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Research Fortnight 30 Sep 2026
Universities are failing at mission-led research—here’s how to fix it
By Jonathan Breckon and Geoff Mulgan
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Jonathan Breckon and Geoff Mulgan explain how institutions can tackle society's most urgent crises
We live in an era of wicked problems that defy simple definitions and don’t respect disciplinary borders—from climate change and inequality to political distrust and public health. In response, some universities have enthusiastically embraced ‘challenge-led’ or ‘mission-oriented’ research, promising to bridge the gap between the natural sciences, social sciences and humanities to deliver tangible societal value.
Yet our experience and research point to a gap between the rhetoric and the reality on the ground. In the current landscape, the greatest risk is what the OECD calls mission-washing : adopting the terminology (and banking the research funding) but not really changing behaviour.
Part of the problem is that universities are often fundamentally uncollaborative environments. Despite many efforts to foster cross-subject working, academic reward systems remain heavily favoured towards siloed, single-discipline, individualistic inquiry over collective problem solving.
Nor are they particularly good at collaborating with bodies outside the sector. Universities can play a vital role in using research and teaching to help collective action on big problems, but they are unlikely to solve anything on their own. As University College London’s Michael Spence has argued , overclaiming is not healthy and can prompt cynicism from others in non-governmental organisations, governments and business who feel they’re working much closer to the frontline.
What universities can do
Despite these problems, we have found many green shoots of promising practice around the world. We suggest five main priorities to enable the sector to raise its game.
1. Use smarter tools and collective intelligence to pick future challenges, and get the granularity right
Too often, challenges are portrayed in vague, catch-all language. Challenges need to be challenges, conveying urgency and direction, but they also need to be careful on granularity: inequality and economic growth are too big; sorting out bus lanes is too small. While it is helpful to have goals tailored to local needs, you need to keep a constant eye on the big picture.
Universities should adopt a recursive mix that blends top-down mandates—like the UN Sustainable Development Goals—with bottom-up insights from citizens and academics, followed by careful sifting to reach viable questions that offer a realistic prospect of progress.
2. Radically reshape incentives, skills and professional recognition
Universities cannot expect researchers to take risks if the system punishes them for it. Institutions and funders must give greater recognition for collaborative work.
By aligning incentives with societal impact, universities could signal that tackling wicked problems is a primary institutional mission, not a career risk. And research councils could signal that exploratory work to design options will be valued as much as analytical work.
At present, there is a wide discrepancy between funding in the natural sciences, which often favours design, and funding in the social sciences, which is heavily weighted against it.
3. Invest in dedicated physical and conceptual collaborative spaces
Deep collaboration requires neutral, dedicated infrastructure that fosters cross-sector collisions, and there is abundant evidence that it doesn’t happen without careful design—both to ensure physical proximity and to support joint working. The sector needs more environments like University College London’s East campus or Cardiff University’s sbarc|spark, a £300 million innovation campus .
4. Develop genuine problem-solving collaborations
Many research collaborations are good at assembling insights from multiple disciplines but much less successful at translating these into action. There is a need for much more structured collaborations that link together universities, governments, philanthropy, business and non-governmental organisations, with a clear division of labour and a focus on results.
There are many options to draw on, from the Dutch ‘ top sector ’ approach to Australia’s Resilient Democracy Network , as well as recent initiatives like Denmark’s Alliance for Welfare Innovation . The key to making these work is to allow active curation and management, learning from how some funders focus on breakthroughs.
For example, the Advanced Research and Invention Agency in the UK keeps a sharp eye both on bold thinking and on pathways to impact, as do the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the model of focused research organisations in the US.
5. Stop empty evaluation and seek to capture ‘double additionality’
Finally, evaluation must evolve beyond performative box-ticking to values-based rigour. Measurement needs to capture ‘ double additionality ’: proving that challenge-led approaches deliver specifically better results than traditional business-as-usual methods.
Projects should be assessed on at least four dimensions: how well they use existing disciplinary knowledge; how creative they are; how coherent; and whether there is a potential route to impact—even if it might take a long time.
The choice ahead
If universities remain largely trapped in traditional silos, with challenges and missions as a light layer over these, it is all but guaranteed that those missions will remain fairly ineffectual.
Instead, institutions must rethink their structures, incentives, methods and skills to help them become much more serious partners of societies that badly need better roadmaps to the future.
Jonathan Breckon is a policy and practice fellow at University College London and an independent consultant. Geoff Mulgan is professor of collective intelligence, public policy and social innovation at UCL.
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