Evaluation of the Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund: Process evaluation report

Delivered by UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), the Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund (ISCF) seeks to leverage research and innovation (R&I) to support the development of solutions to major industrial and societal challenges facing the UK. The ISCF adopts a Challenge-led approach: under the fund, individual ‘Challenges’ have been established, each focused on supporting collaborative, cross-sector R&I within a specific sector or thematic area. Reflecting the ISCF’s links to the 2017 Industrial Strategy, the ISCF Challenges have been designed to align to the Strategy’s aims, including the four ‘Grand Challenge’ themes:
Ageing Society; Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Data; Clean Growth; and Future of Mobility. The ISCF Challenges have been established through three sequential commissioning waves.
RAND Europe and Frontier Economics have been commissioned by UKRI to undertake a fund-level evaluation of the ISCF. The overarching aim of this evaluation is to build an evidence base with which to judge the success and overall impact of the ISCF. The fund-level evaluation seeks to complement the ongoing evaluations of the individual ISCF Challenges by focusing on the fund’s delivery as a whole. The fund-level evaluation includes baseline measurement, process evaluation, and impact evaluation phases.
This report presents findings of the fund-level process evaluation of the ISCF. The process evaluation has focused on assessing the processes, drivers and evidence underpinning the design and delivery of the fund and its constituent Challenges across the three commissioning waves. The evaluation employed a mixed methods approach to data collection including interviews, a review of Challenge-level process evaluation reports, a review of secondary data and documentation, case studies and workshops.