Lancaster University’s AHRC Impact Acceleration Account (IAA) supports “Innovation Springboards” – targeted opportunities that bring researchers together with external partners to explore ideas with clear potential for impact. These Springboards combine light-touch funding with structured engagement, helping early-stage collaborations take shape and move towards deliverable projects.
Two recent examples – Crossings and Coasts and Culture Innovation – demonstrate how this model works in practice. Both created space for interdisciplinary exchange, connecting researchers with partners around shared challenges and opportunities. Rather than requiring fully formed proposals, Springboards focus on generating ideas, building relationships, and identifying where AHRC IAA funding can accelerate progress.
The Culture Innovation Springboard, held in March 2025, brought together 18 researchers from across Lancaster’s four faculties with nine cultural organisations from around Morecambe Bay. Developed by the IAA and Knowledge Exchange teams, the programme focused on culture-led placemaking and its role in sustainability, digital transformation, and health and wellbeing. As one partner organisation, Art Gene, reflected, the event was “incredibly valuable, meeting people from lots of different disciplines and different organisations and seeing what sparks off from the conversations.”
Following the event, participants were invited to apply for AHRC IAA funding (ranging from £2,000–£10,000) to test collaborative ideas. This process directly led to a portfolio of projects that demonstrate the value of the Springboard approach.
One such project, A Future Archive, explored Morecambe’s film heritage through collaboration between film studies and linguistics researchers. Working with archival material from the North West Film Archive, the BFI and Lancashire Archives, the team delivered a public event inviting participants to create their own contemporary archive of the town. Reflecting on the project, Dr Dalila Missero noted that “Morecambe has a rich film heritage, and our project promotes community access and engagement with these extraordinary historical materials to strengthen sense of belonging at a moment of transformation.” The work has also created a lasting legacy, with new material to be deposited in the Lancashire Archives, leaving “a tangible trace of Morecambe’s present and their hopes for its future to the next generations.”
Perceptions of Place took a different approach, using creative “walkshops” across sites including Walney Channel and Cavendish Dock to explore how communities experience environmental change. Bringing together expertise from arts, design and organisational studies, the project used drawing, sound, photography and writing to capture perspectives on climate and place. As Dr Louise Mullagh explains, the project combines “creative methods, design-led research and concepts of value to investigate how communities perceive and value place in the context of climate change,” while also developing outputs that translate these insights into resources for policy and adaptation.
Other projects focused on skills, identity and access. Art, Language, and Identity brought together linguistics researchers with creative organisations to work with young people across the North West. Through a series of workshops combining arts practice with ultrasound imaging of speech, participants explored connections between language, the body and regional identity, culminating in a public exhibition. Professor Claire Nance reflected on the process: “We are so proud at how the young people confidently worked to develop their artistic voice throughout the process… it was a new experience… to work with artists in this way, and we are looking forward to seeing some exciting research results.”
Across these examples, a consistent pattern emerges: Springboards create the conditions for new collaborations to form, ideas to be tested, and impactful projects to emerge. They enable researchers and partners to move quickly from conversation to action, while retaining space for experimentation and co-production.
As AHRC IAA funding continues, Innovation Springboards will remain a key mechanism for developing partnerships and generating the next wave of impact-led projects.
