Reorganising Research — Science Works

Every era of scientific progress has rested on the invention of new ways to organise our efforts.

The research university, the national laboratory, the corporate lab, the funding council, the mission agency – each was an institutional innovation with its own design choices, affordances, and limits, well-suited to some kinds of work and less to others.

How labs and funding are organised, what incentives and timescales are hardwired into the system – these choices promote certain types of research and make others very difficult to pursue.

The UK is unusually dependent on a single dominant model of research: the academic lab, funded by a patchwork of external grants, organised around a principal investigator, assessed primarily on papers, and built around a standardised career pathway. This model has supported much of what British science is rightly known for, and it will remain central.

But no single template serves every kind of research project. Recent initiatives and proposals – Focused Research Organizations (FROs), the Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA), Lovelace Disruptive Invention Labs – reflect the growing recognition that Britain would benefit from a broader institutional repertoire. Where variation is limited, there is less to learn from; the system struggles to evolve, and is less resilient.

The questions of whether our research base should diversify, and how, are only becoming more pressing: the existing system is under significant strain, while AI is transforming what research teams can achieve.

Reorganising Research is a Science Works initiative to chart what mix of research institutions Britain now needs, and how to get there. We’re kicking things off with an essay prize and a call for evidence.

Essay Prize

We are launching an essay prize to uncover new thinking about how to reorganise research.

We want provocations, reimaginings, and new data. We would much rather read a new argument that we disagree with than a familiar one we don’t.

Your entry can take any form you wish, but below are three prompts for essays that we’d be interested in reading:

Write a piece of speculative fiction exploring how the UK develops more diverse types of research institution over the coming 5–10 years.
Is the UK’s mix of research institutions right after all? How would we know if it weren’t?
Identify a type of scientific or technological problem that cannot be adequately tackled inside existing research institutions. Explain why and identify a potential solution.

You don't need to be a researcher or to work in policy to enter – only to care about how organisational design shapes what science can do.

Prize: £3,000
Runners up: £500
Length: Maximum 3,000 words (no minimum)
Closing date: 15th July 2026

Winners and runners up will be informed by the 31st July 2026. Essays will be judged by the Science Works team. By submitting your essay, you agree that Science Works may publish it with full attribution. You retain copyright in your essay. Full terms here.

To submit an essay, email essay@science.works

Call for Evidence

Run jointly with the Wellcome Trust, this call for evidence will uncover examples of the labs, departments, institutes, programmes, and funding architectures across the UK that are doing things differently to the mainstream academic model.

We are looking for organisations and initiatives that have stepped outside one or more of the mainstream assumptions about how research gets organised.

This could include unusual team structures, financial models, governance arrangements, career trajectories, connections with other types of research organisation, or approaches to infrastructure.

Key Question

How diverse is the UK’s research landscape, and what’s already being trialled?

The most useful responses will come from people who can describe what their group or initiative is doing that wouldn't be obvious from its website.

You can use the form to describe your own work, or to point us elsewhere. It takes around ten minutes to complete.

This scoping exercise is part of a broader programme of work on institutional dynamism in UK R&D.

With your permission, we may be in touch about future collaboration, use of your response to inform case studies, or events on this topic.

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