sectoral heterogeneity in R&D practices.

Project team: Dr Dalila Ribaudo and Prof Jun Du

This project aims to explore the notions of smart specialisation, twin transitions, and the role of network weaving agents within place-based innovation policy. While previous reports have demonstrated numerous contextual challenges of designing regional innovation policy, there remains a need to explore further how policy-mix scenarios and sectoral adjacencies may influence the route for technology specializations, twin transitions and the technological convergence of R&D and innovation activities across adjacent sectors. While some studies have inferred a need for further empirical work within this realm, few studies explore this complexity.

Project team: Dr Stephanie Scott, Dr Farzana Chowdhury, Dr Bettina Becker and Dr Efpraxia Zamani

This project aims to foster better innovations in different places and their adoption by non-innovating companies believing innovation is a driver of growth and productivity. However, not all innovations are equal and innovative activity is uneven in the UK.

The project will explore questions such as: what some of the most impactful innovations are and, perhaps more importantly, how can policymakers help the delivery of impactful innovations?

Combining quantitative and qualitative expertise to answer these questions. Firstly, patent data will be analysed to identify widely adopted patents (our definition of impactful innovations). Secondly, interviews will be held with creators and users of impactful innovations to better understand their experiences, challenges, and perceptions of support and assess the help they received.

Project team: Dr Anastasios Kitsos, Dr Dalila Ribaudo, Dr Chloe Billing, Dr Charlotte Hoole, Tyler Rickard and Mara Sankey

Access the project page via this link

This project seeks to promote inclusive innovation in the commercialisation of UK university research. Building on existing work point to the lack of diversity and inclusion in innovation and commercialisation, our project seeks to develop a novel approach to mainstream equality and inclusion at all stages of the innovation process. Adopting a process design approach, that brings together key stakeholders to co-produce new innovation tools, that center the needs of a wider range of users. In so doing, our project will provide unique solutions for integrating inclusion into the business practice in order to make EDI part of “the business-as-usual approach” in innovation.

This ambitious project will thus provide evidence of the multiple ways in which inclusion can provide new opportunities for growth in the UK economy.

Project team: Prof Roberta Guerrina, Prof Anne Laure Humbert, Dr Jeff Pilgrim-Brown and Julian Jantke

This project aims to estimate the productivity lost by academic parents because of the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns of 2020-22, and understand the challenges faced by academics who are parents and/or caregivers towards developing evaluation strategies to sensitively accommodate for time lost to research productivity and visibility as a result of the pandemic.

The increase in work responsibilities caused by the sudden shift to online teaching, reduced access to research facilities and other disruptions to research activities. As a result, academic parents, especially women, suffered from a loss of research productivity and competitivity than their academic peers who either do not have children, or have children who are significantly older. The effect of this disruption, especially as it pertains to the research careers of academic parents, is unlikely to be contained to the COVID-19 lockdown years (2020-22) and will manifest over a longer period of time. For academic-parents, means that the hallmarks of a successful academic career necessary to achieve a workplace promotion – research productivity, attracting competitive funding and/or establishing collaborative relationships – will be delayed or else lost entirely.

Project team: Dr Gemma Derrick, Dr Cassidy Sugimoto, Prof Vincent Larivière, Prof George Leckie, Dr Thed van Leeuwen, Dr Pei Ying Chen and Prof Judith Squires

This research project aims to analyse the role and impact of state subsidies on the UK economy, focusing specifically on innovation and firm performance from 2021 to 2023. In recent years, UK government subsidies have grown significantly in the UK, especially after Brexit, with debates on their necessity continuing. The project will map the landscape of UK subsidies, assess their distribution across sectors, regions, and firm characteristics, and investigate their short-term impact on innovation, productivity, and internationalisation. Using a novel dataset that combines financial and innovation data, and a battery of machine learning and econometric methods, it will evaluate the subsidy allocation and effectiveness. The findings will guide policy development, shedding light on how public funds support private R&D and inform future interventions. This study also aims to fill gaps in understanding subsidies’ role in the UK, offering insights into the broader debate on industrial policy and state intervention.

Project team: Prof Jun Du, Xingyi Liu, Michail Karoglou and Prof Sourafel Girma

This project aims to understand what role Innovate UK (IUK) funding has had on the development and growth of AI new ventures in the UK. We leverage unique data from an ESRC funded project that has developed a comprehensive dataset of all UK AI new ventures founded since 2000 combined with IUK internal records.

