Shaping capability’s goal is to align our portfolio to areas of UK strength and national importance. This will ensure that the country’s international standing is maintained and enhanced within a competitive international research environment.
We will base all investment decisions over the Delivery Plan period on both international excellence and relevance to national importance (over a 10-50 year time-frame) while continuing to encourage the free generation of ideas and curiosity-based research.
We will harness the expertise of scientists and engineers from across our portfolio to help redefine, refocus and re-energise the UK research and training landscape.
We will target resource to where it is needed most, ensuring researchers receive the funding and infrastructure support they need.
We will:
- Define and build a dynamic portfolio that harnesses the talents of our best people
- Concentrate more funding in research centres and clusters of excellence which cover a breadth of engineering and physical sciences
- Encourage collaborations where there are synergies
- Align investments in training, people, research and knowledge transfer to ensure efficient use of resources
- Enable the most creative and potentially transformative research to flourish
- Increase the proportion of leading researchers working on EPSRC's challenge themes
We will achieve this by working in partnership with key researchers, as well as through a more proactive dialogue with stakeholders, business and other users.