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: Professor Marc Cowling and Professor 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: Professor 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:

Professor Jeremy Phillipson, Professor 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: Professor 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 Professor 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, Elisabeth Moody, Dr Giacomo Carli, Dr Serdal Ozusaglam, Dr Hamisu Salihu and Dr Ronald Macintyre. 

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 Dalia Ribaudo and Professor Jun Du.

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.

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: Professor Roberta Guerrina, Professor 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, Professor Vincent Larivière, Professor George Leckie, Dr Thed van Leeuwen, Dr Pei Ying Chen and Professor Judith Squires.

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, Professor Raquel Ortega-Argiles and Professor Stephen Roper.