A SELECTION OF EXTERNALLY FUNDED RESEARCH PROJECTS
Management Insights for Tackling Grand Challenges: Exploring Policy Instruments, Building a Transdisciplinary Understanding, and Extending Impact Funded by: Future Leaders Fellowship scheme by the UK Research and Innovation Council (UKRI) A recent global report shows Earth has crossed six of nine critical environmental limits, with climate change worsening. To tackle this, governments and businesses have tried to use the financial sector to drive climate action, as promised in the Paris Agreement. Our initial research studied how financial institutions, like banks and investors, use climate data and frameworks, and found big gaps: the knowledge exists but isn’t fully applied due to barriers like short-term thinking and unclear policies. Current investment practices fall far short of Paris goals. The project will examine how financial regulations shape these practices and work with policymakers, NGOs, and financial firms to design solutions that shift money toward low-carbon investments and away from high-carbon ones, helping meet global climate targets.
Towards better business support: Extending learnings from the ‘Business Basics’ Randomised Controlled Trials Funded by: Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) The Business Basics programme, led by BEIS from 2018 to 2022, funded 32 projects involving nearly 3,500 SMEs at a cost of £6.4 million to test ways of improving productivity through technology and management practices. Uniquely, it included 17 randomised controlled trials (RCTs), offering rare experimental evidence on business support. This project uses that data to address key evaluation challenges: assessing long-term effectiveness, identifying biases in quasi-experimental methods, profiling participants, and validating interim outcomes. The findings will inform better evaluation methodologies, strengthen policymaking, and improve the targeting of business support, ultimately contributing to more effective outcomes for SMEs.
CONCORD: Co-developing System-wide Principles & Framework
UK Energy Research Centre (UKERC) Phase 4 Funded by: Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) UKERC carries out world-class research into sustainable future energy systems and acts as a focal point for UK energy research, as well as a gateway between the UK and the international energy research communities. Current research is focusing on the increasingly contested and uncertain nature of energy system change. WBS leads the theme ‘Geopolitical economy of energy system transformation’, with involvement from researchers at Durham University, University College London and the University of Southampton, together with the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies. The project is divided into five over-lapping work packages that together will provide a comprehensive assessment of the global context for the UK’s transition to net-zero.
A Practice-theoretical Account of Organisational Attention Funded by: The Swiss National Science Foundation This study aims to shed new light on
It takes two to tango: A synergistic approach to human-machine decision making. TANGO Funded by: European Commission (EC Horizon Europe) Artificial Intelligence (AI) holds enormous potential for enhancing human decisions, improving cognitive overload and lowering bias in high-stakes scenarios. Adoption of AI-based support systems in such applications is however minimal, chiefly due to the difficulty of assessing their assumptions, limitations and intentions. In order to realise the promise of AI for individuals, society, and economy, people should feel they can trust AI in terms of reliability, capacity to understand the human’s needs, and guarantees that they are genuinely aiming to help them. TANGO will develop the theoretical foundations and the computational framework for synergistic human-machine decision making. The four-year project will pave the way for the next generation of human-centric AI systems, with a goal to establish a symbiosis between humans and machines.
for “Good” Involvement Funded by: Coventry and
Warwickshire Integrated Care Board The CONCORD study is looking at how communities are currently involved in health and care decisions within the Coventry and Warwickshire Integrated Care System (ICS) and aims to create a clear framework for doing this well. The research will first review existing practices and talk to key stakeholders, then gather views from local communities and voluntary groups, and finally use this information to design practical tools and guidelines. The goal is to produce easy-to-use resources, like best-practice examples, a toolkit, and an evaluation framework, that help organisations involve people effectively and make sure engagement really makes a difference. These findings will be shared widely to improve involvement across the region.
the mundane, concrete practices of how organisations, rather than their individual members, pay attention. The team will explore: how attention comes to be weaved in everything we do at work; how specific situations, spaces, and arrangements of objects make us pay attention (often without any effort or even us realising); and how all these aspects together combine in orienting the attention of organisations, generating their attention and foresight capability. Uncovering existing attention processes will help organisations to improve their overall attentional capacity and identify attentional bottlenecks and blind spots.
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A snapshot for academics 2026
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