This project’s goal is to cover the whole innovation funding lifecycle, focusing on three main areas:

1. The selection into application: why certain AI new ventures apply for IUK funding and others do not.
2. The assessment of the applications: whether rejection discourages re-applications and how applying for IUK funding affects future outcomes.
3. The effects of funding: What is the causal impact of IUK funding on non-traditional measures of firms’ outcomes, including the scientific and innovation output, use of its open-source code, and the likelihood of securing additional venture funding.

Project team: Prof Ammon Salter, Dr Federico Bignone and Stefano Baruffaldi

The UK must ensure a reliable supply of critical minerals, such as lithium, to meet net zero commitments. The UK is currently reliant on sourcing such materials globally, but there is the possibility to “onshore” critical mineral extraction and refining, building on a rich history of mining, whilst respecting social, environmental and cultural assets.

The technical challenges of building the UK’s capability in this vital area are well understood, but the other elements of a healthy innovation ecosystem for critical minerals are missing. This project supports existing industry and new investment in UK critical minerals and metals by improving understanding of the non-technical challenges and opportunities (legal, social and environmental) and how to respond to those challenges. The research gathers data from the firms trying to create the innovation ecosystem we need and offers a framework to help this important sector work in harmony with local communities and the environment.

Project team: Prof Alice Owen, Dr Laura Smith,Dr James van Alstine and Dr Taija Torvela

The main objective of the project is to explore the new era of central-local relations in innovation policy following the election of a Labour Government. In summary terms, it consists of three empirical components: (i) mapping the new macro policy context for devolution, innovation and regional economic development; (ii) assessing city-regional strategies in the new place-based innovation policy mix, which consists of the traditional Science + Technology model (eg triple helix arrangements in university-industry partnerships, cluster building, startups and scaleups etc) and the emerging Social Innovation model (eg new heterodox challenge-led experiments in community wealth building and foundational economy initiatives etc); and (iii) the new roles that universities are beginning to play in brokering and convening place-based partnerships in the new innovation policy mix. In principle the two models are complementary, but in practice they can trigger tensions within city regional partnerships given their different constituencies and metrics (Morgan and Henderson, 2023).

Project team: Prof Kevin Morgan, Prof Rick Rick Delbridge, Dr Katherine Parsons, Prof Elvira Uyarra and Dr David Waite

This project aims to provide novel evidence on the role played by public R&D grants in supporting regional technological development, reflecting the diffusion of knowledge and the branching into new technological specialisations across regions.

The project will match data on UKRI funded collaborative R&D and innovation projects with measures of technological innovation output, proxied by patent data, using machine learning techniques. First, we will estimate the direct effects of public R&D funding in supporting regional technological development. Secondly, we will identify indirect effects generated by collaborative networks, which are stimulated by exchange of knowledge between a wider set of partners, including private businesses and public research institutions located in different regions of the UK.

Findings from the study will provide important insights for innovation policies to support a more equal diffusion of innovation and spur long-term development across regions.

Project team: Dr Enrico Vanino and Professor Carlo Corradini

Access the project page via this link.

Rural businesses account for 23% of businesses in England (Defra, 2024) but are often neglected in the innovation research and policy agenda, with rural areas often considered inferior to cities in bringing about innovation. However, the effect of rurality on firm-level innovation – which includes “improved or new types of production and processes, business models or innovations that are not uniquely profit-driven” (OECD, 2023, p.14) – remains a matter for debate, with the evidence base mixed and incomplete.

This project therefore seeks to fill an evidence gap regarding innovation in UK rural economies. First, we examine profiles of rural innovators and how they move from being non-innovators to being innovators. Second, we seek to understand the effect of rurality on innovation adoption and invention by exploring the enabling and inhibiting factors from firms’ internal and external environment. Third, we investigate the outcomes of innovation on firms’ performance. Throughout the process, we will also draw a comparison with urban firms and identify the implications for innovation support strategies and actions.

Project team: Prof Jeremy Phillipson, Dr Thao Nguyen, Natalie Partridge and Professor Matthew Gorton

This project explores how UK businesses can increase their involvement in setting global technology standards – such as 5G and IoT standards – in key fields like artificial intelligence, semiconductors and future telecommunications. These standards are vital as they help companies adopt new technologies, ensure compatibility, reduce risks, gain market access and remain competitive in global markets. However, UK businesses are less involved in developing these standards than their US and Chinese counterparts. The project has two main objectives: first, to understand how participating in standards-setting benefits UK companies, and second, to explore why fewer UK companies engage in this process and the enablers for greater participation. By learning from successful strategies in other countries, we aim to help UK businesses play a more active role in setting technology standards, strengthening the UK’s position in global production and innovation networks and ultimately supporting its long-term technological leadership in these strategically important areas.

