Building a Strategic Brain for UK Research

On 30 September, we welcomed Stian Westlake, Executive Chair of UK Research and Innovation’s Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), for a seminar at UCL’s Department of Science, Technology, Engineering and Public Policy (STEaPP) on how analytics and experimentation can strengthen research funding — and help UKRI realise its ambition to act as a “strategic brain” for the UK’s R&D system.

When UKRI was created in 2017, one of its boldest ambitions was to provide this kind of strategic brain: a stronger capacity to understand where and how public investment in research can deliver the greatest return. With budgets tightening, and with a new Chief Executive, Sir Ian Chapman, at the helm, there is fresh momentum to reflect on how UKRI can build the skills, capabilities, and evidence base to guide the future of the UK research system.

Analytics and experiments in research funding

In his talk, Stian outlined the informational and experimental needs of UKRI, expanding on his recent article here. The organisation, he argued, must strengthen its situational awareness of the research and innovation landscape, improve its ability to allocate funding systematically, and develop better ways to track the impact of its investments — both to inform its own choices and to provide robust evidence to government.

While UKRI holds decades of grant data, much of it remains underused. Stian emphasised the opportunity to curate and combine this resource with external datasets, including those created by RoRI partners and through bibliometric research. He also pointed to gaps in understanding around outcomes such as intellectual property rights from funded research — areas where new analytic capability is needed.

Design principles for a strategic brain

Stian set out several principles for building UKRI’s analytic and experimental capability:

1. Create useful knowledge – ensuring insights are not just academic but connected to the craft of research funding and its processes.
2. Be intellectually ambitious
3. Work in partnership – drawing on metascience, bibliometrics, and expertise across the community.
4. Approach with humility – recognising the limits of what we can know about complex research systems, and being realistic about how evidence can inform decisions.

The seminar also featured responses from Molly Morgan Jones (Director of Policy at the British Academy) and Sarah Chaytor (Director of Research Strategy & Policy at UCL).

Molly Morgan Jones underlined the importance of linking experiments in research funding back to their underlying purpose: what outcomes are we trying to achieve, and how will we know if changes are working?

Sarah Chaytor emphasised issues of social licence, accountability, and purpose, noting that government is increasingly focused on the benefits of research for citizens and economic growth. She asked fundamental questions: What does the UK want from its research system? How should public funding interact with business and charity investment? And how confident can we be that the outcomes we most value are measurable in the first place?

Looking ahead

The seminar closed with a lively discussion on how UKRI can build its analytic and experimental capabilities, capture institutional memory, and create a more systematic, transparent approach to funding decisions.

As Lord Vallance noted at the Metascience 2025 conference earlier this year, there is a growing recognition across government of the value of metascientific evidence in shaping policy. This seminar reinforced the importance of strengthening the evidence and analytic foundations of UKRI — and the need to balance data and experimentation with purpose, values, and accountability.