Colette Fagan and Sarah Sharples: Making the Leap: Accelerating the path from research excellence to impact
Between October and December, we are running a series of Viewpoint blogs written by our University Executive to give their personal perspectives on our new strategy to 2035, play back what we heard, explain the choices we are making, and set out how we will test, learn and scale to deliver our strategy. In this piece, Professor Colette Fagan, Vice-President for Research and Professor Sarah Sharples, Vice-President and Dean of the Faculty of Science and Engineering, give their insight into the leap: Accelerating the path from research excellence to impact. You can explore the strategy on our webpage, or download the full strategy text.
Making the leap: Accelerating the path from research excellence to impact
We come to this from different disciplines – sociology and human-centred engineering – but we share the same aim: make Manchester the best place in the UK to do ambitious, inclusive research with faster impact. Whatever you are working on, the conditions that help are the same – time for discovery, simple ways to collaborate, trusted data and tools, and partners who can help ideas to develop and travel.
Curiosity to change – at scale
Our leap is rooted in a commitment to organise ourselves around research challenges, beyond disciplines. We are building on strong foundations. We have a world class record of research excellence and impact which is recognised in global rankings and the UK’s Research Excellence Framework. But we want to be better. We will supercharge our platforms in creative, digital, environment and health to drive large-scale progress in research, innovation and teaching. By uniting our people and partners, these platforms will tackle urgent questions, turning ideas into impactful solutions while ensuring academic freedom. They will also strengthen links between research and teaching, enhancing student experience through curriculum development, challenge-led teaching, and new opportunities with Manchester Online, such as micro-credentials and summer schools – with Unit M serving as the gateway for partners, ensuring our research benefits civic and employer needs. Our focus on organising research and innovation around key challenges extends beyond these platforms. Our institutes, centres and groups, with their longstanding partner relationships, will remain at the forefront of research. They will work with platforms to showcase our strengths, and, by building on what works, we will foster new challenges, collaborations and innovations across the University. As was emphasised in the announcement of the Department of Science, Innovation and Technologies allocation of R&D funding to 2029/30, curiosity-led, foundational research is critical for the delivery of future discovery, insight and invention. We will ensure that our strengths in curiosity-led research are more visible, communicated, supported and connected alongside those of challenge-led research.
From Manchester for the world, our new University strategy to 2035 has five leaps – bold choices where we’ll go further and faster to become the university the future demands. We challenged our students to explain each in just one minute. Can they beat the clock?
Building on what we already do well
Colleagues were clear in the consultations about the research environment and culture that they need to do their best work: time to focus on research and innovation, investment in physical and digital infrastructure, efficient and time-saving administrative systems, and a culture which supports people and values team collaboration. We agree. We are dedicated to creating a well-structured, collaborative and inclusive research environment. Progress includes the Research Culture and Environment framework, enhanced professional services, upgraded IT and facilities, and the recruitment of 200 Bicentennial postgraduate researchers and fellows. While our facilities are among the best in the UK, further investment is needed to streamline systems and boost efficiency. We will invest further through the University’s From Manchester for the world strategic commitment to be ‘organised for success’ by streamlining systems, reducing bureaucracy and improving support so that all colleagues, student and partners can do their best work. Our ‘Digital Inside and Out’ Leap features the AI Skunkworks, providing a space to co-design responsible AI usage, alongside ongoing investment in research IT infrastructure. Accelerating our pathway to innovation is underway with the launch of Unit M, offering partners a single point of collaboration, and initiatives like the Innovation Accelerator help scale real-world solutions with the NHS and industry. As part of the expanding innovation ecosystem, we will continue to develop our impact enabled by our professional business engagement, public engagement, knowledge exchange and impact teams. A key example is Policy@Manchester, which connects research with policymakers. Alongside these investments we will work with colleagues to devise ways of working that release time for research and which help to build and sustain collaborative and inclusive research teams. Our approach is people-centred and values-led – grounded in academic freedom with clearer career pathways and fairer recognition for the contribution of all team members.
How we will phase the work
Manchester 2035 is a ten-year strategy, with the first three years focused on building upon existing research excellence and enhancing the research environment and innovation ecosystem. The initial priority is to amplify the impact of teams already making a difference. The plan also aims to unite areas of untapped potential across schools and faculties. We will work with the platforms, institutes and schools to identify areas of potential intersection between research teams, listening to colleagues about their ideas for areas where, through convening and collaborating, we can make the whole greater than the sum of the parts, and deliver more impact by bringing different disciplines and teams together. Challenge areas will be defined for curiosity- and challenge-led research, with open competitions for teams to accelerate progress. Our platforms and institutes work will evolve through the ten-year strategy to enable this focus on research challenges, collaborations and acceleration of impact. This includes the expanded platform remit to work more closely with the teaching, learning and students’ teams to deepen the connections between our research and teaching to enhance our students’ learning. This work will commence in the first phase of the plan.
Imagining 2035
What will research excellence with impact feel like in 2035? Success will be visible to everyone. Our researchers can access world class facilities and work in an environment with leading digital resources and efficient unobtrusive administrative systems. Our platforms and institutes enable them to come together easily in teams and move from idea to prototype with clear support, and without feeling like practicalities are getting in the way – setting the agenda in their field. This environment frees up time and makes it easier to focus on what matters. Team collaboration is the norm. The contribution of all team members – including technicians, methodologists, postdoctoral researchers, innovation specialists – is recognised and rewarded through clear pathways for career progression. Postgraduate researchers have an inspiring experience preparing their thesis, providing a springboard into employment, with many in research and innovation functions across different sectors of the economy. Students value how research enriches their learning and have more opportunities to contribute, for example through research projects and placements. And strategic partners experience us as one university with a clear front door, joined-up teams and students embedded in projects – and choose to work with us because collaboration feels easy and ambitious.
One question to discuss: What single change would most accelerate your path from research to impact
We talk as if the university is a kind of mission-driven conglomerate, strategically steering research toward grand challenges. In reality, a modern research university is a platform — closer to Amazon— that lets academics use its infrastructure, reputation and regulatory status to access other people’s money. And that money is mostly public: taxpayer-funded research councils and medical charities whose donors think they’re paying for breakthroughs, not for universities to build ever larger central bureaucracies.
Yet our strategies are written as if the university itself is the originator, investor, and beneficiary. It isn’t. We are intermediaries. When something actually does look commercially promising, we are very quick to invite in private equity and venture capital, who quite reasonably protect their risk by diluting the university’s stake to a rounding error. The pattern is familiar: the university puts in small, high-risk seed funding (and decades of salary, labs, PhDs — all effectively public subsidy), then business walks away with the real upside. Universities then point to the spinout as “impact,” but economically, it’s marginal for us.
So the corporate fantasy goes like this: “We will be a research-intensive university solving the world’s problems.” The operational reality is: “We will be a platform through which publicly funded academics compete for publicly funded grants, while the serious downstream value creation is captured elsewhere.” Which is why I find the 2035-style visions incomplete. If everyone is chasing the same challenge-led funding, we produce conformity, not originality. And if our actual revenue is teaching plus highly competitive public research money, we should admit that the real, defensible business of a university is still teaching, training, and safeguarding fundamental, even esoteric scholarship whose value can’t yet be narrated for a VC deck. Everything else is fashion.