Project team: Prof Cher Li, Dr John Moffat and Dr Xin Deng

Innovation involves turning new technologies and ideas into commercially viable products and services. Firms who develop and adopt such technologies and ideas, often find this part of innovation difficult. Hence, special organisations, called Innovation Support Organisations (ISOs), are sometimes needed to bridge this gap. We think that many ISOs concentrate on the development of the technology without also developing or making the markets that enable adoption to be successfully scaled. It is only when technologies and ideas are adopted at scale that they can significantly affect productivity and growth.

Using theories about market-making, this study examines different forms of ISO (including catapults, incubators and accelerators), to see how they might better be able to support the development of markets for the technological innovations they are supporting. It will advise the bodies who fund ISOs (e.g. UKRI) on how to adapt existing ones and to establish new ones that are more effective.

Project team: Prof Katy Mason, Prof Martin Spring, Nicole Bulawa and Dr Francine Morris

Innovation is central to the UK’s future economic growth through its impact on productivity growth. It is associated with better quality jobs, a richer and more diverse range of new products and services, superior internal processes, and resilience in supply-chains. It follows that creating an environment in which more firms are innovative and more innovation is successful will have far wider impacts on the economy by strengthening the UK’s global competitiveness.

This research will provide detailed insights into the full life-cycle of equity backed firms from immediately prior to their initial funding round onwards and establish how equity funding is initially attracted to innovative firms and how subsequent equity funding acts to enhance further innovation, growth, and productivity. It will also explore the impact of different types of equity funding (including Government VC) and identify when in a firm’s innovation life-cycle different types of equity serve the innovative firm best.

Project team: Prof Marc Cowling and Prof Nick Wilson

Business R&D investment is crucial for innovation & growth. To build an innovation-driven industrial base, Governments provide financial support for firms’ R&D. However, firms located in certain regions benefit from unique advantages that can supercharge their R&D capabilities. In some regions, there is a critical mass of R&D infrastructure such as Universities, science labs & clusters of high-tech firms. In the UK, this manifests in the Golden Triangle between Oxford-Cambridge-London. By locating in this region, firms derive significant R&D benefits. Many argue this has come at the cost of permanently disadvantaging firms outside the Golden Triangle, running counter to the principals of ‘levelling up’ and inclusive growth.

Therefore this research evaluates the impact of R&D grants & R&D tax credits on firms located inside vs. outside the Golden Triangle, providing evidence-based actionable insights on how Government R&D support for firms can help reduce regional economic inequalities.

Project team: Dr Kevin Mulligan, Dr Ammu George, Dr Karen Bonner and Prof Justin Doran

Access the project page via this link.

Our project examines communities within coworking spaces (CWSs) as: i) a dynamic repository of scalable INFORMAL business support

ii) with the potential to act as an institutional bridge to FORMAL business innovation support services (BISS). Experiences in CWSs can boost users’ entrepreneurial confidence & self-awareness of their knowledge deficits; the creation of stronger relationships between CWSs & regional BISS providers can better guide SMEs to the right service provider/scheme.

This is important because despite much private & public provision, formal BISS, regarded as critical to SME innovation, are described as ‘insufficient’& ‘fragmented’ yet most SMEs rely on friends & family for informal business advice. The two are disconnected.

Our novel multi-region, mixed methods proposal offers insights to industry & policy stakeholders regarding the connectivity between informal/formal support providers and establishes a pathway for entrepreneurs to navigate across the two.

Project team: Dr Felicia Fai and Prof Philip Tomlinson

This project explores why manufacturing SMEs in the West Midlands are not fully embracing the ‘Triple Transition’—the combined shifts in business digitalisation, adoption of net-zero practices, and productivity upgrading—despite government incentives. It identifies barriers such as limited resources, skill shortages, and lack of awareness and examines how overcoming these challenges can drive innovation, productivity, and sustainability, ultimately boosting the region’s economic growth. Using secondary data, interviews with SME leaders, and focus groups with policymakers, the study highlights challenges and opportunities unique to the West Midlands. By comparing regional trends to national patterns and reviewing government strategies, it provides evidence-based recommendations to help SMEs navigate these transitions, secure a stronger industrial future, and enhance their contribution to the UK’s economy.

Project team: Dr Samia Mahmood, Dr Nadia Ashghar, Dr Kayvan Kousha, Prof Delma Dwight and Prof Gareth Jones

Access the project page via this link.

