Foreword
At a time of profound change and opportunity in the UK, the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) is launching its first-ever strategy for commercialisation. This builds on the success of our community of researchers in applying arts and humanities research to real-world impact.
There are two clear sides of the same coin here, the economic case and the social need for arts and humanities commercialisation activity. UKRI’s new mission, to advance knowledge, improve lives and drive growth, presents a special opportunity to harness the full potential of our research, shaping a dynamic, inclusive and sustainable economy.
In step with the government’s industrial strategy, arts and humanities research brings unique strengths: informing design, guiding ethical frameworks and shaping technologies that serve society. From the creative industries, digital heritage and immersive experiences to our approaches across policy and business, our disciplines contribute greatly to the solutions our citizens need. Critically, our commitment to co-design with communities transforms outcomes into shared objectives, embedded in citizens’ lives and aligned to their needs and lived experience.
Our direction is clear. This strategy demonstrates our commitment to the commercialisation pathway. It promotes the translation of research excellence into real-world impact, fostering partnerships that generate economic value while enriching lives. By doing so, we will play our part in ensuring that the UK remains a global leader in social innovation, delivering growth that is knowledge-driven and deeply human.
Professor Christopher Smith, Executive Chair, AHRC
Strategic purpose
Despite significant progress across the SHAPE (social sciences, humanities and the arts for people and the economy) ecosystem in recent years, we know that barriers remain, limiting the full potential of arts and humanities commercialisation. We also recognise that commercialisation is not a pathway that is suitable, or desired, by everyone. This strategy throws light on that pathway for those who seek it as just one route to delivering impact.
So what is research commercialisation?
UKRI definition: Commercialising research solves real-world problems and can create long-lasting impact. It is the process by which new or improved technologies, products, processes (experiences) and services that have been generated through research are brought to market.
As a concept, commercialisation can feel very different to people across the arts and humanities community. While there are persistent barriers across the SHAPE ecosystem, it is important to recognise that arts and humanities disciplines have already generated significant commercial successes, from design-led innovation and digital heritage technologies to new business models and creative IP.
However, access to these pathways remains uneven, and for many researchers the route to commercialisation can feel less visible or harder to navigate. This strategy therefore aims to widen access, foster support and build confidence across the community, strengthening our balanced approach to sustainable economic growth and social innovation.
Sustainable economic growth
AHRC is steadfast in its commitment to driving sustainable and inclusive economic growth, grounded in the conviction that the arts and humanities are essential to the UK’s long-term prosperity.
We invest in the ideas, talent and partnerships that unlock new forms of value, ensuring that innovation is not only commercially viable but socially and culturally meaningful.
Through initiatives such as AHRC’s Proof of Concept, we enable researchers to translate insights into scalable opportunities. Our Creative Clusters programme strengthens regional creative economies, fostering ecosystems that generate high-quality jobs and global competitiveness. Across the UK’s nations and regions, our Impact Acceleration Accounts provide the agile support required to mobilise knowledge rapidly where it can make the most difference.
Together, these programmes demonstrate AHRC’s leadership in shaping a more resilient, dynamic economy – one that recognises creativity as a strategic national asset and places people, place and culture at the heart of sustainable growth.
Social innovation
At AHRC, ‘social innovation’ means the translation of arts and humanities research and practice into inclusive, sustainable solutions that address societal challenges and improve lives. Alongside sustainable economic growth, it is the purpose behind our commercialisation strategy.
AHRC already delivers meaningful real-world outcomes for the UK public through a sustained commitment to social innovation. The Connected Communities programme has pioneered collaborative, place-based research that empowers local groups to co-design solutions to social challenges. Through the Locally Unlocking Culture through Inclusive Access (LUCIA) programme AHRC is investing in research networks that give communities greater agency and opportunity, enabling more equitable access to services and embedding a culture of inclusive policy design. Meanwhile, our Design Generators are providing practical, creative methodologies that help partners harness design to address environmental sustainability, decarbonisation, circular economies, policy design and regenerative practices.
