{"id":2176,"date":"2026-10-29T14:52:41","date_gmt":"2026-10-29T14:52:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.manchester.ac.uk\/mioir\/?p=2176"},"modified":"2026-10-29T15:03:34","modified_gmt":"2026-10-29T15:03:34","slug":"r-and-d-management-conference-2026","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.manchester.ac.uk\/mioir\/2026\/10\/29\/r-and-d-management-conference-2026\/","title":{"rendered":"Coming home, looking forward: R&D Management 2026 in Manchester"},"content":{"rendered":"

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In June, the Manchester Institute of Innovation Research (MIOIR) welcomed the R&D Management Conference 2026 back to Manchester, bringing the global community to the city where much of its story began. Three months on, we look back at what the conference meant for MIOIR, for Manchester and for the wider field of innovation research.<\/p>\n

A homecoming<\/h2>\n

At many academic conferences, the host city can remain little more than a backdrop. In Manchester, it was part of the story. The roots of the R&D Management community in Manchester reach back to 1967, when Professor Alan Pearson established the R&D Research Unit at Manchester Business School. The R&D Management journal followed in 1970, and in 1980 Manchester hosted the first R&D Management Conference. What began here grew well beyond the city, developing into an international community of researchers and practitioners and taking the conference to cities across Europe and beyond. The 2026 meeting brought that community back to Manchester for the first time in 13 years. From 22 to 24 June, the University welcomed more than 600 delegates working across research, technology and innovation.<\/p>\n

For Conference Chair Professor Silvia Massini, that return had been an ambition for some time. It was not about reclaiming the conference for Manchester, but about reconnecting the community with its origins. As she put it, there was value in occasionally coming back “to remind the community of where it all started, Manchester.”<\/p>\n

Beyond bouncing back<\/h2>\n

Manchester made a particularly apt place for that return. The history of the city is inseparable from technological change: from the industrial transformation of the nineteenth century to contemporary work in digital technologies, advanced manufacturing, health innovation and the creative industries. For Conference Co-Chair Dr Mabel S\u00e1nchez Barrioluengo, that history also speaks directly to the questions at the centre of the 2026 conference. Manchester, she argues, has repeatedly had to adapt to new waves of technological and economic change. Its experience suggests that technology alone does not determine what comes next. What matters, too, is whether people and institutions can respond creatively, adapt and reinvent themselves.<\/p>\n

That made the conference theme – “Creativity and Resilience in an Era of Technological Disruption” – feel less like a title imposed on the programme than a question with particular resonance in the city hosting it. The R&D Management community had returned to the place where its own story began, but the conversation in Manchester was firmly about what comes next.<\/p>\n

For Silvia Massini, that framing was deliberate. The organising committee wanted something that spoke to the moment without tying the conference to a single technology or sector. They chose technological disruption rather than digital disruption, opening the discussion to a wider set of questions about how organisations, industries and institutions respond when established ways of working are unsettled.<\/p>\n

The pairing of creativity and resilience mattered just as much. Resilience has become a familiar part of the organisational vocabulary since the pandemic, often associated with absorbing a shock and recovering from it. Professor Massini had something more ambitious in mind. Creativity, she argued, is where new ideas begin. Put the two together, and resilience becomes less about restoring what existed before than about using disruption as an opportunity to make something different. The question is not only how to “bounce back”, but how to move forward.<\/p>\n

A conference built around conversation<\/h2>\n

R&D Management 2026 brought together 602 participants from 38 countries across five continents, including 181 PhD researchers. Over three days, delegates presented 451 papers across 60 Special Tracks and 112 parallel sessions.<\/p>\n

With a programme that dense, the challenge was not simply to fit everything in. It was to make sure the conference still allowed for meaningful academic exchange. For Professor Silvia Massini, the quality of the programme depended not only on which papers were selected, but on the discussion they generated once presented. Papers were assigned to dedicated discussants – a commitment that asked more of track chairs and participants but encouraged closer engagement with the work. Instead of relying on a few questions squeezed into the final minutes of a session, presenters could expect someone to have read their argument carefully and respond to it in depth.<\/p>\n

