I firmly believe that research and innovation are amongst the biggest assets the UK has.
Our researchers and innovators affect the lives and livelihoods of everyone in the country. The opportunities for research and innovation to make an ever-bigger impact are growing. We benefit from record levels of Government investment in research and innovation, creating a significant opportunity for us all. But equally the expectations from the public, whose money we invest, are also growing. Together, we must make the most of those opportunities and make sure that everyone feels the benefits of research and innovation (R&I) in all parts of the country.
UKRI was established to bring strategic coherence to the national R&I system, enabling multi-disciplinary research at scale, and to ensure that R&I delivers prosperity for the UK public. Having laid the foundations of a united UKRI with extraordinary breadth and remit, the next five years will see us deliver on our potential.
Our new strategy is the high-level framing of how we will deliver that. Given our mission to advance knowledge, to improve lives and to drive growth, the first three chapters of the strategy are about how we support discovery and curiosity-driven research, how we address societal priorities and how we help companies to start and scale into industry giants. UKRI is at its best when these parts work together. Enabled by the scale and breadth of our research, we can make a huge difference for the future of the UK’s four nations.
Over the next five years, we will show a clear line from our mission to our money, from our strategy to our spending. Across our three strategic priorities, almost half of our budget will back discovery and curiosity-driven research. Our unrestricted schemes allow researchers to pursue transformative ideas in any discipline, and our block grant funding for universities in England provides the flexibility to explore novel ideas while maintaining longer-term stability.
The other half of our budget will focus on high-growth sectors that deliver more immediate outcomes, and supporting companies to start, scale and ultimately stay in the UK. Here, we will be more selective, doing fewer things, better.
The final two sections are about providing the foundations for the sector and ensuring UKRI is as efficient as possible. Our aim is to create a funding system that is simpler, more outcomes-focused and better able to deliver benefits for people, places and the economy. We also need to elevate our partnerships with investors and delivery partners, at home and abroad, from transactional to strategic. And we need to be clearer about our long-term plans and how our interventions fit together, reducing risks for our partners.
Direction of travel
This is a five-year strategy and some of the outcomes we’re aiming for will take time to achieve. But I hope you feel that our direction is clear, and that we’re already moving. We have launched Priority Programmes in areas with the highest growth-potential, including life sciences and artificial intelligence, now with one aggregated budget allowing us to do bigger, bolder research. Over the next year, we will reduce our decision-making time so we can back novel, ambitious research more quickly. And we are strengthening our curation of innovation, providing a concierge service to the highest-growth potential companies to help turn them into industry giants.
Partnership is central to everything we’re trying to achieve. We want to build even stronger, long-term relationships with the organisations and people we work with across the research and innovation system. The scale of our ambition means that success will only come through collaboration.
I’d encourage you to read the published UKRI strategy and consider the role you can play in helping us deliver it. We’re excited about the opportunities ahead, and we look forward to working with you to turn that ambition into reality for the benefit of the UK.
This is a thoroughly Stalinist vision of research in Highe Education. It is top down and highly instrumentalist in true managerialist fashion. It is only credible if you think you (that is managers) already know what you want to know. Without the element of serendipity we can look forward to a continuation of a politically driven Lysenkoism. As such it is fundamentally anti-Socratic and marks a break with the longstanding tradition of the Academy.