28th January 2026

Tomas Coates Ulrichsen and Leonard Kelleher

There is significant policy interest in the UK in strengthening local economies to fulfil their economic potential and address long-standing spatial disparities. Universities have a significant role to play in helping to deliver policy ambitions in this area, including through their KE activities.

Funders of KE, including Research England, face increasing pressure to develop approaches and allocate funding to enable universities, through KE, to strengthen contributions to regional economic growth. More widely, the development of regional policies, growth strategies, and implementation approaches are informed in part by the data and metrics available. While some progress is being made on regional innovation and economic growth data, there is a lack of any significant fit-for-purpose data that more specifically captures universities’ contributions to regional growth outcomes through their KE activities. For Research England – which allocates KE funding to universities through both formula-driven allocations and competitions – this constrains their ability to:

• Allocate funding to enable universities to contribute to regional growth through KE
• Track and evaluate the performance of such funding programmes
• Support learning and improvement by universities around how to deliver effective and impactful regional economic growth initiatives

To begin to address the gap in data availability, leading academics with expertise on regional economic growth, universities, and KE, were commissioned to produce a series of Expert Insights Papers. The papers provide insights on the state-of-the-art evidence available and offer thoughts on where better understanding, data and metrics could be developed to meet the needs of institutional funders of KE such as Research England.

The topics were shaped by a policy evidence roundtable in September 2024, which brought together national funders, policymakers, and academic and sector experts from across the UK to identify key gaps. Key topics include:

• Approaches, opportunities and challenges to fostering regional economic growth (including theoretical and empirical insights, and latest international practices).
• Opportunities and challenges for where and how universities can contribute to regional economic growth through KE.
• Types of regions or regional contexts and how these shape the role universities should play in enabling economic growth through KE.
• University KE pathways for delivering impacts on regional growth
• The types / scale of capabilities, resources and alignment needed within universities to deliver KE aimed at supporting regional growth, and the ability of universities to adapt and reconfigure to deliver.

Policy Evidence Roundtable report

Key insights and priority areas requiring further work emerging from the 2024 Policy Evidence Roundtable:

Click on the paper title to download the paper

Commissioned papers

The commissioned papers include:

Click on the paper title to download the paper

Focusing our efforts for improved data and metrics

The expert insights papers identify a number of key gaps where tangible progress could be made over the next few years to improve the data and metrics available to inform the agenda focused on strengthening university KE for regional growth. These include the need for:

A territorial typology for knowledge exchange

• A typology of places specific to the needs of institutional funders of university KE that captures the varieties of local strengths, opportunities and challenges that exist across the country.

Improving KE data availability

• Greater geographic granularity of data on KE activities and outcomes to enable better insights on the regional focus and reach of KE
• Improved data on the resources (financial / non-financial) committed and mobilised by universities to contribute to regional growth through KE
• Data and metrics capturing the ecosystem-strengthening activities and contributions of universities through KE, not least on regional institutional capacity and capability building
• Data and metrics capturing the collaborative and joint efforts of universities (with each other and with partners such as Further Education colleges) aimed at contributing to regional economic growth
• Data and metrics capturing the scale and specialisation of universities within local economies as it relates to their potential to contribute to regional economic growth outcomes through KE

Increasing understanding of the roles and contributions of university KE to regional growth

• Further understanding the different KE pathways for regional economic growth, particularly through collaborative approaches, those focused on strengthening and mobilising ecosystems, and by stimulating and leveraging public procurement to pull through innovation
• Examining the pathways and contributions of university KE to regional economic growth through an arts, humanities and social science lens to improve understanding and identify key gaps and opportunities for improved KE data and metrics

Approaches to KE decision-making, funding, and performance measurement for regional growth

• Integrating qualitative and quantitative data into strategic decision-making and funding approaches
• How to capture and measure the strengthening and maturing of ecosystems for regional growth through university KE (e.g. cluster development, system transition opportunities, local institutional capacity to design and deliver strategies for growth)
• Opportunities for a ‘systems-of-systems’ approach to performance management and measurement that leverages the power and insights of regional consortia
• How to balance local and non-local outcomes in funding approaches
• How to incentivise collaborative KE approaches to regional economic growth given the current mix of formula and project-specific funding for KE

Moving forward

We are now actively exploring how we can best enable progress to be made in these areas. If you are interested in learning more about our work in this space, please get in touch!

Research England national knowledge exchange metrics programme

This Expert Insights Paper Series was commissioned by UCI, as Research England’s national knowledge exchange (KE) metrics advisers, to provide expert insights to inform the Research England-UCI work programme to develop better data and metrics for KE.