That emphasis on conversation began before the main programme itself. Over the preceding weekend, around 25 doctoral researchers gathered at Alliance Manchester Business School (AMBS) for a two-day Doctoral Colloquium led by Professor Khaleel Malik, with support from MIOIR colleagues including Dr Xin Deng. The smaller setting allowed more time for mentoring, publishing advice and discussion of academic careers. For Felipe S\u00e1ez Noriega, a doctoral researcher at MIOIR, the colloquium offered a chance to test his ideas with peers and more experienced scholars. He also valued the opportunity to compare methodological approaches, connect with other early-career researchers and hear from journal editors about publishing, career development and the early stages of doctoral study. The experience, he says, gave him a stronger sense of the wider research community he was joining.<\/p>\n

Senior members of the R&D Management community joined those conversations too. Jeremy Klein of RADMA and Alberto Di Minin, Editor of R&D Management, spent time with participants of the Colloquium across the two days. For Professor Malik, the value of the colloquium lay precisely in this kind of exchange – doctoral researchers being able to test ideas, ask questions and engage directly with people who had spent years working in the field.<\/p>\n

The same pattern continued in the main programme. Professor Malik co-chaired a three-session track on R&D infrastructures and university-industry collaboration with three researchers from Finland. Months of reviewing submissions and shaping the sessions together became, in Manchester, the basis for a deeper academic relationship. Early-career researchers presented alongside more established scholars, while the co-chairs began discussing what they might do together next. Those conversations have continued beyond June. After the conference, Professor Malik and his Finnish colleagues met with other MIOIR researchers to explore possible collaboration between their institutes. They are now considering bringing a similar track to the 2027 R&D Management Conference.<\/p>\n

For all the density of the programme – hundreds of papers, dozens of tracks, three packed days – some of its value will only become visible later. A comment on a doctoral project, a new relationship between researchers, an idea that becomes a collaboration: these things are harder to count than participants or sessions, but they are often what lasts.<\/p>\n

The work behind the programme<\/h2>\n

A three-day conference for more than 600 people begins long before the first delegate arrives. For Wendy Walker, Research Support Officer at AMBS, preparations for R&D Management 2026 began in September 2025. There were accounts to set up, purchase orders to raise for suppliers and an online store to establish for registration fees. As the conference approached, there were also the requirements and preferences of hundreds of participants to keep track of.<\/p>\n

Around that administrative work, a 13-member organising committee was assembling the conference itself, supported during the event by more than 25 PhD volunteers. Academic tracks had to be coordinated, the Doctoral Colloquium planned, venues and social events arranged, and international visitors supported with the practicalities of coming to Manchester. Professor Khaleel Malik points to the collaboration between academic, administrative and professional-services colleagues as central to making the event work. Co-Chair Dr Mabel S\u00e1nchez Barrioluengo describes it as a genuinely collective effort, with different members of the team taking responsibility for different parts of the conference. One of the rewards, she says, was seeing the team grow stronger through the process.<\/p>\n

Months of preparation came into focus on the first morning, when plans became real, and delegates began to arrive. Wendy Walker remembers a mixture of excitement and nerves. The team had prepared as thoroughly as possible, but there is always some uncertainty once the doors open. Many participants, she noticed, were nervous too. A few words at registration – answering a question, offering directions, simply welcoming someone to Manchester – could make the start of the conference easier for both visitor and organiser.<\/p>\n

Across the building, volunteers were helping to keep people moving. Julia Zdunczyk, a doctoral researcher at MIOIR, spent much of her time directing delegates to lecture rooms, answering questions and helping with microphones. An Yu Chen, Research Associate in Science of Science at the University of Manchester, was struck by how much the experience depended on communication, flexibility and close attention to detail.<\/p>\n