Legal professionals are cautious about adopting AI due to the high-risk nature of their work and the dominant business model in the industry. A key challenge for professional firms has been accelerating AI adoption, with trust identified as a catalyst of this process. Trust can enable open discussions about AI risks, building confidence that AI will support rather than threaten professional roles. Establishing trust in AI is essential, with peers playing a key role in promoting trust and reducing AI risk perceptions.

Our project examines how trust in AI spreads through interpersonal relationships in a legal firm, creating a “contagion effect” that can lead to AI adoption across a firm. We aim to identify how individual traits, such as hierarchy and demographics, along with key actors, influence this contagion. Our findings aim to guide innovators and policymakers on the conditions that support adoption, offering evidence on how to build trust in AI through peer relationships.

Project team: Dr Francisco Trincado-Munoz and Hannah Isabelle Tornow

This project explores how global access policies (GAPs) can improve the affordability and accessibility of UK-driven research & innovation in the UK and globally. GAPs ensure publicly or philanthropically funded R&D outputs are globally accessible, aligning with open science principles & advancing UN SDG 3 targets on universal health coverage and access to medicines. While some global health funders have embraced GAPs, UK academic funders and institutions largely lack such policies, limiting equitable access to innovations.

The study will:
1. Evaluate the impact of GAPs on promoting affordable access to R&D
2. Identify exemplar GAPs from health research funders and institutions
3. Develop a framework for UK funders and institutions to adopt GAPs.

Using interviews with key stakeholders, literature reviews, & case studies, the project aims to create actionable strategies for deploying UK R&D outputs globally, bridging access gaps, & enhancing economic and societal benefit.

Project team: Dr Becky Jones-Phillips, Dr Ezekiel Boro, Dr Chris Peters, Dr Carolina Velasco and Aaron Argomandkhah

This project will gather insights from experts through a series of surveys to identify what researchers should consider when planning for openness and transparency. Using this evidence, this project will create practical resources, including a step-by-step planning template for researchers and guidance for organisations like UKRI. These tools will help researchers incorporate a broad range of open practices into their work and funding applications, bringing us closer to a truly open research and innovation system.

Project team: Dr Suzanne Stewart

Many researchers and stakeholders are committed to building a more open and transparent research and innovation system. However, there is a gap between this commitment and researchers using a broad range of open research practices in their day-to-day work. This gap is caused by a lack of training, tools, and recognition for these practices. To bridge this gap, researchers need clear guidance and practical tools to plan and carry out open and transparent research.

This project will gather insights from experts through a series of surveys to identify what researchers should consider when planning for openness and transparency. Using this evidence, this project will create practical resources, including a step-by-step planning template for researchers and guidance for organisations like UKRI. These tools will help researchers incorporate a broad range of open practices into their work and funding applications, bringing us closer to a truly open research and innovation system.

Project team: Prof Iain Docherty, Prof Gary Dymski, Prof Alice Owen, Paul Lawrence, Sara Thiam and Graham Thom

The proposed project explores how innovation policies and programmes shape adoption and diffusion across supply chains and their role in enhancing resilience in the UK. Resilient supply chains have become critical amid rising uncertainties from Brexit, COVID-19, geopolitical tensions, and climate change. This project will create a comprehensive dataset and analysis framework, offering new insights into the systemic impacts of innovation policies across multiple supply chain tiers. By addressing significant gaps in supply chain management and innovation literature, the research will deliver actionable, evidence-based recommendations for policymakers, industry leaders, and researchers. Its findings will strengthen innovation diffusion, foster robust and adaptive supply chains, and advance the UK innovation ecosystem. In the face of global challenges, these insights are essential for building resilient supply chains that drive sustainable economic growth.

Project team: Dr Xin Deng, Professor Elvira Uyarra and Professor Kosta Selviaridis

Most studies looking at the impact of public supported R&D and innovation consider benefits to businesses at specific time horizons, examining lagged impacts on innovation and productivity (Vanino et al., 2019). However, there is limited understanding of the potential cumulative and persistent impact of support over time, particularly regarding repeated or sustained engagement with support. This study aims to address this gap by examining the inter-temporal impacts of innovation support on the evolution of firms’ technological innovation and productivity trajectories. Specifically, we are interested how Innovate UK support influences persistence in innovation and productivity, and how these effects evolve with the duration and frequency of support. With anticipated changes to UK R&D funding structures allowing longer funding horizons, this analysis is both timely and relevant.

