Putting research in its place

by Alex Hulkes

‘Place’ and accessibility, including access to the knowledge and skills found in the UK’s research organisations, are recurrent themes in the UK’s Industrial Strategy. This makes them important, as the strategy is central to how the government sees future investment and growth in the country’s R&D.

Many of the elements of the strategy, such as the drive to increase investment in R&D to 2.4% of UK GDP by 2027, have been uniformly welcomed. But when it comes to deciding the right emphasis and the nature of the interventions required, differing views are apparent. This is no bad thing: for strategies of this kind it really is true that the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about.

Collaboration and coincidence

by Alex Hulkes

History has been described as ‘just one damn thing after another’. Data on the other hand is often ‘lots of damn things all at the same time’. This blog highlights not one but two new damn things appearing on the ESRC website at the same time, each containing many sub-damn things all of which happened at the same time, or nearly so.

The arc of funding

by Alex Hulkes

We recently published ESRC success rate data and analysis for the seven years up until April 2018 – the first published since we became one of the nine UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) councils. This blog expands on one aspect of it – increases in grant size.

Where has all the money gone?

by Alex Hulkes

The concept of ‘place’ is a key part of the UK’s Industrial Strategy. Knowledge, capabilities and skills might be rather abstract things but in the end they act through and on people who have a physical presence in a place or places.

We’ve just published some new analysis of ESRC regional spending (PDF) which links the intangible inputs and outputs of ESRC funding with their physical and geographical placement.

Life, the universe and everything

by Alex Hulkes

Presumably ‘How many ways are there to travel between UK research council interfaces?’ isn’t a question that Douglas Adams had in mind when he was writing The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. But there are seven research councils, which means that the number of directions that can be taken is 42 (that’s n(n-1) if there are n councils and the direction of travel matters). All of which serves merely to provide a preamble to this blog, which looks at one aspect of cross-council application behaviour.