Impact Acceleration Account

Funding for collaboration, innovation and impact

Several students walking along a path between campus buildings

Do you want to work with the University on a collaborative, industry-based or innovation project?

Lancaster’s Impact Acceleration Account (IAA) applies research into real-world problems, offering flexible funding from £500 to £50,000 based on the project scope and suitability, with an average award of around £20,000.

“The IAA provides short-term seed-funding to rapidly mobilise research into action – enabling knowledge exchange with external partners and benefitting society.”

Awards provide early stage funding for projects with the potential to scale up. They also support the development of new opportunities and partnerships, and facilitate collaborations between Lancaster University academics and external partners including businesses, charities, and community groups.

IAAs are a funding mechanism, supported by UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) with the allocation and management of them devolved to organisations, including Lancaster University.

How will IAA funding benefit you as a partner?

The principle aim of an IAA is to work together to tackle real-world challenges - benefiting everyone involved and wider society, too.

Innovation

Supports innovation and research capacity – amplifying the impact of University research and benefitting your organisations development

Partnerships

Develops long-term meaningful partnerships, opening up new opportunities to innovate and grow your business, service, or product

Commercialisation

Progress research outputs and methods into new products and services with high economic potential

Professional Skills and Development

Develops skills, capacity, and capability in innovation for all involved

Expectations and terms and conditions for IAA projects are outlined at IAA Resources. If you have an idea for a collaborative project then get in touch and we can explain how things work in practice.

See what we've funded

We support projects that bring research to life and make a difference in the real world. Take a look at some of the work IAAs have helped fund.

Four smiling people seated in an office meeting room

Collaborations that count

Listen to Lancaster University's Impact Acceleration Account managers and some of our project researchers and partners discuss the role of Impact Acceleration Account funding.

View transcript

Melanie Burton: It could be Blackburn, it could be Fleetwood as far as Sierra Leone globally, but it's only a small amount, but it makes a really big difference.

Mark Bowen: The difference can be felt at a local/regional level, at a national level, across the UK. But in many cases it has a global effect.

Dr Sam Murphy: People talk about the energy crisis and the climate crisis whereby we need to reduce our carbon emissions. We're going to be battling the climate forever. It's not going to be over by 2050. We're going to need to constantly be worried about what we're emitting.
Now fusion, has no carbon emissions.

Dr Mark Spencer: Fleetwood as a community, for a long time was looking backwards, to the past. We recognize the past and we're very proud of the past as a community, but we are much more hopeful and that sense of hope is really, really beneficial.

Melanie Burton: Impact Acceleration Accounts, IAAs, are UKRI investments that are awarded to universities for knowledge exchange activities. That's really taking research out into the real world.

And we're able to do that in a very flexible way with our researchers, in a way that's meaningful for our institution, for our region, and nationally.

An amazing thing is that with knowledge exchange, is it's like seeing how research can be translated into other sectors, into other domains. So, yeah, the researchers will say themselves, you can start out with a research problem or a question and you don't know where it's going to lead. And I think that's the amazing thing that we've supported.

Mark Bowen: Serendipity always plays a part in developing any relationship. The money is there simply to help that relationship. It's not the be-all and end-all.

Professor Charlotte Baker: The Impact Acceleration Account funding has helped me to collaborate with different partners in Africa to bring people together, to bring together stakeholders in various meetings and networks that have enabled them to exchange their knowledge and expertise as well. So it's been really, really important to my work.

Professor Rob Young: EPSRC's Impact Acceleration Account has been a really efficient way of leveraging the funding that we've managed to raise through the company. So essentially, it's an act of taking a small amount from the commercial pot and magnifying it as much as possible. And that's kind of one of the primary aims of the Impact Acceleration Account, to leverage that kind of funding.

And it's been amazing. So obviously it gives us access to the facilities here at the university, but it also means that we don't need to raise as much money, to rely on other people quite so much. So it's giving us freedom. It's accelerated the scientific development, er you know, it puts the R in R and D and allows us to develop a really exciting new technology.