Together, these initiatives demonstrate AHRC’s leadership in shaping socially responsive and community-driven innovation across the UK
Vision and objectives
Our vision is to create an environment that engages, enables and evolves the arts and humanities commercialisation community through targeted interventions, supporting AHRC’s strategic aims and UKRI’s overarching ambitions. We have three objectives to achieve this:
- Engage: lead and assist partners in addressing conceptual, linguistic and landscape-mapping challenges hindering arts and humanities commercialisation
- Enable: improve the health of commercialisation pathways by targeting points of failure, creating accessible opportunities and enriching AHRC’s broader strategic aims
- Evolve: strengthen connectivity across research organisations, sharing best practice for partnership development through benefits realisation
Our plan: the first steps
To deliver our vision, AHRC will build upon existing investment models, interdisciplinary partnerships and, where possible, establish new activities in line with our objectives. We will, of course, continue to advocate for arts and humanities across existing and forthcoming UKRI translation activities. But this is just the beginning. We also want to take a long-term, iterative approach that can flex to changing sector conditions.
To that end, AHRC will prioritise early commercialisation interventions that ensure promising ideas are supported at the moment they are most vulnerable yet most full of potential. By strengthening entrepreneurial skills and the steps along the commercial pathway, AHRC will build a robust foundation from which later stages of scale, investment and impact can follow.
Our first steps are to:
- Engage: communicate with stakeholders consistently, providing clear messaging around our commercialisation activities and promoting opportunities both nationally and internationally
- Enable: promote early career researcher entrepreneurial skills training alongside new and existing models for sustainability and scale-up, while improving links to industry sectors and businesses
- Evolve: convene a Community of Practice to drive continuous improvement across research organisations, and to further embed commercialisation across AHRC investments
Measuring success
AHRC must demonstrate itself as an engine for growth. Doing so will require routine monitoring and insightful evaluation of our commercialisation programming, at UK, regional and local levels. We are developing methods to do this proportionately, informed by the work of our UKRI partners in Innovate UK, Research England and beyond.
Accordingly, our approach to commercialisation over the next five years (2026 to 2031) will need to capture additionality through the collection of both economic and social innovation metrics. These range from skills development, job creation, return on investment and efficiencies to contributions that advance the UK government’s missions and the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals.
AHRC innovation value chain
A driving purpose of this strategy is to enhance the potential of what you already do. By embedding an innovation value chain into our commercialisation approach, alongside existing economic measures, we will demonstrate how arts and humanities deliver tangible outcomes and benefits for the UK taxpayer.
See the AHRC innovation value chain
Step 1: AHRC inputs
AHRC and partners will work together to identify and quantify economic and social benefits that can be realised via commercialisation.
Step 2: investment outputs
Investments will pursue commercialisation to develop skills and sustainable/scalable solutions, increasing researcher satisfaction.
Step 3: benefits to citizens
Investments will capture their outcomes and benefits to UK citizens, demonstrating where they have added value or efficiency to the economy and society.
Step 4: sustained success
AHRC will evaluate the benefits and impacts from its investments, learn the lessons and promote the success of research commercialisation.
Success will be measured not only in generative economic terms, but also through the stories of transformation, where research informs policy, empowers communities and drives sustainability. Our vision and objectives echo this cause.
Next steps
AHRC’s commercialisation strategy is a commitment from us to help translate your ideas into solutions. By embracing its purpose, we are proud to support your commercialisation journey and to maximise its impact on society and the economy. After all, research and innovation are most powerful when they change lives.
AHRC therefore invites all those with entrepreneurial curiosity, across our inspirational disciplines, to join us in shaping the solutions for the future.
We will continue to provide updates on our progress and funding announcements via our bi-monthly commercialisation newsletter.
Subscribe to the commercialisation newsletter
Be inspired: AHRC commercialisation case studies
For researchers and practitioners new to this area, it can sometimes be tricky to understand what commercialisation really involves. The following AHRC-funded case studies provide a range of past and present activities and their impacts. We hope they may inspire you to take this path with an innovation of your own.
