UKRI’s strategy for 2026 to 2031 has been read closely across the sector, and most of the commentary has focused on where the money is going. Life sciences, AI, clean energy, advanced manufacturing, defence. The £11.9 billion earmarked for industrial strategy sectors. The expectation of £3 of private investment for every £1 of public money.
All of that matters. But there is a quieter shift running underneath it that is worth paying attention to, particularly if you are writing a bid in the next twelve months.
Impact has moved from the end of the project to the start
The strategy is built around three themes: advance knowledge, improve lives, drive growth. Discovery research is explicitly protected, and UKRI has been clear that curiosity-driven work underpins everything that follows. That has not changed.
What has changed is the weight given to what happens next. Reviewers want to see benefits for patients, communities or businesses. Translation into policy or practice. Adoption beyond academia. A credible route to implementation rather than an intention to publish and hope.
Impact used to be something you described in a section near the end of the form. Increasingly it is something you have to design for from the beginning, and that has practical consequences for how a project is put together.
Where digital quietly becomes load-bearing
This is the part that tends to get overlooked, because digital is often treated as an operational detail rather than something that belongs in the research design conversation.
Consider what the strategy is actually asking for.
Stronger collaboration across sectors. Universities working with NHS organisations, industry, government, international partners and the public. Those partnerships need somewhere to live. Shared spaces, clear documentation, ways for people outside your institution to find out what the project does without having to email someone and wait three days.
Public and patient involvement. PPIE is not a box to tick, and it does not work if the only route in is a PDF on a departmental page. If you want contributors from outside academia, the way you present the project has to make sense to people who do not share your vocabulary. Accessibility is not optional here, either legally or practically.
A credible route to implementation. If your findings are meant to reach practitioners, policymakers or businesses, they need to be findable and usable by those audiences. A dataset nobody can navigate and a report nobody can locate are not routes to adoption.
Public engagement and dissemination. Reviewers are asking how findings will reach people beyond the field. That is a communications question as much as a research one.
None of this is glamorous. But a project website is often the first thing a potential partner, participant or journalist encounters, and it is frequently the weakest link in an otherwise strong piece of work.
The gap between the bid and the build
Most research projects allocate something for dissemination and digital outputs. The trouble is that the figure often gets set early, before anyone has worked out what the project actually needs, and it gets revisited once the funding lands and someone asks who is building the website.
By that point the options have narrowed. You either stretch a small budget across something more complicated than expected, or you scale back what you promised.
The projects that avoid this tend to have had a conversation about the digital side while the bid was being written, not after. Not a detailed specification, just enough clarity to cost it honestly. Who needs to use this. What do they need to do. What happens to it when the funding ends.
That last question is worth asking early. A platform that stops being maintained the month the grant closes is difficult to describe as lasting impact.
What this looks like in practice
A few things are worth thinking about while a project is still taking shape.
Design for the audience you are trying to reach, not the one you already have. If PPIE is part of the plan, the digital presence has to work for contributors with no background in the field.
Treat accessibility as a design decision, not a retrofit. Public sector accessibility regulations apply, and meeting them properly is considerably cheaper at the start than it is after launch.
Think about who maintains it. Research teams change. Postdocs move on. Something that depends on one person’s goodwill is fragile.
Be realistic about what a website can do. It is not a substitute for engagement work. It supports it.
Our part in this
We work with NIHR-funded teams and university research groups, so we see the same pattern regularly. The research is rigorous and the team is strong, and the digital element has been squeezed into whatever was left over.
That is not a criticism of anyone. Funding applications are long, deadlines are tight, and digital is rarely the most pressing thing on the list. But UKRI’s direction of travel makes it harder to leave until later. When reviewers are looking for evidence of a route to implementation and genuine engagement beyond academia, the infrastructure supporting that starts to carry real weight.
We are not researchers and we do not pretend to be. Our role is the part where the work meets the people who need to find it, understand it and use it. Getting that right will not make a weak bid strong. But it can stop a strong one from being let down by the bit everyone assumed would sort itself out.
If you are putting a bid together and want to talk through the digital side before the numbers are fixed, we are always happy to have that conversation.