Mark Bowen: The reality is that these are projects that will impact people's lives in a very positive manner. Some of that impact may be felt very, very rapidly, as in the case of Fleetwood. However, it could be ten or 20 years down the line in terms of the work we're doing with Tokamak Energy about fusion fuels for power.

Melanie Burton: We're here supporting researchers, who are researchers, they're also educationalists, being able to help them to actually engage and work with other organisations. I think that's the exciting thing and I think it is very rewarding.

I'm Mel Burton and I've worked on the ESRC Impact Acceleration Account. It's been an amazing experience working in the social sciences at Lancaster University.

Mark Bowen: I'm Mark Bowen. I'm the Business Gateway Manager, and as part of that role I have operational management on a day-to-day basis of the EPSRC IAA Funding. It's the people that make the difference, whether it be the researcher or the partner, whether they be in business, public sector or the third sector, making the difference through people.

Narrator: From local to global, collaborations that count.

Social Enterprise in Residence Podcast

Listen to hear Professor Charlotte Baker and other academics and leaders discuss the impact of the Social Enterprise in Residence programme, funded by the AHRC Impact Acceleration Account, at the Faculty of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences.

View transcript

 
(0:00) Making the most of the expertise of academics and helping when it comes to real world need.
(0:09) That's the aim of a programme which has seen collaborations formed, 
(0:14) linking Lancaster University with organisations as varied, 
(0:17) as charities working to improve health in East Africa to the NHS, 
(0:22) here designed Hospitals of the Future. 
(0:24) Funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council Impact Acceleration Account, 
(0:29) coming up we'll hear how, in just two years, 
(0:32) the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Social Enterprise in Residence programme 
(0:36) has made a big impact.
(0:38) You can end up going off course, so it was just really, 
(0:41) really valuable to just start, plan and think,
(0:44) how do we want to go about this in the way that we want to do it?
(0:47) And it's so interesting to see how other people work,
(0:50) lots of like little niche areas of study and thinking about how that all links in. 
(0:54) It's really, you know, it's amazing. 
(0:55) Well, actually, why don't we start from the idea that a hospital might not be 
(0:59) a site of dread and of discomfort, 
(1:02) something we associate with or so often associate with all of those things.
(1:09) Epilepsy did some good research on epilepsy and also our work 
(1:13) to help young people with learning disabilities to make the transition 
(1:17) from school to their adult lives and the whole sort of world of work. 
(1:22) We wouldn't have been able to recruit such good people without that partnership. 
(1:26) Andrew Betts is the Director of Advantage Africa, 
(1:30) the first of six social enterprises that have been hosted by the Faculty.
(1:34) The charity supports people affected by poverty, disability and HIV 
(1:38) to improve their education, health and income. 
(1:41) It just cemented our relationship with Lancaster University. 
(1:45) We've had a number of collaborations on a few projects now, 
(1:48) ranging from albinism to preventing sexual abuse 
(1:52) and more recently on autism as well.
(1:54) So it was lovely. It was lovely to meet people, spend time with Charlotte Baker. 
(2:00) Charlotte appreciates how Advantage Africa is able to work with people at the grassroots.
(2:07) It's a two-way link.
(2:09) Advantage Africa will also host a Lancaster student intern
(2:13) and have led a workshop for students interested in working in the third sector. 
(2:18) This kind of collaboration means access to research and engagement with academics 
(2:23) across the university is possible, leading to opportunities which may otherwise be overlooked.
(2:28) You don't stop and think and then you apply to the fund, 
(2:31) but sometimes that can mean it takes you away 
(2:33) from what you're actually trying to do or your ethos as an organisation, your direction. 
(2:38) And that's especially true in anti-racism work. 
(2:40) Meg Guy from Anti-Racist Cumbria, a charitable incorporated organisation 
(2:45) which aims to tackle and end racism through action and education.
(2:49) Some forms of racism have been in the news more, 
(2:53) but the understanding of what anti-racism is, which is actually an approach to understanding racism 
