“There is no route to stronger growth in this country…without science, technology and innovation leading front and centre.” Liz Kendall, Innovation for Growth Summit, November 2025.
Research-led economic growth is not merely a matter of increasing the overall research budget to fund the same kinds of activities in the same way. If the answer was only more funding for research, the economy would be booming and it is not. UKRI’s four bucket model is a step toward a clear theory of research for economic growth with greater delineation between applied research, blue-sky thinking, and strategic government priorities. If they are to be more than a relabelling of existing work they not only need to consider the trade-offs between buckets but how the buckets interact with the wider research ecosystem and its complex inter-dependencies.
The commission on research for better economic growth has set out to try and bring attention to some of the key tensions in research policy and in doing so assess and develop the mechanisms needed to drive economic growth across the country through research, development, and innovation. Our primary focus is on how connectivity between places amplifies research impact, how local research excellence can drive national economic growth, and what policy and funding frameworks enable better outcomes.
Economies of scale(s)
We’ve now held the first roundtable and begun to scope some of the areas the commission will consider.
To be clear, university research cannot solve every economic problem the country faces. Commercialisation of research is probably not the most effective way to increase the supply of sheet metal workers and care workers. Spin-outs are likely not the most impactful mechanism for closing regional inequalities (not in the current form at least). And the government probably shouldn’t put the same kind of capital investment everywhere if it wants to stimulate new kinds of economic activity.
However, a crucial area to unpack is what kind of economic benefits research may be expected to deliver. Building laboratories in the South East may give access to more institutions, and thereby create larger cluster benefits, but it’s inherently more expensive to do so. Attracting deep-technology businesses to the North can be more difficult owing to distance from London, shallower capital pools, and a smaller concentration of institutions but it would create a significant number of high value jobs. This isn’t to say London wouldn’t benefit from more labs, or the North wouldn’t benefit from more deep-tech businesses, but that there are trade-offs between different policy agendas and economic imperatives.
Another consideration is the balance between upstream and downstream impacts. This gets beyond Patrick Vallance’s analogy of feeding the blue skies research goose which lays the gold innovation eggs. It’s about the whole range of indirect impacts which flow from investment in knowledge and the means to apply it. And it’s about the breadth of ways in which research contributes to a strong economy. This encompasses foundational enablers from ensuring healthy citizens and a skilled workforce, to vibrant cultural sectors, to environmental sustainability.
You say specialisation, I say regionalisation
A key challenge the commission will wrestle with is how a growth orientated research policy can encourage economic growth in a devolved policy environment. This is both about the ways in which devolved authorities are involved in directing research priorities and how a research system should build regional strength with national connectivity. It is probably bad for coherent policy making in a small island to devolve large amounts of research funding away from a clear national strategy, but in a devolved system of government, mayors should get some say.
Distinctiveness is however extremely difficult. At a national level, the Industrial Strategy is so broad as to allow the majority of UK research to be classed as a strategic priority, while at a regional level there are few incentives for institutions to collaborate on a smaller number of research priorities (or to ensure that the sum of regional specialisation adds up to national strength and international competitiveness). Presently, there are just no impactful policy incentives to encourage specialisation and collaborations, and connectivity between research assets and the people who work within them is hampered by a poor intra-city transport network.
So how might research policy making be different if it was done through a systems approach. Making it easier for researchers to afford to live near where they work and move around to take their ideas is one important consideration. So too is a more rigorous focus on research and innovation skills development, including meeting specific regional needs. Another is how the wider public sector can stimulate demand for research including through their approach to procurement, their coordination to act as large buyers of research, and the extent to which public sector research services could be further integrated with universities.
The consideration may therefore not just be where to put a lab but where to put a railway. This would mean worrying about the cumulative impact of the whole knowledge economy, including people’s skills and their mobility, the intra-relationship between public and private sector partners, the diffusion of research across geographies, and an ability to measure second-order research effects like the savings made to public services. The trade-off here of course is that less money might flow to universities directly, albeit they might benefit in the long-run if the economy were stronger
The big trade-off
Implicit within the government’s planning is that increased research funding comes at the expense of more state involvement. This looks like new funding for defence research, unwinding of capital commitments, UKRI’s explicit pro-growth agenda, and the Post-16 Skills White Paper which imagines (but does not spell out) rewards for universities that can specialise their work. This may bring more funding to the sector but institutions have traditionally been nervous of too much overreach.
Cumulatively, this leads us toward the next stage of work where we’ll be looking more deeply at how research connectivity can play a role in economic growth; the specific kinds of economic impacts induced by different kinds of research activity; t the right balance between state direction, regional influence, and institutional priorities; the trade-offs in building a broader picture of research investment to include research adjacent infrastructure; and the political consequences of more explicitly framing research as being about economic growth.
Thanks to everyone who has contributed, been in touch, and took part in the first roundtable. If you’d like to share a piece, bring us a new idea, or have a chat, you can email James here.
