Project

Science as Substrate: Mapping the Maturity of Research Supporting Innovate UK’s Innovation Portfolio

Science and Innovation Funding Data science & innovation mapping

As the UK’s national innovation agency, Innovate UK supports business-led innovations to start and grow. They face a persistent strategic dilemma: when is the right time to support new products and services? Many innovations emerge from scientific research. 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 supporting innovations that are premature. On the other hand, supporting innovations built upon more established knowledge lowers risk but may sink resources into companies late to market.

This project directly links Innovate UK projects to the cumulative body of scientific knowledge, measuring the maturity of this evidence base to uncover strategic investment choices and inform future decisions.

Activities and Impact

By linking an enhanced version of UK Research and Innovation’s “Gateway to Research” funding data (GtR+) to the global scientific literature on OpenAlex, we explore the following questions:

How mature is the research underpinning innovative projects supported by Innovate UK?
How much does Innovate UK invest into research in different maturity categories?
How do maturity profiles and investment strategies change over time?
As Innovate UK focuses on frontier technologies, how has it invested in these areas in the past, and how do maturity profiles differ?

Our datasets span 29,262 Innovate UK-funded projects and an underpinning corpus of over 40 million academic articles. An AI-assisted pipeline assigned each project a research topic, and topics were categorised as niche, emerging, active and mature based on publication volumes and growth rates. Weighting these categories by Innovate UK grant spend, we can establish where public funding for innovation sits relative to the developmental stage of the underlying science.

This research provides the foundations for a novel diagnostic tool to evaluate strategic portfolio alignment, understand the historical role of public capital across the scientific lifecycle, and to identify unexploited translation gaps in the research landscape.