(2:59) and to tackling it, which is different to the mainstream understanding, isn't really there. 
(3:04) So that then trickles down into the funding bodies often don't have that knowledge as well. 
(3:10) So yeah, you can end up going off course.
(3:13) So it was just really, really valuable to just stop, plan and think, 
(3:17) how do we want to go about this in the way that we want to do it, 
(3:21) before we then jump into bigger pots of funding? 
(3:24) Because otherwise you could just end up being five years down the line and thinking, 
(3:29) oh, we're just, we're totally different. We're not doing what we set out to do. 
(3:32) We do live in a world where we need the money.
(3:34) So it's really, really difficult balance to make, which is great. 
(3:38) And that this opportunity was, it's a small period of time, 
(3:41) but it was funded and that made all the difference. 
(3:43) At a time when funding is hard to come by, every piece of advice or insight is welcome.
(3:49) For Meg, meeting and working with Dr Dayo Sonno, 
(3:52) a lecturer in politics and policy at Lancaster, has proved vital. 
(3:56) I joined the university in 2023. As soon as I joined, it brought with me my interest in 
(4:02) racial equity and racial justice and how that links to policy work.
(4:06) And I was supported by the university to start the network in 2024. 
(4:12) So the racial equity and policy network has been going on since 2024. 
(4:16) And that sort of serves as the cover or the dissemination channel through which 
(4:23) I disseminate my research on racial equity.
(4:26) I really kind of like social enterprises and I have worked with social enterprises in the past, 
(4:31) in the sense that they are not charities and they're also not private organisations, 
(4:39) entities, they are for a particular social good. 
(4:43) And so the idea of social enterprises as an entity, 
(4:48) and I've supported social enterprises in Greater Manchester in the past, 
(4:51) so it felt quite natural and I was excited that this was happening at Lancaster University. 
(4:56) I definitely think academia can be, well, is an ivory tower.
(5:01) And there are more and more people like me who are trying to 
(5:05) connect, particularly within the civic university agenda, 
(5:10) ensuring that the university is anchored in the places that it is in locally. 
(5:15) And so this residency programme, again, is another great example of that, of how to, 
(5:22) I guess, implement that civic university agenda that Lancaster University has signed up to. 
(5:26) We're about five years old, we've just celebrated our fifth anniversary and we've got 
(5:29) quite a few different pillars of work.
(5:32) And one of them was already impacting leadership and we've worked with the NHS, 
(5:36) we've worked with a lot of different high-profile businesses, 
(5:39) but we didn't have a policy aspect of trying to influence government, 
(5:45) because until you influence the policies there or the law or the guidelines that a lot of places 
(5:51) like the NHS have to abide by, it's very difficult to make change because that becomes a barrier. 
(5:57) So we've been trying to build that up and we were just trying to work out how we were going to do 
(6:00) that and we really wanted to link in with academia, with researchers and this idea of 
(6:07) the might of the university to help us. So that's how I got introduced.
It was just really, 
(6:12) really valuable to just have some funded time and set aside time, a couple of months, 
(6:18) where we could just sit down together and talk about it and really plan 
(6:21) what working together could look like, what it could achieve. 
(6:26) For me, I've been to university, but I don't work in the academic space, 
(6:30) so understanding how that works, how do you get funding? It's very difficult to access 
(6:35) knowledge about, not even accessing the academic papers, say, but also just how that whole world 
(6:42) works when you're a charity. So that was really valuable and then just talking about what research 
(6:49) could look like and also how we can do it in a new way.
We're trying to make an anti-racist 
(6:53) county and an anti-racist country and anti-racist world all be part of that. 
(6:57) So we don't want to be replicating harmful ways of doing things that harms black and brown people. 
(7:02) And we do get a lot of requests from universities and researchers to do work, but sometimes it can 
(7:09) feel quite extractive. It's often unpaid and they're contacting us to get access to our 
(7:16) community because we have a lot of volunteers and we're embedded in that black and brown 
(7:20) community in Cumbria. But we often turn it down because when we're not paid, the people 