Project team: Prof Kausik Chaudhuri, Sandra Lancheros Torres and Dr Halima Jibril

Government financial supports for collaborative research and innovation (R&I) projects between Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs) and Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) play a key role in the UK economy. Cultivating a pipeline of innovative SMEs at various growth stages is essential for a resilient R&I system. However, SMEs face significant knowledge and financial obstacles to start and sustain their innovation journey. Government-supported collaborations can provide an entry ticket for SMEs into the innovation game, providing access to cutting-edge knowledge and infrastructure embedded in HEIs.

Collaborative financial supports vary in size and, consequently, the type of R&I they can support. Small-scale collaborative R&I supports focus on small R&I projects. However, the expectation is that they can build up SMEs’ innovation capacity, and prepare them for future larger R&I projects, and R&I funding applications. We term this concept the ‘Collaborative R&I Support Ladder’, which SMEs climb as they grow through their innovation journey. Despite its importance, how SMEs deal with the key ‘second rung on the ladder’, from small-scale to mid-scale collaborative funding support, has been ignored in previous research.

This research uses comprehensive data that tracks SMEs’ R&I and business performance activity from 2006-2021. The data captures SMEs that received initial small-scale support through an Innovation Voucher, and then went on to receive additional mid-scale collaborative R&I funding for more advanced innovation projects. This unique data enables the research to provide actionable insights for policymakers on the most effective ways to build SMEs’ R&I capacity, thus supporting a resilient R&I system.

Project team: Dr Kevin Mulligan, Prof Helena Lenihan and Dr Mauricio Perez-Alaniz

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is increasingly being employed in social science research as a methodological tool, for example, in text mining, prediction, and simulation. This development presents significant opportunities to generate new insights, address complex societal challenges, and inform evidence-based policymaking. At the same time, the rapid adoption of AI highlights the need to embed principles of privacy, fairness, transparency, and accountability within a broader Responsible Innovation (RI) framework to ensure that research outcomes remain robust, inclusive, and trusted.

This project explores how Responsible AI practices can be systematically integrated into social science research and innovation. Drawing on the UKRI Gateway to Research (GtR) database, it will map trends in AI-related social science projects, examine how AI and RI considerations are currently incorporated, and identify key barriers and enablers to wider adoption. Complementary case studies and stakeholder workshops will provide deeper insights and support the co-creation of practical frameworks for implementing Responsible AI and RI practices.

The project will deliver actionable recommendations for the ESRC, offering guidance on how the responsible use of AI — embedded within a RI approach — can strengthen the resilience of the UK’s research and innovation system. By aligning ethical AI practices with the RI agenda in the social sciences, the project aims to build trust, foster inclusivity, and enhance adaptability, supporting the UK’s ambition to be a global leader in applying AI within social science research.

Project team: Prof Bowei Chen and Prof Nuran Acur

This project examines knowledge transfer (KT) within publicly funded research and development (R&D) consortia to understand what makes the United Kingdom (UK) research and innovation (R&I) system resilient. Consortia bringing together firms, universities, funders, and intermediaries, making them microcosms of the wider system. KT, understood as the movement and reuse of ideas, expertise, and know-how, is central to resilience because it allows knowledge to be mobilised, adapted, and sustained across organisational boundaries. Examining KT in consortia, the project reveals, at a micro-level, how the system functions in practice and what conditions enable it to endure.

Building on this focus, the project will trace knowledge flows within the consortium, including what moves, when and how it moves, how it is used, and the conditions that shape these flows. Findings will be translated into practical actions for two audiences.

For consortium participants, we will offer guidance on governance, role design, meeting and documentation routines, and ways to monitor and strengthen knowledge exchange, helping consortia cultivate stronger, more resilient partnerships and enabling more effective collaborations. For policymakers and funders (ESRC, Innovate UK, and UKRI), we will provide concise guidance on programme design, reporting, and monitoring, indicating how to track KT, what facilitates or hinders it, which designs support it, and what targeted support can overcome barriers.

Together, these insights will inform how resilience can be built at the system level, in line with UKRI’s priorities, by showing which actor roles, collaboration routines, and governance and incentive arrangements enable effective KT across organisational boundaries.

