The Missions Accelerator Programme, unpacked

There are an infinite number of challenges for researchers to tackle. They could spend every single day trying to cure cancer, or end global poverty, or fix climate change. A responsible funder could reasonably choose to put all of its money on the biggest bets. An equally responsible funder could choose to spread out its money and let a thousand flowers bloom.

It isn’t easy to decide which route to go down. Choosing to fund some things inevitably comes in the context of choosing not to fund others, and with this comes an implied hierarchy. Sometimes that hierarchy will be financial: a funder will fund the things they think have the best chance of a good return on investment. Sometimes it will be speculative: a funder will fund what they believe to be the most challenging issues even where the science is new or not established.

The UK, with its dual funding system, has a best of all worlds approach. The funding that goes to universities through QR is entirely unhypothecated. Universities are entitled to use, lose, and spend it in whatever ways they like in the pursuit of knowledge that would otherwise remain undiscovered. Grant funding administered by UKRI and a number of other bodies is used to cover specific projects, ideas, or support the commercialisation of existing ideas.

This system is not the same all over the world. As work by PWC for the Russell Group demonstrates, it is possible to have research funding systems that are almost entirely grant-led and aligned closely to government priorities. It is possible to have funding systems that are led by regional priorities backed up with a block grant. And it is entirely possible to slide the scale between free and discretionary funding depending where government priorities lie. No one system is perfect; they are all built to suit the context of the nation they exist in.

Mediating bodies

In acknowledging that no system is perfect, governments have built mediating bodies to work at the interface between research institutes, funding, and government priorities. In the UK, UKRI operates independently of the government – but its work is informed by it, and ultimately its funding is contingent on its ongoing usefulness in tackling government priorities. UKRI performs lots of functions, but at root it brings the messy priorities of the state into a set of funding calls, programmes, and funds that can realise the government’s vision.

The challenge is that the larger a system is the more complex it becomes for any one body to force its will upon it. Look only at the ongoing debate about the REF: the steering team is trying to mediate thousands of inputs on quality, impact, and culture into a single framework that will distribute funding effectively. Moving the allocation of funding, not the quantum of it, has been a source of fierce debate in the sector for several years now. The argument has been so hotly contested that it has at times threatened the success of the entire exercise before it has even launched.

It is a difficult position to have to mediate social problems, institutional priorities, and government asks into a series of frameworks, policies, and funds that can command the confidence of enough elements of the research sector to succeed. In particular, when applying those frameworks to a set of challenges that are unknown, where every issue is contested, and where there are enormous meta debates on the nature of frameworks, not just their end results.

For that reason we’ve been spotlighting UKRI’s Research and Development Missions Accelerator Programme (R&D MAP) on Research Agenda, with essays from Stian Westlake and Anne-Marie Canning and colleagues.

In effect, the programmes work as follows: the government identifies a large problem, UKRI creates research and innovation challenges, teams build a solution with academia, industry and the third sector, and this is then adopted in the real world. The programme acts as an interlocutor between what the government wants to achieve and the hundreds of bodies that could be well placed to achieve it.

The programme imagines a role for all partners within it. The government sets priorities, R&D MAP makes them tangible, and research organisations then deliver them. This is in contrast to other modes of grant funding, which might either be restrictive in their audience or purpose. The missions programme is broad in what it is trying to achieve, acknowledging that sometimes projects like a creative content exchange might be more specific than enhancing the quality and impact of play, and that funding models and modes might include competitions, trials, grants, challenges, frameworks, and other models.

Complementary mix

It is impossible to solve some of the UK’s most entrenched problems by funding in silos, as the world does not neatly map on to research clusters or subject disciplines. The problems require teams with different expertise working together. Although interdisciplinary teams are not new, the challenge R&D MAP has chosen to grapple with is the scale at which they can be willed into existence. An enormous challenge like “solve all crime” would lead to thousands of approaches but would lack direction and be enormously speculative. A tiny one like “reduce burglaries on my street” could have some impact – but not enough for the enormous costs of assembling and administering teams and grants.

The trick is to find the issues that are large enough to genuinely make a difference to society but which are small enough to have a reasonable chance of being solved. The value of a function like R&D MAP is not that it can set the terms of that debate alone but that it enables both government and research institutions to work out what is reasonable, what is fundable, and what might work.

Amidst the debate on which research powers and funds might be devolved here there is a lesson that the Burnham government might learn from. Devolution is only one mechanism among many. The goal is ultimately to make people’s lives better through research: achieve that, and they will not care if it comes through their mayor or from Whitehall. The question is which mechanisms allow for the correct balance between proximity to issues and solutions, on the one hand, and enough distance to ensure resources and common causes can be pooled.

The debate doesn’t have to be devolution versus something else, but rather: what are the complementary mix of interventions that can make places better? This might involve genuinely devolved funding around issues of specific regional importance. It might involve cross-boundary challenges where issues manifest in places but their causes exist between them. It might involve trials where learning can be shared across the country and grants where an issue is cross-border and requires the best research wherever it may be. It may even involve the development of smart intermediary bodies which can coordinate, support, and scrutinise work across the whole country.

The lesson from R&D MAP is that many approaches are possible. Success is not always easily defined, but it shouldn’t be surprising that it will sometimes need a body which can coordinate, cajole, and turn political aspirations into practical applications.