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Science as substrate
Unearthing insights about strategic innovation investment
22 October 2026
How can innovation agencies maximise public benefit by supporting successful new products and services?
To begin to answer this question, our recent research for the Innovation and Research Caucus (IRC) mapped Innovate UK investments against the maturity of the underlying academic research.
Science as substrate
Science is a substrate from which innovation can grow. At times, commercial applications are not remotely obvious, as when basic research into the venom of Gila monsters (Heloderma suspectum) unexpectedly informed the development of GLP-1 receptor agonists. Other innovations build incrementally on existing, applied research, such as ongoing refinements in turbomachinery, vehicle battery performance, or manufacturing optimisation.
The world of possible future innovations at any point is in part a product of the global scientific knowledge available. Academic research provides codified knowledge that businesses can build on, alongside secondary outputs such as talent and know-how.
Timing innovation support
Innovation agencies make difficult choices about which projects to support with their funding. They must evaluate the quality and feasibility of proposed projects, the attributes of grant applicants, and the likelihood that they will generate societal and economic benefits.
They must also contend with the external environment, leading to a dilemma of timing. Intervening early, while the underlying scientific knowledge base is still forming, can secure first-mover advantages and a national stake in emergent domains, but risks backing premature technologies. Supporting innovations built upon more established knowledge lowers feasibility risk, but may sink resources into companies that arrive late, and to a saturated market.
The stakes are high: Innovate UK committed nearly £18 billion in funding between 2006 and 2025. Each individual investment decision does not take place in a vacuum. Although their core remit to support business-led innovation to start and grow remains constant, policy priorities shift, budgets fluctuate, and new technologies emerge. Over the past two decades, the agency’s posture has evolved across multiple strategies – from the Technology Strategy Board’s early emphasis on knowledge transfer mechanisms, to the 2017 focus on enabling and emerging technologies, to the current prioritisation of deep tech across six frontier technologies.
Under these complex constraints, how can innovation agencies like Innovate UK maximise their impact through investing at the right time? And crucially, how can they know whether funding choices reflect their intended strategic direction over time?
Strategic investments and scientific maturity
With open administrative data and publication metadata, we can begin to answer these questions. Specifically, it is now possible to link innovation projects to the underlying global scientific knowledge base by identifying overlapping topics, and track growth across scientific disciplines.
In our project, GtR+ made research into scientific maturity possible by providing enriched award metadata, an effort to which IGL contributed, including subfield classifications for funded projects. Processing and categorising tens of thousands of project descriptions manually is beyond human capacity, but modern large language models can complete this task in a few hours. Using a two-stage LLM pipeline, we assigned 29,262 Innovate UK projects to 1,878 granular research topics within the CWTS Leiden / OpenAlex taxonomy.
Using an approach adapted from previous work by Nesta, we tracked publication volumes and growth rates across topics to classify the underlying research into four developmental stages: niche (low volume, low growth), emerging (low volume, high growth), active (high volume, high growth), and mature (high volume, low growth).
Our analysis found:
- Maturity breadth and portfolio shifts: Topic investment peaks are distributed across the entire scientific lifecycle of niche (25.1%), emerging (23.4%), active (31.2%), and mature (20.2%) research. Between 2006 and 2014, Innovate UK funding concentrated on high-growth emerging and active domains, but from 2015 it diversified into niche and mature areas, which made up roughly two-thirds of funding by 2022, suggesting a shift towards established, slower-growing literatures.
- Frontier technology misalignments: Portfolios across the UK’s six priority frontier technologies differ markedly. For example, 90% of AI funding since 2020 backed low-growth niche or mature topics rather than rapidly expanding emerging science, while cybersecurity funding rested almost entirely on mature research. This raises the question of whether public funding in priority technologies concentrates in the fastest-growing segments of the underlying academic base.
Additional analyses include Journal-level Frascati classifications and tracking of strategic archetypes over time.
Geologies of inquiry
As a small, exploratory project, our research offers an initial glimpse into the innovation ecosystem and its scientific foundations. Looking ahead, further research about the optimal timing of innovation funding can support the ultimate aim of an effective, joined-up science and innovation pipeline.
Promising approaches combine richer data with human judgment:
- Tracking outcomes: How does backing innovations at particular stages of scientific maturity influence firm survival, follow-on investments and commercial scaling? Linking GtR+ project data to external commercial datasets and administrative records would allow researchers to test the relationship between timing and key outcomes.
- Context and baselines: How do public investments align with domestic research strengths and local talent? Benchmarking portfolios against external baselines would distinguish global publication momentum from the UK’s domestic research base, while qualitative evidence can connect observed funding shifts directly to strategic policy choices.
Data-driven and human-enriched, this approach offers innovation agencies a practical lens to understand the scientific substrate beneath tomorrow’s technologies, helping ensure public capital is deployed when and where it can achieve the greatest impact.ovation agencies a practical lens to understand the scientific substrate beneath tomorrow’s technologies, helping ensure public capital is deployed when and where it can achieve the greatest impact.
Get involved
We are continuing to develop these methods to help researchers and policymakers better understand innovation funding choices. Do you have a dataset, research question, or methodology that could build on our approach? Get in touch with the team at [email protected].