Project team: Dr Siqiao Luan, Prof Nola Hewitt-Dundas, Prof Stephen Roper and Dr Jason Wiggins

This project will investigate if and how Focused Research Organisations (FROs) – a novel organisational model for mission-driven R&D – can contribute to a more resilient UK research and innovation ecosystem. FROs are non-profit organisations designed to address the organisational-design gap for managing scientific projects that are bigger than an academic lab can undertake, more coordinated than a loose consortium or themed department, and not directly profitable enough to be a venture-backed start-up or industrial R&D project. They pursue prespecified, quantifiable technical milestones within a finite time (~5 years), actively deploying public goods (e.g. open-sourcing data, spinning out nonprofits/startups, partnering with existing institutions). While FROs have gained momentum in the US, their development in the UK remains nascent. Recent funding from ARIA (e.g., Asterisk Labs), DSIT (Bind Research), and Convergent UK’s FRO incubation and launch programme marks the UK’s early steps in establishing FROs.

In partnership with Convergent UK, this research examines the launch of its first UK FRO cohort to explore the potential of FROs in the UK and the dynamics of their early-development. A key focus will be on UKRI and Innovate UK’s organisational eligibility policies and their potential role in supporting FROs as a growing route for entrepreneurial scientists pursuing ambitious missions.

Outputs are designed to raise awareness of this emerging organisational form to inform UKRI and Innovate UK strategies. The research will offer evidence, recommendations and insights regarding ‘alternative’ organisational designs and their potential to enhance the UK’s capacity for bold, mission-driven science and a resilient innovation ecosystem.

Project team: Gemma Milne, Mary Wang and Dr Jillian Gordon

Widening inequalities and regional disparities have drawn growing attention across policy, academic, and public discourse. While regional innovation systems (RIS) have long interested policymakers, recent concerns about spatial inequality raise critical questions about their relevance and effectiveness in less advantaged parts of the UK’s periphery and semi-periphery, including the northern “powerhouse” with regions associated with high potential and deep disparities. Much existing RIS research focuses on high-performing clusters, leaving a significant gap, and corresponding policy opportunity, in understanding how RIS (can) emerge and thrive in less privileged regions where the potential of innovation-led transformation is most profound.

This research revisits RIS through the lens of inclusivity, and focusing on their social and economic impacts. By synthesising existing evidence and engaging directly with local actors in the North East and North West of England, the project will (1) identify the opportunities and barriers to the emergence of RIS in (semi)peripheral areas including second cities, declining towns, and rural areas; (2) assess the inclusivity of existing RIS in these places in terms of their impact on income, skill development, and the absorptive capacity of local economies; and (3) explore how local actors perceive and interpret the inclusivity of innovations, particularly those developed within their region, and the knowledge networks or systems that support them.

By re-examining innovation systems from these distinct angles, the research will generate evidence-based insights to inform and support place-based and regional innovation policies. It will offer practical recommendations for tailoring innovation strategies to local contexts, strengthening the capacity of under-invested regions to participate in and benefit from innovation-led growth.

Project team: Dr Ozge Dilaver, Prof Gary Bosworth and Prof David Charles

The UK is home to over 131,000 social enterprises which contribute £78bn to the economy, employing about 2.3 million people while tackling some of the most complex social challenges like homelessness, mental health, disability support, substance dependency, employability etc (Social Enterprise UK, 2025). Thus, such enterprises are strong avenues of delivering the UK government’s policy objectives (Choi et al. 2020). While generating social impact, social enterprises are creating innovative ideas, products, services and ways of working with 68% of enterprises generating product or service innovation, often outperforming traditional businesses (Social Enterprise UK, 2023). Nonetheless, these organisations often struggle to get the right kind of funding to facilitate the generation and scaling of innovation. This can often be due to hybrid orientation of objectives and value creation including both social and economic impact, the long-term nature of experimentation and outcome generation. As a result, disparity exists between the innovation potential of social enterprises and available funding mechanisms.

This study, thus, aims to rethink what funding for innovation by social enterprises can look like by bringing together social enterprises and innovation funders into the same room to explore these challenges and solutions together using co-design mechanisms and serious game-based workshops. Participants will explore and navigate realistic funding scenarios, make decisions, swap roles and reimagine the logics and processes of funding. A playful but structured format helps reveal hidden assumptions, value differences and systemic barriers that people may not normally voice, while creating space for collaboration.

By the end of the project, funders and social enterprises will have jointly developed new ideas for what innovation funding could look like to be more flexible, fair and enable scalability. This can ultimately strengthen the UK’s capacity to tackle deep-rooted social challenges through facilitating creative and sustainable solutions.