- Bridging histories and building futures (Bridging Histories project, SHAPE Catalyst)
- Reusable headwear improving hospital patients’ experience (Design HOPES project)
- Toward commercialisation and pay equity for international NGOs (Project Fair, SHAPE Catalyst)
- Science, Heritage and Archaeology Digital 3D Laboratory (SHArD 3D) unearths growing public demand (Creative Research Capability Grant, RICHeS programme)
- CoSTAR Ideate company SAIReco nominated for prestigious Tech Impact Award
- Rivalry Project puts community at centre stage (Impact Acceleration Accounts)
Reflections from the community on the strategy
Tony Hickson, Chief Business Officer, Cancer Research UK and Cancer Research Horizons, and author of ‘Deepening university-investor links: a review’:
“AHRC’s Commercialisation Strategy is a timely and important step forward. It sets out a clear and credible vision for strengthening commercialisation across the arts and humanities, and provides the foundations for unlocking more social, cultural and economic value from research and innovation. By helping to address long-standing barriers and championing proven good practice, AHRC is creating the conditions for more ideas to reach and benefit society.”
Joe Marshall, Chief Executive, National Centre for Universities and Business:
“The UK’s competitive advantage depends on bringing together different forms of knowledge to solve complex problems. This strategy recognises that commercialisation takes many forms, and that the arts and humanities make an essential contribution to innovation by helping businesses understand people, shape new products and services and create new sources of value. By strengthening collaboration between researchers and industry, it has the potential to unlock new opportunities for innovation, investment and growth.”
Dr Syahirah Abdul Rahman, Oxford Brookes University and member of the Innovation Research Caucus:
“I strongly welcome the AHRC’s Commercialisation Strategy, which is careful in treating commercialisation as one pathway to impact rather than the only route. This provides a realistic and inclusive picture of commercialisation towards researchers, recognising that commercialisation will not be the right option for every researcher or every project, while still helping those who want to engage with it to do so more confidently and with better information and support.
“The Commercialisation Strategy also presents commercialisation as a means of solving real-world problems and creating long-term value, rather than as a purely short-term market exercise. Just as importantly, its wider understanding of success, including regional and local outcomes, social metrics, skills development and job creation, alongside more traditional economic indicators, offers a more credible way to assess contribution from research.
“Taken together, this makes the Commercialisation Strategy a promising route for translating the strength of arts and humanities research in the UK into usable outputs that can benefit citizens, communities, and the wider economy.”
Professor Tracy Bhamra, Provost and Pro Vice-Chancellor (Global) at Royal Holloway, University of London, Professor of Design and Sustainability and AHRC Council Member:
“I really welcome the clarity of this Commercialisation Strategy from AHRC. It provides the sector with clear direction regarding the commercialisation of arts and humanities research – something that has in the past often caused some challenges. The clear linking of existing initiatives to both sustainable economic growth and social innovation helps to frame a way forward that feels inclusive for the breadth of arts and humanities disciplines. I look forward to seeing the next step as this work evolves in the coming years and as further examples emerge.”
Polly Mackenzie, CEO of Zinc Innovation Partners and Research England Council member:
“We often speak of the UK’s knowledge economy as if knowledge itself were reducible to laboratories, patents and engineering outputs. It isn’t. Some of our most powerful tools for solving hard problems and building things people want to use come from the arts and humanities: the ethics frameworks that make technology trustworthy, the design thinking that makes services work, the cultural intelligence that opens global markets and the creative outputs that bring joy and meaning to our lives. But those forms of knowledge can rarely be commercialised through IP and investment frameworks designed for scientific breakthroughs. That is why this AHRC Commercialisation Strategy is so important.”
Further AHRC and UKRI commercialisation resources
See UKRI guidance for research commercialisation
Read AHRC’s impact guidance for more information on impact delivery
Read about UKRI’s simplification of research translation and commercialisation funding