Release untapped potential

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Ideas to shape the future of innovation funding

What principles should guide new institutions and methodologies?

• New methods and institutions should aim to be distinctive, both in how they operate and how they create impact.

• They should be tried out in tandem with robust evaluation – to inform best practice in future.

• They should release untapped potential, embrace uncertainty and address challenges that matter.

New institutions and methods bring with them an opportunity to shape and fine-tune the outcomes that we aim to achieve.

Reforms in the methods and institutions that deliver innovation funding in the UK should be accompanied by robust experimentation and data gathering, to better understand whether the money we spend is achieving the impacts it should – and to inform future policy over which innovation funding mechanisms work best to achieve different goals.

What principles could guide us in this?

Release untapped potential

There are talented innovators who are just waiting for an opportunity, and there is money just waiting to be invested. New methods and institutions should seek to exploit this potential.

That means channelling opportunities to unusual suspects – smaller companies, more radical ideas, innovators from non-traditional backgrounds – giving them a chance to shine. And designing programmes thoughtfully so that they crowd in as much private investment as possible for as little taxpayer’s money as is feasible.