Project team: Dr Nadeen Purna and Dr. Naman Merchant

This project transforms research on manufacturing SMEs in the West Midlands into actionable, policy-ready guidance for government and innovation agencies. Our previous IRC-funded study (FFTwo0012) revealed that while most SMEs are open to adopting digital technologies including AI-driven systems, Large Language Models (LLMs), and low-carbon practices they face significant barriers such as limited time, skills, and capacity, particularly under high energy costs. Current support schemes often favour larger firms, leaving smaller, owner-managed businesses behind. SME owners often struggle to understand the complex terminologies and jargon used in funding schemes, and due to time, cost, skill, and capacity constraints, they are unable to relate government support to their actual business needs and its potential impact. This project addresses these gaps by providing practical recommendations to ensure inclusive, effective digital and green transitions for SMEs.

Using existing data from the Longitudinal Small Business Survey, interviews, and stakeholders’ focus groups, this Action-to-Impact project will turn those findings into short case studies and a concise policy framework showing what works, where, and why. It will outline simple, evidence-based actions such as “one-front-door” regional support models, micro-grants tied to measured savings and tailored local delivery.

Outputs will include a short, illustrated framework, case studies and infographic summarising actionable insights for Innovate UK, DSIT, and regional policymakers. An online briefing session will share the results. By translating research into clear, usable guidance, the project will help policymakers design smarter support for SMEs and advance digital and net-zero goals while strengthening regional productivity and resilience.

Project team: Dr Samia Mahmood, Dr Nadia Asghar and Dr Kayvan Kousha

This project identifies strategic priorities for investment in the enabling infrastructure for agricultural research in the UK.

Innovation in UK agriculture is essential to food security, public health and climate resilience.i Agri-tech is identified as ‘frontier industry’ in the UK industrial strategy.ii This is reflected in Government spending an average £380M/y on agricultural research and innovation. iii The impact and cost-effectiveness of such funding depends on the quality and suitability of the UK’s research and innovation infrastructure.

Agricultural universities have identified investment in research infrastructure as the sector’s top priority.iv It is also a focus for Government research funders.v This is driven by two main factors: Concern that research farms – seen as a key infrastructures – are undervalued and at risk.

Questions over the most effective focus for future investment, given that agricultural research methods are evolving fast, increasingly relying on digital infrastructure to combine and coordinate large-scale data from multiple sources.

This project: collates information from previous studies of research infrastructure to build an interactive directory of resources specifically relevant to agriculture; surveys hundreds of researchers, on their past and anticipated use of these, to identify key current and future infrastructures; interviews diverse stakeholders their future infrastructure needs and investment priorities; combines researcher and stakeholder insights to develop and critically evaluate strategic investment options and prioritise a recommended investment proposition.

This work will be supported by and will contribute to an independently funded State of Agricultural Research & Innovation (SARI) review for UK research funders and providers.

Project team: Dr Pattanapong Tiwasing, Prof Tom MacMillan, Dr Kayleigh Crouch and Yang Bong

The innovation ecosystem is currently hampered by the fragmented use of separate readiness scales (TRL, CRL, MRL, SRL, among others). This ambiguity hinders effective decision-making, complicates investment and collaboration, and slows the crucial journey from research to market impact.

This Targeted Research project directly addresses this gap by creating the Integrated Readiness Matrix: a unified, single-table standard designed to provide a clear, holistic assessment of innovation maturity. It builds on the Innovation Growth Lab’s prior research into science commercialisation and related work with innovation agencies, including Innovate UK, which proved the value of readiness scales while identifying the critical fragmentation problem.

This six-month project is driven by core research questions focused on understanding current scale use, identifying best practices and defining the optimal structure for scale integration. The methodology employs a mixed-methods approach, combining desk research with semi-structured interviews and validation workshops with leading Technology Transfer Officers, VCs, and innovation agencies.

The core innovation is the standardised alignment and matching of the levels of all scales with corresponding metrics. The final output — a publicly available Integrated Readiness Matrix (IRM) — will replace fragmented approaches with a single tool that defines integrated, empirically derived metrics for every stage of development. This standard will create a common language for all stakeholders, facilitate strategic funding and commercialisation decisions, and support the development of services and collaborations to target the specific needs of enterprises moving from lab to market.

Project team: Albert Bravo-Biosca, Apoorva Srikkanth, George Richardson and Sara Garcia Arteagoitia

This project focused on the spillovers from publicly funded R&D and innovation activity. Spillovers – broadly defined as benefits which accrue to organisations other than the direct funding recipient – are a critical element of the rationale for public R&D and innovation investment, and form a significant element of the argumentation in related business cases and evaluation methodologies.

