Sustained investment in community-led research is vital to ensure the UK’s scientific base remains competitive globally and as one of our most important national assets to drive economic and social growth.
It’s driven forward by bold ambition across the sector, working to build research excellence into innovation, productivity and economic growth. In the coming months and years, that is likely to include continued investment in artificial intelligence and advanced technologies, but also in the wider advanced economy sectors, which are now seen as central to the UK’s growth strategy. The question for today and the future is not simply where investment flows, but what kinds of growth it enables, for whom, and on what terms.
But the challenges of the coming decade are social as well as technical. Without putting community led research and lived experience at the heart of what is funded, valued and rewarded, we risk developing approaches that alienate rather than unite, and that will struggle to be implemented or widely adopted.
Why economic growth needs research rooted in people and place
Recent UK government announcements point to a significant rebalancing of funding towards AI, engineering and other economically strategic fields. Investment in these areas can and should play a role in addressing major societal challenges, and investment in advanced economy sectors will be essential to future prosperity. But if growth in high-value sectors is not accompanied by a deep understanding of how people and communities connect to economic opportunity, it will do little to tackle regional disparities, or to build a thriving foundational economy. Without a corresponding commitment to understanding people, places and power, research and innovation could become detached from lived realities. That would risk fundamentally undermining its effectiveness, because technology and high-growth sectors do not operate in a vacuum; they are developed, adopted, resisted and reshaped in places, through institutions, labour markets and communities.
This is where community led research has impact. Research that is shaped with communities – rather than conducted on or done for them – brings forms of insight that cannot be accessed through analysis alone. It surfaces tacit knowledge, exposes unintended consequences, and grounds theory in everyday life. For challenges such as health inequalities, climate transition, trust in institutions, or the future of work, lived experience is not anecdotal colour, it is essential evidence.
Michael Young’s case for social science in innovation strategy
The danger of sidelining social science in favour of a narrow conception of innovation is not hypothetical. Time and again, well-intentioned technological or economic solutions fail because they misunderstand people’s behaviours, incentives or constraints. AI systems reproduce bias. New services exacerbate inequalities. Productivity gains fail to translate into improved quality of life. These are not technical failures; they are social ones.
Michael Young, founder of the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) in 1965 – which is the ESRC today – believed that social science justified public support precisely because of its capacity to change the world for the better. He argued passionately that research must be rooted in the realities of people’s lives. He said, at the time, the social sciences are valuable “in so far as they add to mankind’s span of control”.
Young’s vision was never anti‑technology or anti‑growth. On the contrary, he was deeply interested in future economic prosperity and in the possibilities of new tools. But he was also sceptical of institutions that lost sight of whose interests they served. He believed that knowledge creation should remain open to influence from outside academia, and that important research could take place beyond university walls — in neighbourhoods, workplaces and voluntary organisations as much as in laboratories and lecture theatres.
Why research strategy needs a community lens
That insight feels urgently relevant today. As funding priorities are shaped around economic and strategic advantage, the temptation to treat people as variables to be optimised, rather than individuals with agency and expertise, must be resisted. Community led research is not a niche add-on for participation strategies or ‘broader impacts’ sections. It is a way of producing better knowledge.
Making this real requires more than warm words. It means funding models that allow communities to shape research questions, not just respond to them. It means valuing partnerships with civil society organisations as equal, not subordinate, to academic institutions. It means recognising lived experience as a form of expertise—and designing assessment, evaluation and career structures that reflect that.
If we succeed in accelerating growth in high-value sectors without improving lived outcomes, public confidence in research will erode. If, instead, we embrace a richer understanding of innovation that values investment in technology and advanced sectors while seeing people as co-creators rather than end-users, we have the opportunity to renew the social contract between research and society. That means recognising that economic success depends not only on innovation, but on whether it benefits our places and communities – especially those that are too often excluded from opportunity.
People are not the residue of economic progress. They are its purpose. Forgetting this risks hard‑coding the failures our research and innovation sectors seek to solve.
Community Innovation and Investment Local economies Social innovation Posted on: 23 June 2026 Authors: Kersten England CBE, Sue Griffiths,