(7:26) they're trying to reach through us are not paid and it can be very harmful because they're asking 
(7:30) for lived experiences that kind of compound the racial trauma that they're being asked to tell. 
(7:38) So me and Daya have just been exploring how we can do things differently and I think that's really 
(7:42) been exciting for both of us and something that we want to share later on once we've 
(7:47) done more of the work.
And the collaboration has paid off. Anti-racism Cumbria is celebrating 
(7:57) receiving funding to continue and expand their work. But while the project is helping with day-to-day 
(8:03) and short-term need, the social enterprise in residence programme is also supporting longer-term 
(8:09) initiatives. Work to make sure the hospitals of tomorrow are able to meet the needs of patients 
(8:14) and the people who will work there is underway. My name's Emma Stockton. I'm a consultant anesthetist 
(8:20) at Great Ormond Street Hospital in London.
I work with a group of colleagues. We've got a little 
(8:24) company called Made for Health, which is medical architecture, design and education. And we're a 
(8:29) mixture of doctors, architects, people who come from academia and have project management 
(8:36) backgrounds. So we're a diverse group of people, but we've got this kind of common aim, I guess, 
(8:41) which is to improve the quality of healthcare buildings in the UK. And I guess our common 
(8:50) thing that brings us together is this belief that we could be using buildings as a strategic 
(8:56) tool to improve health outcomes and lives of patients and staff. And we kind of believe that 
(9:03) the only way to do that really well is by involving the people that use those buildings in their 
(9:10) design, I guess. We met Ben when we ran a course for Lancaster University and Hospital because
(9:16) there was a plan to sort of rebuild Lancaster Hospital. And that's part of the thing called the 
(9:23) New Hospitals Programme. And Ben came on the course and I thought that's a bit unusual, 
(9:28) someone doing French philosophy, but actually he's amazing. And he has this completely different 
(9:33) perspective on healthcare, both as a sort of having been a patient, but also from his academic 
(9:40) studies. And he really challenged us to think differently. And so when it is in a way that you 
(9:46) normally wouldn't be, because we're quite in our boxes, we're really super siloed, I think, (9:51) maybe in life, definitely in medicine, even between specialties, there's not huge collaboration 
(9:57) really. You think you know it, you think you're the expert. So he really challenged that.
(10:02) Dr Benjamin Dalton is a lecturer in French studies. And while the link between this subject 
(10:08) and hospital architecture may seem obscure, it is very relevant to the way wards and clinics 
(10:14) are planned. Yeah, so all of my research is about hospitals and how to reimagine hospitals and how to 
(10:21) do something differently with the hospitals of the future, basically. And a lot of people find 
(10:28) it quite strange that I'm doing this as a lecturer in French studies.
And they think that, you know, 
(10:33) I'll be drilling verbs or, you know, doing vocab lists or something like that. But actually,
(10:41) kind of French literature, film theory have very intimate relationships with healthcare, medicine, 
(10:48) and clinical spaces. Many French philosophers have themselves been doctors or involved in 
(10:54) healthcare and healthcare spaces in some way.
And so kind of art, for me, offers this space of 
(11:02) kind of reinvention and reimagining a creative space to think differently about hospitals. So 
(11:09) it's not just about representing hospitals, but about reimagining them and thinking about what 
(11:14) they could be in the future. So I guess I'm kind of working away on on all of this type of research.
(11:22) But I also want to find ways to kind of actually make a difference in the world and and see how 
(11:29) this research can kind of jump off the page and might actually be able to influence hospital 
(11:35) design or the way we think about hospitals. And so for me, engagement has played a really important 
(11:42) part right from the beginning of the project, engaging with people beyond the walls of the 
(11:47) university to be in a room with all of these people was absolutely incredible. And again, 
(11:52) very, very weird to introduce myself as a lecturer in French studies within that space, because I 
(11:58) think at first people didn't understand what I was really doing there.
But made for health was so 
