Applied research towards social goals: the missions accelerator programme

UKRI is investing £500m in a fund aligned to national priorities – here’s how that works in practice

In September, First Secretary of State Louise Haigh launched a £10m accelerator programme to support new approaches to preventing violence against women and girls. This represents a genuinely exciting step towards tackling an important and often neglected problem. But for research policy aficionados, it’s also an example of a novel approach to innovation funding: the R&D Missions Accelerator Programme.

The R&D MAP, as it’s become known, is a £500m R&D fund launched by UKRI in 2025 as a way of helping us address strategic government and societal priorities. The aim is to fund innovations that address major societal challenges identified by the government, such as reducing crime, driving the transition to clean energy, or improving the healthcare system.

The programme has a few tricks up its sleeve. First of all, it follows an explicitly challenge-led model. The R&D MAP team works with a government minister or other senior stakeholder to define a clear problem that needs solving, and then turns this into a set of actionable, quantifiable challenges. Take the Ultra-Long Duration Energy Storage Challenge, which is funding the next generation of energy storage tech that can store clean energy for over 100 hours, enough to power homes and businesses for four days.

Or the SEN Identification and Support Challenge, which is helping schools spot children who need extra support years before the system currently catches them. Crucially, these challenges come with deadlines attached: on the SEN work, for instance, we’re hoping to see successful approaches rolled out in schools as early as 2028.

It’s firmly in the tradition of mission-led innovation, tying R&D to specific public goals. The team has been working closely with the OECD’s Mission Action Lab to share what we’re learning and to learn from partners around the world.

In return, the government puts in place a “pull-through plan” for the challenge. This is their commitment to help the innovation process along, for example by procuring the results of the R&D if it is successful, or to accelerate regulatory approval for the resulting invention. As Jakob Edler and Luke Georghiou of the Manchester Institute of Innovation Research observed nearly two decades ago, innovation policy has long neglected the potential of the government’s purchasing power and regulatory heft to drive progress. For as long as I’ve been involved in the field, the idea has been widely promoted – but rarely put into practice. I’m delighted that it is a central part of this programme.

R&D MAP also relies on expert, empowered programme managers. Each area of work is led by a challenge director, who has been hired to be a subject-matter expert. We studied ARIA’s programme director recruitment and training process and ended up hiring all five of our challenge directors from outside UKRI, building teams around them to complement their knowledge with R&D funding expertise.

The directors have been given authority to use a range of different funding tools at their discretion, including not just traditional competitive R&D grants but also accelerator programmes, challenge prizes, and collaborations with businesses, public bodies and charities. Crucially, they’re also able to end projects quickly if they don’t work out, adopting a “fail fast” mindset that allows investment to be recycled within the portfolio.

To see how all of this comes together, consider our dementia care challenge. Working with the Department of Health and Social Care, we set a challenge to improve the speed and quality of dementia assessment by 2029. Specifically, our target is to ensure at least 92 per cent of people referred for a dementia assessment get the results within 18 weeks of referral. This is currently a crucial bottleneck to providing effective care, with around only two-thirds of people getting a diagnosis at all, and it often taking over a year to obtain one.

Our challenge director, a former medtech chief executive, determined that the key problem was effective evaluation and implementation of new interventions. In this case, the challenge therefore focuses on providing accelerated evaluation of a range of promising diagnostic tools, technologies and care pathways, with a commitment to adopt the most successful across the four nations of the UK

This challenge wouldn’t be possible without close partnership with a host of partners from around the healthcare system: regulators, the NHS bodies responsible for commissioning dementia services, charities, people with lived experience, and the health department itself. Bringing them together to support the best innovations from the private sector and from researchers – it’s a nice example of how a pull-through plan can do what R&D funding alone can’t.

So far, the experiment is proceeding well. We have just announced that nine projects have been selected to move into real-world NHS testing, including ventures that will develop faster MRI scans, cutting scan time from 20 minutes to around seven, and a 15-minute remote cognitive assessment that people can complete from home.

A new approach

The R&D MAP as a whole currently covers a host of challenges in different areas, from modular construction of housing, through improving the home learning environment for young children, to improving the flexibility of the electricity grid. We have committed £500m to it over the next three years.

Part of the reason I’m excited by it is because it is tackling problems of real societal importance. That is UKRI’s purpose – not simply funding research and innovation, but advancing knowledge, improving lives and driving growth. The R&D MAP helps us deliver on this purpose for the UK public.

But for research policy enthusiasts, it is also exciting because it represents a new approach to how UKRI funds innovation. We are carefully watching and evaluating to see how it works – and what this might mean for the future of applied research towards social goals.

Stian Westlake is Executive Chair of the Economic and Social Research Council.