But volunteering did not mean missing the academic life of the conference. Professor Silvia Massini was keen that PhD researchers helping to run the event should still have time to attend sessions and participate as scholars. For Julia Zdunczyk, that led to one of the most memorable encounters of the week. She met a professor whose work closely overlaps with her PhD, discussed her own project and came away with feedback that opened up new ideas for its development. That experience captures something distinctive about the conference. Organising, participating and learning often overlapped. A doctoral researcher might spend one part of the day helping delegates find a room and another discussing her own work with a scholar in a closely related field.<\/p>\n

Nor did the work finish when the final session ended. For Wendy Walker, there were still expense claims to process, transfers to make and transactions to reconcile before the conference accounts could be closed.<\/p>\n

Bringing Manchester into the conference<\/h2>\n

“The conference came to Manchester, but we brought Manchester into the conference.” For Mabel S\u00e1nchez Barrioluengo, that became something of an organising principle.<\/p>\n

The academic programme was centred at the University, but delegates were also taken beyond the conference rooms and into places that tell different parts of Manchester’s story. The pre-conference gathering was held at Manchester Museum, the opening reception took place in Whitworth Hall, and the gala dinner brought delegates to Victoria Warehouse, whose industrial past recalls the trade and infrastructure that helped shape the city.<\/p>\n

For Professor Silvia Massini, the choice of venues was deliberate. She wanted participants not simply to attend a conference in Manchester, but to experience something of the University and the city while they were here. Manchester also appeared in smaller details. Delegates arriving at partner hotels were greeted with welcome messages, while reusable conference bottles carried the Manchester bee alongside the University logo. The organisers later joked that they had “spread Manchester bees around the world” – an apt image for a conference that brought researchers from 38 countries to Manchester and then sent them home with a small reminder of the city.<\/p>\n

The post-conference survey suggests that delegates noticed the care that went into the experience. More than three-quarters of respondents rated the conference as excellently organised, with the venues and social programme among the aspects most valued alongside the academic content, networking opportunities and sense of community.<\/p>\n

For a conference returning to the city where the R&D Management community first took shape, Manchester was never going to be simply a location on the programme. The organisers made the city part of the experience.<\/p>\n

Looking forward from where it began<\/h2>\n

Returning to Manchester was never only about celebrating the past. For Dr Mabel S\u00e1nchez Barrioluengo, the significance of the city lies just as much in the questions it is equipped to ask now. As MIOIR approaches its 20th anniversary and RADMA its 60th, she sees a clear thread between their histories and the challenges facing innovation studies today: both were built on the idea that understanding innovation requires different perspectives, brought together around real-world problems.<\/p>\n

The questions have also changed. The challenge is no longer simply to understand which technologies will emerge next, but how they will be governed, who will benefit from them and how they might contribute to sustainability, inclusion and wider societal goals. Dr S\u00e1nchez Barrioluengo sees Manchester’s strength in the combination of research and engagement with industry, policymakers and communities – a tradition that gives the city a continuing role in those debates.<\/p>\n

Professor Silvia Massini was thinking about that continuity too when the conference was being planned. One reason for involving younger colleagues, she says, was simple: they may be the people who bring the conference back to Manchester next time.<\/p>\n

That is perhaps the clearest way to understand the 2026 return. The R&D Management community came back to the city where much of its story began, but it did not come back to look backwards. It came with new researchers, new collaborations and new questions about how innovation should be understood and shaped. For three days in June, Manchester was once again a meeting point for that conversation. What matters now is where it goes next.<\/p>\n

About the author:<\/strong> Mariia Bobyleva is a PhD researcher at the Manchester Institute of Innovation Research and MIOIR Blog Coordinator. She attended R&D Management 2026 as a PhD volunteer and interviewed members of the organising team and volunteer community for this article.<\/em><\/p>\n

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