Existing approaches to capturing spillovers in business case development and evaluation are limited, often based on pre-existing ratios. This project aims to ‘shift the dial’ on this approach by providing IUK and other partners with a more robust and nuanced approach to calculating spillovers drawing on existing evaluation and analytical evidence.

The completed project was designed to draw together and integrate existing evidence on spillovers. We hoped this would highlight empirical gaps which would then form the basis for future primary research.

Project team: Dr Serdal Ozusaglam, Dr Halima Jibril, Prof Raquel Ortega-Argiles and Prof Stephen Roper

The project will involve exploratory analysis of the Innovation State of the Nation Survey 2023 dataset in more detail than previously undertaken. The project will focus analytical effort on several key policy areas, all anticipated to be components of the upcoming anticipated Spending Review.

Project team: Dr Ully-Yunita Nafizah and Dr Halima Jibril

The project will focus on creating a qualitative understanding (via interviews with businesses) of the challenges being faced by business, a greater appreciation of the role of technicians within innovative businesses and recommendations for how the situation could be improved.

Project team: Dr Ully-Yunita Nafizah, Dr Hamisu Salihu and Prof Stephen Roper

This project hopes to look at addressing evidence gaps for the upcoming Innovate UK (IUK) spending review (SR) (likely to be in spring or autumn 2024) with a coherent narrative for investing in innovation to address current economic challenges, including productivity and stagnating living standards, and to justify its spending decisions across a range of programmes, from IUK. The Economics and Insights team have carried out a review of evidence gaps and has identified where these can be filled in-house or by the Caucus.

Evidence gathering is the first stage of preparation for the SR and will require short, expert reviews (SOTAs) on the evidence gaps identified the focus of which will be on fresh ideas for driving productivity growth, supporting place and levelling up, making tax credits work best, and sector-specific support.

Project team: Prof Stephen Roper, Prof Jillian MacBryde, ProfNeil Lee and Halima Khan

The project aims to create a stakeholder-wide consensus on AHSS commercialisation impact by co-creating a logic model of AHSS commercialisation through venture building. To build initial dataset to be used for evaluating the value of AHSS commercialisation through venture building and to sharpen the narratives of surrounding the economic value of AHSS.

Project team: Dr Shera Abdul Rahman, Tomas Coates Ulrichsen, Prof Tim Vorley and Dr Hamisu Salihu

This project aims to aid the understanding about what can be learned from the champions model and demonstrate the role and value of champions associated with current and future ESRC funding programmes. The IRC will create a framework and/or logic model to identify the multiple roles and activities as well as the associated outcomes. The objective is to enable UKRI and individual funders to better understand how to utilise champions as a part of funding programmes to achieve particular aims/outcomes.

Project team: Prof Tim Vorley, Prof Muthu De Silva, Dr Maryam Ghorbankhani and Dr Omar Abou Hamdan

This project explores opportunities for the UK to be world-leading at integrating the state of the art of non-technical support to improve the effectiveness, reduce costs, and ensure alignment of UK space strategies/missions/investments with other national policy priorities (e.g., sustainability and wellbeing goals, regional economic growth).

It will produce a short thought leadership piece that surveys the broad areas where non-technical research and development can contribute to the aims of the NSS and the development of the UK space economy.

Project team: Dr Sebastian Herbert Fuchs and Prof Jen Nelles

This project focuses on the recent work on the spatial configuration of innovation clusters (DSIT cluster mapping project) which has produced new data about the concentration and specialisation of industries in places across the UK. While that work focuses on the colocation of businesses it creates an opportunity to learn about the relationship of research capacity to proximate economic activities.

This project will map the location of research communities relative to innovation clusters, and innovation infrastructure, to explore these dynamics. It will provide an evidence base to inform UKRI investment strategy as well as contribute to academic literature on knowledge networks, flows, and spillovers.

Project team: Dr Jen Nelles, Prof Raquel Ortega-Argiles, Dr Halima Jibril, Dr Michalis Papazoglou and Dr Pei-Yu Yuan

A review looking at the existing evidence base on the topic of ‘innovation persistence’, including:

• Patterns in innovation behaviour within firms – How much ‘one-off’ innovation do we see in comparison to more persistent innovation behaviour in the UK? What role do firm characteristics play in this (size, age, industry)?
• What are the benefits/impacts of innovating persistently?
• Is there evidence of what public support works (or doesn’t) in encouraging innovation persistence?
• What are the challenges/barriers to innovating persistently?
• What mechanisms can firms use to enable innovation persistence?