(12:04) welcoming and encouraging and really open to hearing what I had to say at that event. And 
(12:10) that really kind of got the got the collaboration off the ground, I think. And we found out that 
(12:16) there were lots of crossovers and lots of things we wanted to continue working on with each other.
(12:22) Then he suggested that we collaborate on some stuff. And he told us about this social enterprise 
(12:26) in residency at the University of Lancaster, which is what we came up to do. And it was just this 
(12:33) amazing opportunity because it was time to think.
Normally, when you apply for anything, 
(12:38) you have to write a report and you have to have to be some output. But this was like completely 
(12:45) amazing because it was this almost free time. But we're structured. Ben had 
(12:50) organized lots of events. We watched like quite niche French films about hospitals. 
(12:55) We spoke to loads of people. We went to visit some amazing sort of health care places 
(13:01) and community places in your neck of the woods. So sort of Morecambe, Lancaster. I mean, amazing.
(13:07) I guess we're mostly sort of London based. One of my colleagues, Ali's from Glasgow. But we have 
(13:12) this quite London centric view of the world. So I mean, on every level, it was just amazing. 
(13:17) And it really gave us a space away from our respective kind of day jobs and inboxes, 
(13:25) just to kind of be together and go and see lots of different health care environments and 
(13:31) architectures across Lancaster, Morecambe Bay and the surrounding areas, speak to so many different 
(13:38) people and have that critical time for reflection and thinking and planning. 
(13:45) He has a really different way of thinking about things. He talks about this panoptic view of the 
(13:50) hospital and this kind of the whole construct of the hospital. So he sort of challenged for me, 
(13:56) he sort of challenged the whole roots of how hospitals are designed, the whole ethos of 
(14:01) medical care. We build stuff that we've built again, and we tend to just repeat the same pattern 
(14:06) and it goes really unchallenged. I think that's a thing that sort of very much is what the new 
(14:11) hospitals program is doing is trying to recreate what we've already got, but a bit cheaper. 
(14:16) Fundamentally rethinking that is probably what we need to do and very much getting out of silos 
(14:23) and having a broader perspective on it rather than just the narrow perspective of some clinicians 
(14:29) and some architects and some projects. You know, actually, the broader you can go, the further you 
(14:34) can sort of push things and improve care of people and how we interact with each other.
(14:40) From Africa to closer to home, challenges now and in the future. The social enterprise and residence 
(14:52) program has already made a mark. It's hoped this kind of collaboration will pay off both for the 
(14:58) university and its partners for many years to come. I think the fact that we had the interns 
(15:05) who were paid as well by the university, very enthusiastic people. Why wouldn't you? If you're 
(15:13) particularly for a small organization, small charity with lacking capacity, why wouldn't you 
(15:18) have a bright young mind working with you? We can't do things in isolation. If we can build 
(15:23) partnerships and build our range of influence and our range of collaborators, why wouldn't we? 
(15:31) If we don't, we're going under. Lots more charities are going under and maybe they 
(15:37) haven't pursued those kind of partnerships. It gives you enthusiasm and you meet all these 
(15:41) amazing people. And it really is a time to think, which is something we have so little of 
(15:46) in our society. We're on screens, we're like constantly looking at output and, 
(15:51) you know, metrics for that kind of thing. And just some time to think is amazing. There's so much 
(15:56) theory behind it and new ways of doing things. But sometimes in the charity sector, we can always be 
(16:02) a step behind because we don't have access to the new approaches that are coming out that people 
(16:07) like Dayo are working on. That's really good as well. And that's going to feed into all the different 
(16:11) aspects of our work. So the impact really is really big. So if you're thinking about it, 
(16:15) I would just say go for it.
A head and shoulders photograph of Jamie Hodge

Connect with us

Not sure if your idea will qualify for collaboration? Contact Jamie Hodge, Impact Acceleration Account (IAA) Partnership Development Manager for an initial chat.

Email Jamie

Further reading

Find out more about each of Lancaster's Impact Acceleration Accounts.